What if one of the most overlooked kitchen waste products could become a beautiful piece of contemporary design?
Joanne Odisho, Australian designer, has turned humble kitchen waste into an award winning lighting design. Originally created during her studies at RMIT University in Melbourne, while exploring the materiality of food waste, Odisho found a way to turn discarded eggshells into a sculptural lighting object.
The project began as an exploration into how food waste could be repurposed into functional materials. For the design, Odisho collects eggshells from local cafés, sterilises and crushes them into a fine powder before combining them with a biodegradable biopolymer to create a durable composite material. The resulting material has a tactile, stone-like quality and can be stacked and arranged into a variety of configurations. The aesthetics of the blocks are a celebration of its material origins, retaining their natural tones, creating a warm, understated surface.
Beyond lighting, the eggshell-composite blocks could hint at wider possibilities for sustainable furniture and product design. Their modular nature could be applied to furniture pieces such as room dividers, shelving systems or decorative interior elements that can be adapted over time rather than replaced. As designers search for alternatives to resource-intensive materials, the project suggests how waste streams might be transformed into versatile building blocks for circular design products.
