This lamp is made from just three recycled orange peels

Krill Design has been experimenting with using 3D printing techniques to upcycle fruit peels.

The creative agency does its best to avoid any additional waste during production, which involves grinding orange peels down and combining them with vegetable starch to create a firmer substance.

But before this happens, the orange peels need to be dried out to ensure that the organic matter has a moisture level below four percent.

Once this has been achieved, the dried peels are ground into a fine powder and sifted to filter out larger pieces.

The next stage involves adding a biopolymeric vegetable starch base, the only part of the process outsourced to a compounding facility. The reason for outsourcing is that the machinery required for this step is extremely bulky and expensive.

Here, the mixture is pressed into pellets, which make them almost ready to be turned into lamps.

The pellets are sent back to the team at Krill Design, who extrude the orange filament from the pellet and feed it into a 3D printer.

It then emerges as the Ohmie lamp.

The key limitation to Ohmie lamps are that they must be sent to a composting facility if owners want to discard them. They cannot be composted directly in nature due to their strengthening biopolymer coating.

For now, the biopolymer coating is necessary, as it provides the Ohmie lamps with high performance and durability in customers’ homes. Krill Design continues researching other alternatives and is set on finding a polymer that will allow for composting in nature and at home.

The Ohmie lamp joins a growing list of home and kitchenware created from food waste like meat cut-offs, fruit peels, and mushrooms.

It’s these technologies that will help us cut down on food waste, ease plastic production, and slow the climate crisis.