love of great white sharks
spurred designer Beatrix Ong to sign up for an
international marine volunteering programme in 2017.
Ong, sustainability advocate and erstwhile creative
director of Jimmy Choo, spent four weeks with the
Dyer Island Conservation Trust in South Africa,
learning about her favourite species but also
rehabilitating wildlife that had suffered as a result of
pollution. ‘It made me realise that humans are affecting
the oceans in a drastic way. It’s one thing to look at data
on plastic pollution. Holding an intoxicated penguin
brings a whole new level of emotion,’ she recalls.
‘People have questioned how we even begin to
reverse our impact on the environment. But I believe
that bigger problems don’t have to be met with even
bigger solutions. We can start with small changes.’
One change she firmly believes in is abandoning
single-use plastic bottles for durable, and eventually
biodegradable, water containers – like the vessel she
created for Handmade, made of recycled coffee cup
paper and inspired by a sea shell she’d collected in
South Africa. It’s a project that takes wellness and
wonder to an ecological level, championing not just
individual wellbeing but the health of the planet.
For the material, Ong called on James Cropper,
a specialist paper mill in England’s Lake District
established in 1845. Now chaired by Mark Cropper,
a sixth-generation member of the founding family,
the company has stayed at paper’s cutting edge,
producing coloured papers and 3D products
for industries from luxury packaging and framing to
digital imaging. It maintains a minimal environmental
footprint by using renewable energy sources and
leveraging the heat from the paper production process
to warm its mill. Five years ago, it developed the
world’s first industrial process to separate the plastic
waterproofing from disposable coffee cups.
CupCycling, as the process is called, uses a mix of
mechanical and chemical means to separate cellulose
fibres from the polyethylene lining, allowing the fibres
to be recycled into new paper. Richard Burnett, who
oversees the project, explains that they started with
offcuts from the coffee cup manufacturing process.
‘Over time, we’ve developed relationships with retailers
and waste management companies to start working
with used cups,’ he says. ‘Our partners send lorry loads
to us. Since last September we’ve taken 20 million cups,
though we can accommodate about 500 million cups a
year.’ At full capacity, James Cropper could handle 20
per cent of the cups thrown away in the UK annually.
Significantly, CupCycling sends fibres into higher-
end products than they came from – shopping bags for
luxury brands (Selfridges was an early adopter) and fine
stationery, for instance. ‘Normally, fibre is downgraded
every time it’s recycled,’ Burnett enthuses. ‘What we’re
doing is different: we’re adding more value to the fibre.’
Ong’s water vessel uses the same ethos, taking a
disposable typology and elevating it to something
longer lasting. She sketched out an organic, spiralling,
shell-like form – ‘so should it find itself in nature, it
wouldn’t look out of place, unlike plastic bottles in the
ocean’. The difficulty in realising this design was that
paper only bends in certain ways. ‘What was missing
was a translator to work in the language of paper.’ Enter
Lou Blackshaw, an illustrator-turned-set designer who
specialises in paper sculpture. Ong got in touch to
explain that she was trying to create a shell shape out of
paper. As it turned out, Blackshaw was acquainted withMaking Of...