The aim of Enterprise North East is to get the message across that anyone can start up in business and anyone can be a success.
Published on the first Friday of every month in The Journal.
Waste not, take a seat
Jul 21 2006
By Enterprise North East
To you and I, it's a milk carton. To Richard Liddle, it's the base material for an exciting product that converts what we regard as waste and an ecological nightmare into a valuable resource. Then he sits on it.
Richard uses recyclable plastic products to make furniture - and his idea is really making people sit up and take notice. Now lecturing in 3D design at Northumberland College in Ashington, he has set up Cohda, an "innovation house" that creates design work out of the large percentage of domestic waste packaging that we throw in the bin and forget about.
Richard exhibited at last month's Launch 2006 design exhibition in the former Pilgrim Street Fire Station in Newcastle. He has since shown his furniture at the House & Garden Show in London and at an exhibition in Nottingham, all to terrific response.
"It has created a lot of interest and a few stores are taking on the designs as well as individuals buying them," he says. "I did research on a two-year master of philosophy at the Royal College of Art in design production and the process of shredding and reforming plastic packaging - basically, everything you throw away, I'll turn it into a useable product, like the RD3 chair and URE table.
"It's quite exciting sitting on them. People are buying them as talking pieces for lounges, dining rooms and balconies - they cast lovely shadows. I'd like to build a brand around the furniture and will launch an online shop in about a month's time.
"I eventually want to take the production process on the road to the source of the waste - music festivals and schools, for example. We'll have all the machinery there and shred all the plastic cups and trays to make forms and give them back as useable products. I'm speaking to the Eden Project in Cornwall, which is obviously at the forefront of recycling, to generate designs from the plastics in their bins. It's even cutting out the recycling process."
Shredding and reforming at the moment takes place at a facility in West Auckland in County Durham.
Richard understands the wider global environmental problems and his process may be a drop in the ocean, but it may make schoolchildren think that bit harder about what happens to their discarded plastic.
He says: "The vast majority of plastic waste from the North-East goes to China to be processed, but the've got so much stockpiled, I'm told you can see it from space. It's a massive environmental problem.
"Designing products that are attractive is easy, but creating designs that surprise and excite by combining imagination with emerging technologies is what Cohda is all about."
