I made a collection of chandeliers out of upcycled lab waste. This was a collaboration with the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA). I worked with Nika Čanigová, who launched the Green Labs Initiative at ISTA, which is a program for collecting recyclable lab plastics and getting them recycled by private companies in Austria. The reason these lab plastics cannot be recycled along with the municipal waste is that consumer tax is not paid on lab supplies, and the recycling centers won't do the work without getting paid.

All of the pieces featured in these fully functional chandeliers are non-hazardous, non-contaminated single-use lab plastics. They were never used for biological or chemical applications. Because they are used for scientific research, they must be made of the highest quality virgin plastics, so it is really a shame that they are discarded after a single use (sometimes for something as innocuous as measuring a precise amount of sterile water), and then incinerated. The Green Labs Initiative has found private companies who give these materials a second life, but so far, only certain types of plastics are accepted (HDPE, PP, and PET). Since polystyrene is currently not accepted at recycling centers in Austria, I decided to focus on featuring that as the primary material in the chandeliers. The serological pipettes and petri dishes are made of polystyrene. I also made smaller light fixtures out of pre-cast gel cassettes (for running PAGE, used for protein analysis), and one out of autoclaved waste.

I presented these chandeliers at the Think & Drink lecture series at ISTA on March 1st, 2024. The entire presentation was recorded and uploaded to YouTube. (It's also embedded into the gallery on this page. Scroll to the right!)

For more details, visit my Instagram page.

First 7 photos (all the nice ones with the dark backgrounds) were taken by Jürgen Hofmann. https://www.juergenhofmann.com/