“Try cracking it,” says Dilara Kan, partner at Studio Yellowdot, as she hands me a small piece of dried eggshell. Holding the pearl-coloured fragment between my thumb and index finger I can feel the dual nature of one of the world’s most ubiquitous waste materials. Rigid and porous at the same time, the shard bends easily, but when enough pressure is applied, it cracks, producing a crisp sound similar to clinking glass. “Isn’t it fun to play around with it?”
Studio Yellowdot’s “Hatch” series floor lamp is made from eggshells and resin. Photo: Ali Gulsener
For the past five years, Kan, who hails from Turkey, and her partner in life and art, Chinese-American Bodin Hon, have been turning discarded eggshells into a design material for a series of objects, including floor lamps exhibited during this month’s Milan Design Week, the world’s largest design event. Part of a series called Hatch, crushed eggshells glued with resin are turned into functional and decorative household objects in their Hong Kong and Istanbul studios.
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The idea for this upcycling project started during the Covid-19 quarantine, Kan says. Like many of us, the couple was spending a lot of homebound time cooking. “We realised eggshells are a very interesting material,” she explains. “We started to play around with the idea of making something beautiful with them.”
Sometimes called nature’s own arch, eggshells can withstand extreme pressure, experiments showing they can take the weight of piles of magazines when distributed evenly over the arched surface. Hon, who has a degree in bioengineering and has worked at Nasa crafting spacesuits, started to look into the material’s properties.
Studio Yellowdot partner Dilara Kan with a part of the “Hatch” floor lamp. Photo: Yellowdot
“It’s a very lightweight material but it’s also very strong,” says Hon. “It makes for a versatile design material.” Plus, eggshells are mostly made of calcium carbonate, a compound found in materials routinely used for design objects such as lime and marble. Kan, who has a background in fine arts, was always fascinated by their more aesthetic qualities. “I love that they are translucent,” she says. “If you hold an eggshell against the light you can see through it.”
About 87 million tonnes of eggs are consumed globally each year (leaving an estimated 8.6 million tonnes of eggshells), with China being among the biggest per capita consumers, where the average person will scoff more than 20kg of eggs per year.
In recent years, a growing number of designers and engineers have been repurposing eggshells to use in objects and even buildings. Netherlands-based design studio Ylem has used a mix of eggshells and an algae-based bio-binder to make cutlery, plates and vases while Swiss-based Nature Squared partnered with Hong Kong designer and artist Elaine Ng Yan-ling to make tiles using mashed eggshells.
Eggshell-inlaid parts of the “Hatch” series floor lamp from Studio Yellowdot. Photo: Yellowdot
For Kan and Hon, eggshells have become both a design material and an inspiration for the aesthetic of Hatch. “We wanted to create objects that reflect a sense of balance and lightness,” says Kan, “and we added some bold and playful elements to reflect Studio Yellowdot’s design ethos.”
