Award-Winning Modular Lamp Turns Discarded Eggshells Into Sculptural Lighting

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Joanne Odisho’s Mod-u lamp feels like the kind of object you want to touch before you fully understand what it is. Made from modular, Jenga-like blocks, the lamp sits somewhere between lighting, furniture, and sculpture. The surprise is its material. The Melbourne-based designer has created the piece using thousands of discarded eggshells collected from local cafes, turning a fragile everyday waste material into a durable, tactile, award-winning design.

The process starts in a very ordinary place: cafe kitchens. Odisho collects used eggshells, sterilises them, dries them, and crushes them into a fine powder using a Nutribullet. The powdered shells are then mixed with a biodegradable biopolymer to form a wet, sand-like composite. This mixture is poured into moulds and left to dry naturally for about a week. There is no firing process, no synthetic dye, and no complex industrial setup. Once cured, the material becomes hard and rock-like, while still holding onto the soft, natural tones of the eggshells themselves.

Designer: Joanne Odisho

The idea began in 2022 while Odisho was studying furniture design at RMIT. For a school assignment, she was asked to create a product using food waste. Her first experiments with coffee grounds did not work because they developed mould. Eggshells, however, offered something more promising. With inspiration from Materiom, an organisation focused on nature-based material innovation, she began testing how this overlooked kitchen scrap could become a strong, compostable design material.

That material eventually became Mod-u, a collection of configurable lighting pieces made from dozens of individual eggshell-composite blocks. Each block can be moved, rotated, stacked, and rearranged, allowing the lamp to shift between a table lamp, a floor lamp, or a sculptural feature piece. This makes the design especially relevant for smaller homes, where objects often need to adapt to different spaces and uses.

The lamp recently won the Australian Furniture Design Award, one of the country’s most respected design prizes. The award, led by Stylecraft and presented with the National Gallery of Victoria during Melbourne Design Week, challenged designers to respond to the theme “living well, living small.” Odisho’s lamp answered that brief with a balance of function, material experimentation, and emotional appeal.

What impressed the judges was not just the use of eggshells, but the way the object invites interaction. Mod-u is not a lamp that simply sits in the corner and performs one fixed role. Its modular structure gives the user control over its form. It can be built up, pulled apart, shifted, and reimagined depending on the room, the mood, or the need. That sense of play gives the piece a rare warmth. It feels practical, but still personal.

There is also something quietly powerful about the way the lamp treats waste. The eggshells are not disguised or hidden under a polished finish. Their natural colour remains visible, giving each piece a soft, earthy palette that feels honest to the material. It makes the object feel less manufactured and more grown, even though it is carefully designed.

For Odisho, the project opens up a much bigger conversation about what sustainable furniture can look and feel like. It does not rely on guilt or overly technical language to make its point. Instead, it offers a simple idea: the materials we throw away every day might still have value, beauty, and strength left in them.

Mod-u succeeds because it feels experimental without being inaccessible. It is clever, but not cold. Sustainable, but not preachy. By turning something as delicate as an eggshell into a strong and adaptable object for the home, Joanne Odisho shows how thoughtful design can begin with the most ordinary leftovers.

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The Bento Box Built to End Takeout Waste for Good

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Every time I order food delivery, I already know what’s coming before I open the bag. A stack of plastic containers, lids that barely seal, and that guilty beat when I toss everything in the trash about five minutes after eating. It’s a ritual nobody talks about but everyone performs. It happens millions of times a day.

That’s the problem Kaja Brunke decided to sit with. The Polish designer, who earned her Master’s from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, didn’t approach meal delivery packaging with the usual sustainability playbook. She didn’t swap the plastic for bamboo and call it done. She asked a harder question: what if the container was never meant to be thrown away at all?

Designer: Kaja Brunke

The result is ReBento, a returnable, reusable container system designed specifically for subscription meal delivery. It just won the Packaging category at the Green Product Award 2026, and once you understand what it’s actually doing, it’s hard to unsee how obvious the solution feels, and how long it took for someone to build it properly.

ReBento works like this: meals are delivered in durable, leak-proof containers. Inside, removable glass compartments let you separate and reheat food directly in the box, no transfer required. After you’re done, empty containers are collected by couriers on their next delivery run and cycled back into the system. No secondary logistics chain to build. No complicated drop-off points. It integrates into the delivery infrastructure that already exists.

That last part is what makes it genuinely clever. Most sustainable packaging concepts are designed in isolation, as if the supply chain is a blank canvas waiting to be reimagined. ReBento was designed around the reality that already exists. Brunke clearly understood that a solution only works if it doesn’t require the whole system to change around it. Couriers are already going door to door. Why not have them pick something up on the way back?

The glass compartments are a thoughtful detail that deserves more attention than they might initially get. Glass is heavy, yes, but it’s also the reason the dining experience actually improves. Food doesn’t absorb the smell of the container. You can reheat without transferring to another dish. The meal arrives as it was meant to be eaten. For anyone who has peeled hot soup-soaked rice out of a soggy paper container, that alone is worth talking about.

What Brunke has built is not just a product. It’s a framework for how meal delivery could work if the industry decided to take the waste problem seriously, rather than paper over it. The sector has largely settled for greenwashing: compostable containers that require industrial composting facilities most cities don’t have, or “recyclable” plastic that rarely makes it through the actual recycling process. ReBento sidesteps the whole debate by making durability the point.

I’ll be honest: I’m a little impatient for something like this to reach the mainstream. Subscription meal delivery is one of the fastest-growing segments of the food industry, and the packaging waste it generates is staggering. The irony is that the subscription model is actually the ideal environment for a returnable container system. The logistics are already in place. The customer relationship is already ongoing. The pieces are all there.

Brunke came to design through an unusual path: advanced math and physics in high school, a year on exchange in Illinois, and a degree grounded in solution-based thinking. You can feel that background in ReBento. It’s not a conceptual piece that looks beautiful in a portfolio and stops there. It’s a system that has been thought through to the point of asking: how does this actually get picked up, cleaned, and sent back out again?

That’s the kind of design thinking that doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves, because it’s not flashy. A returnable bento box won’t stop traffic the way a concept car does. But the best design isn’t always the loudest. Sometimes it’s the kind that makes you wonder why it took this long.

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