Tag Archives: sustainable design

The Coffee Sleeve Reinvented From the Grounds Up

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Every morning, millions of people grab a coffee to go and toss the paper sleeve into the trash without a second thought. It is a tiny object, easy to overlook. But that tiny object is part of a system that produces an estimated 16 billion disposable cups every year, sleeves included, and nearly none of it gets recycled. In the UK alone, cup sleeve recycling sits at roughly 2.8%, which is a polite way of saying almost everything ends up in a landfill.

That number has been sitting in the back of my mind ever since I came across GoBean, a design concept by Aranza V. Sanchez and Song Yeon Lee, two design students from Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach in Germany. The project recently earned a nomination for the Green Product Award, and when you look at what they have actually built, you understand why.

Designers: Aranza V. Sanchez & Song Yeon Lee

GoBean is a coffee cup sleeve made from coffee grounds. Not coffee-inspired, not coffee-colored. Actually made from the used, spent, leftover grounds that cafés collect and typically throw away. Combined with natural binders, the material becomes water and heat resistant, which matters quite a bit when your job is to wrap around a hot cup. It feels like a design idea so obvious that you wonder why it took this long to exist.

The material is 100% compostable and breaks down completely in about three weeks. If you would rather not compost it, you can plant it directly into soil. The sleeve, the thing that kept your fingers from burning on a Tuesday morning, becomes part of your herb garden by Friday. That circularity is not just a marketing point. It is genuinely elegant design logic.

What makes GoBean feel more serious than a typical student concept is the business model built around it. The idea is that cafés supply their own spent coffee grounds as the raw material for production. This turns waste into a resource, gives cafés a reason to participate, and keeps the material loop local. Designers often get credited for solving the object, but solving the system is harder, and Sanchez and Lee are clearly thinking about both.

I will admit, I have a complicated relationship with sustainable packaging projects. A lot of them promise a lot and deliver something that either does not perform as well, costs too much, or requires consumer behavior change that just is not going to happen at scale. GoBean avoids most of those traps by meeting the product exactly where it already exists. The sleeve still looks like a sleeve, fits like a sleeve, works like a sleeve. The only difference is where it comes from and where it goes afterward.

The Green Product Award tends to surface work that is genuinely trying to move the needle on material innovation rather than just putting a green label on something old. A nomination here carries a bit of weight, and GoBean fits the ethos of that kind of recognition.

It is also worth noting that this is a concept still in development, not something you can order from a café supplier today. That distinction matters. Student projects are exactly where this kind of thinking should live, unencumbered by the commercial pressures that usually flatten ideas before they can fully form. Whether GoBean eventually makes it to mass production will depend on all the less exciting stuff: manufacturing cost, supply chain logistics, regulatory approvals. None of which are guaranteed.

But as a vision of what disposable packaging could be, it is hard to argue with. The sleeve you use for ten minutes does not need to exist for a hundred years. That mismatch has always been the problem, and GoBean is one of the more elegant answers I have seen to it. Design does not always save the world, but sometimes it asks the right question. In this case, the question is simple: if your coffee sleeve is made from coffee grounds, has it ever really left the café?

The post The Coffee Sleeve Reinvented From the Grounds Up first appeared on Yanko Design.

Europe’s Largest 3D-Printed Apartment Building Just Changed Everything

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Something significant happened in Bezannes, France — and the construction industry should be paying close attention. ViliaSprint², Europe’s largest 3D-printed apartment building, has been completed, and it arrives less as a proof of concept and more as a genuine blueprint for what housing could look like moving forward. Developed by Plurial Novilia, designed by HOBO Architecture, and printed by PERI 3D Construction using a COBOD BOD2 printer, this is the kind of project that makes you reconsider what a building even is.

The numbers are striking. Twelve social housing apartments across three floors, 800 square meters of living space — all printed on-site in just 34 days, down from an originally planned 50. That alone would be a headline. But what makes ViliaSprint² genuinely remarkable is that it’s the first building in France where both the load-bearing structure and every wall were printed directly on-site, with 100% of all loads transferred through the 3D-printed walls. No hybrid workarounds. No conventional skeleton hiding beneath the surface. The printer did the heavy lifting, quite literally.

Designer: Plurial Novilia & HOBO Architecture

HOBO Architecture’s design leans into the honesty of the medium. The building’s rounded geometry — fluid curves that would cost a fortune to achieve through conventional formwork — is made possible precisely because a machine, not a tradesperson, is doing the forming. It’s design that could only exist with this technology, which is a rarer claim than it sounds. Timber balcony structures offset the weight of the concrete shell, adding warmth to a building that could otherwise read as cold and industrial.

Sustainability is baked into the structure rather than retrofitted onto it. The optimized curved form saved roughly 10% of concrete volume. Holcim supplied the printable concrete using its TectorPrint technology within the CO₂-reduced ECOPact range, reinforced with synthetic macro fibres. Perlite insulation, 500 square meters of photovoltaic panels, and a hybrid gas-heat pump system by Atlantic Systèmes push the building to around 60% energy self-sufficiency — fully compliant with France’s RE2020 2025 green building targets.

The building sits directly beside a conventionally constructed twin, built by the same developer simultaneously, as a live comparison. The 3D-printed version finished three months ahead. It also required only three workers to erect the walls, compared to six for the conventional build — a meaningful detail as the construction industry faces deepening skilled labor shortages.

Plurial Novilia is already planning the next move: roughly 40 apartments, two printers running simultaneously, with a target to cut print time by a factor of four. ViliaSprint² isn’t the destination. It’s the proof that the destination is real.

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Herman Miller’s Aeron Just Broke Its Decades-Long Neutrals-Only Rule

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Office chairs have largely operated on a color vocabulary of one. Black. Occasionally dark gray. The reasoning is defensible enough: a chair meant to work in any office, boardroom, or home studio needs to disappear into the background, and neutrals are the safest way to guarantee that. The Aeron has lived by that rule since its 2016 remaster, offering four restrained options that leaned charcoal and graphite and asked very little of the rooms they occupied.

Herman Miller is breaking from that constraint in 2026, though only just. The two new Aeron colors, Jasper and Nightfall, aren’t a departure toward the bold or the playful. Jasper is an earthy olive green calibrated to read almost as a neutral while gesturing toward the biophilic design sensibility that has been moving through workplace interiors for several years. Nightfall is a sophisticated midnight blue already present across the MillerKnoll portfolio, added partly to make specifying a cohesive space easier.

Designer: Herman Miller

The full palette now sits at six hues, Onyx, Graphite, Carbon, Mineral, Jasper, and Nightfall, all drawn from natural references and all quietly confident about their ability to belong without demanding attention. For designers specifying a lounge, a studio, or a home office with a more considered material palette, those two additions open the door to pairings that the existing neutrals couldn’t quite reach. The chair’s structure and ergonomics stay entirely intact.

But the more substantive changes in this update aren’t visible from across the room. The team mapped where the chair carried the most weight and substituted in lighter materials, including post-industrial recycled content and bio-based nylons, with the result that the chair’s global average embodied carbon drops by 12% compared to the previous version.

That 12% follows years of prior reductions. In 2021, the Aeron became the first Herman Miller chair to incorporate ocean-bound plastic. As of June 2026, the company has diverted more than 660 metric tons of that material since its last tally in 2023, the equivalent of roughly 79 million plastic water bottles. Today, the Aeron is composed of more than 50% recycled content and is up to 91% recyclable, carrying both BIFMA Level 3 and Indoor Advantage Gold certifications.

Size inclusivity received a quiet update as well. The Aeron has always come in three sizes, A, B, and C, covering nearly the full range of human body types. Recent testing confirmed that the largest size, C, now meets all structural requirements to support users up to 400 lb, a formal expansion of what the existing design had been capable of without being officially stated.

The new Aeron is debuting at Fulton Market Design Days in Chicago, June 8 through 10, as part of an exhibition called “Living with Change.” It’s available now through hermanmiller.com, Herman Miller showrooms, and MillerKnoll dealers, starting at around $1,520 in base configurations and $2,050 for fully specified versions. The new colors arrive on a chair that already sells one unit every 17 seconds, which says most of what needs to be said about whether the core design needed changing.

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Japanese Designer Just Built a Real Shelf From Rolled Paper Sheets

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When Japanese designer Muto Yumi set out to make furniture from paper, the result was not what most people would imagine. No papier-mâché. No origami-inspired folding. No cardboard box aesthetics salvaged and called art. What she produced is a modular furniture system so structurally sound and visually precise that it makes you question almost everything you assume about material strength and decorative surface.

The project is called Pattern as Structure, and the name is not just poetic framing. It is literally the concept. Muto starts with flat sheets of paper pre-cut with holes arranged in a specific pattern. Roll that sheet tightly around itself, layer upon layer, and the paper transforms from something limp and delicate into a dense, rigid rod capable of bearing real weight. The physics of it are intuitive once explained, but watching it happen feels like a magic trick. A single sheet does nothing. Rolled and compressed, it becomes architecture.

Designer: Muto Yumi

Here is where it gets more interesting. Those pre-cut holes that look like a graphic pattern on the flat sheet? Once the paper is rolled into a rod, those holes become tunnels running through its body. They are the connection points of the whole system. Other paper rods slot through them, linking one piece to the next without glue or hardware. The pattern was never just decoration. It was always the joint, the connector, the system’s logic. The aesthetics and the engineering are the exact same thing.

That kind of design clarity is genuinely rare. Most furniture design separates surface from structure, treating them as two different problems to solve. A frame holds the load; a finish makes it beautiful. Pattern as Structure collapses that division entirely. The surface IS the structure. The decoration IS the joint. You cannot take one away without destroying the other, and that coherence is what makes the project feel so resolved.

What Muto has produced so far is a family of open shelves in varying sizes. They look clean and slightly architectural, like something you would expect to find in a gallery or a well-curated apartment. But the real achievement here is not the object itself. It is the proof of concept. Because the rods are made from printed paper sheets, the color and graphics on the surface can change infinitely without altering the construction method at all. Want a shelf in deep terracotta? Stripe patterns? Illustrated surfaces? Print the sheet differently and roll it the same way. The structural logic stays identical. The visual language can do whatever it wants.

For anyone paying attention to design right now, this matters. The conversation around sustainable materials has become crowded with beautiful ideas that fall apart under practical conditions. Paper furniture is not new, but paper furniture that is also modular, reconfigurable, and visually customizable without requiring any change to its fabrication process? That is a more sophisticated argument. It asks whether we really need virgin timber, powder-coated steel, or injection-molded plastic to make things that last and look good. Muto’s answer is apparently no.

I keep returning to the honesty of the material choice too. Paper does not pretend to be something else. It does not mimic wood grain or stone texture or metal sheen. It is exactly what it is, and somehow that straightforwardness makes the furniture more interesting, not less. The pattern on each rod is visible. You can see the rolled layers at the cut ends. The making is part of the looking.

Design that is this conceptually tight often sacrifices warmth or approachability in the process. Pattern as Structure avoids that trap. The pieces feel considered without being cold. They feel experimental without being precious. And for a project made from something as unassuming as a sheet of paper with holes punched through it, that balance is quietly remarkable. Muto Yumi is someone worth watching. Not because she is working with expensive materials or chasing spectacle. But because she is asking better questions about what furniture is actually made of, and why.

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Kinari Might Be the Most Important Material You’ve Never Heard Of

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Plastic has a PR problem, and it has for years. We know it. Brands know it. And yet, the stuff is everywhere, because for all its environmental baggage, petroleum-based plastic is cheap, durable, and remarkably easy to manufacture at scale. Finding a material that can honestly compete with it has been one of the quieter design challenges of the last decade. Kinari, developed by Panasonic’s MI Division, is making a compelling case that the answer was growing in the ground the whole time.

Kinari is a cellulose-based composite resin made primarily from plant fibers. Not a novelty material reserved for concept art and trade show booths, but a functional, moldable, colorable material designed for home appliance casings, building materials, and automotive components. It currently contains up to 85% cellulose fibers, and the team has been steadily pushing that number upward since work began in 2015. Back in 2019, the formulation sat at 55% biomass. By 2022, it had reached 90%. The goal, eventually, is 100%. That trajectory tells you something. This isn’t a splashy announcement material cooked up for a sustainability report. It’s a slow, deliberate material science project with a very clear destination, and that kind of patience is rare in an industry that tends to reward the bold launch over the quiet improvement.

Designer: MI Division of Panasonic Holdings Corporation

The products already made from kinari help tell the story better than any specification sheet could. There are spoons in matte black and deep forest greens that look like something between resin and lacquered wood. Bowls in warm terracotta tones that sit naturally alongside ceramics without trying to impersonate them. A tumbler with the kind of rich, grain-like surface you’d expect from a hand-turned wooden cup. A soap dispenser pump in honeyed amber. Pendant lamps with a softly mottled, stone-like finish. These aren’t prototypes staged for press photos. They’re finished objects that feel considered, tactile, and genuinely desirable, which is not something you often say about sustainable alternatives to plastic.

That’s the part that matters most, beyond the environmental credentials. Kinari doesn’t ask you to compromise on aesthetics to feel good about your choices. The material carries a warmth that conventional plastic simply can’t replicate, and the range of colors and finishes it’s capable of makes it versatile enough to work across product categories without looking like it’s trying too hard to be natural.

Beyond the plant-based headline, kinari’s most compelling quality is how practical it’s designed to be for manufacturers. One of the most persistent criticisms of sustainable alternatives is that they demand too much: new equipment, new processes, new supply chains. Kinari sidesteps all of that. Manufacturers can switch to it without investing in new machinery, because it behaves like conventional plastic during production. The most elegant sustainable solution is always the one that removes friction rather than adding it.

The production process adds to the case. Kinari uses an all-dry manufacturing method, eliminating water entirely, which significantly reduces energy consumption and CO₂ emissions compared to conventional plastic manufacturing. Petroleum use drops by 55 to 70 percent depending on the formulation. These aren’t rounding-error improvements. They represent a meaningful shift in how much environmental cost gets built into a material before it even becomes a product.

The end-of-life story is equally worth attention, even if it’s harder to photograph and harder to market. The team is developing a two-pronged recycling approach aimed at creating a genuinely closed-loop system. A material that can be recovered, processed, and remade is categorically different from one that just gets discarded in a slightly less guilty way. Circularity is easy to put in a brand statement. Building it into the actual material science is another thing entirely.

The honest question with any sustainable material is whether it can scale without losing what makes it worth scaling. That’s still being answered. But Panasonic has been working on kinari quietly and methodically since 2015, improving the biomass content year over year, and that level of sustained commitment sets it apart from the concept-stage bioplastics we’ve seen come and go.

Design moves fast. Materials take longer. Kinari is proof that the most consequential innovation isn’t always the loudest one. Sometimes it’s the one that’s been in the lab for a decade, getting a little better every year, waiting for the world to finally catch up.

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Pompom Stool Made From Recycled Aluminum Is Green Design Done Right

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Sustainable design has a branding problem. Not an ethics problem, not a materials problem, but a branding problem. For years, the conversation around circular materials and responsible production has been wrapped in language that feels like a lecture. Worthy, yes. Exciting, rarely. So when a stool shows up at Alcova during Milan Design Week looking like a bouquet of pompoms crowning a cluster of dreamy pastel cylinders, it stops you mid-stride. That stool is the Alice Stool by Studio LoopLoop, and it’s making a very quiet but very pointed argument.

Founded in 2022 by Odin Visser and Charles Gateau, Studio LoopLoop is a Dutch practice that operates somewhere between science lab and design studio. Their approach is hands-on and deliberately self-sufficient, developing their own processes rather than outsourcing to industrial systems they’d rather move away from. For Alice, that methodology produced something that looks almost nothing like what we typically picture when someone says “sustainable furniture.”

Designer: Studio LoopLoop

The base of the stool is made from 100% recycled aluminium, specifically Hydro 100R extrusions, and coloured using a plant-based anodising technique the studio developed in-house. The result is a range of subtle colour gradients that shift from soft sage to deep plum to warm yellow, achieved through controlled dyeing rather than chemical baths heavy with petrochemical inputs. The seat is upholstered with Savian by Bio-Fluff, a plant-based faux fur hand-dyed with NIG natural pigments. The combination is tactile in a way that feels almost irrational for a piece of furniture. You want to touch it. You probably want to sit on it and not get up.

And that’s exactly the point. Studio LoopLoop titled their Alcova presentation “Alice Atomicus,” a nod to both Lewis Carroll’s dreamlike world and the idea of material elements rearranged into something new and entirely unexpected. Sustainability, they’re saying, doesn’t have to arrive in a brown paper wrapper with a guilt trip attached. It can be playful. It can be seductive. It can be soft and sculptural and genuinely desirable.

I think this matters more than it might seem. The design industry has spent years making the case that circular materials can be high-quality, and that case has largely been won. But the emotional argument is trickier. If sustainable design feels like an obligation rather than a pleasure, it will always occupy a niche, admired from a distance but rarely chosen with enthusiasm. The Alice Stool feels like a genuine attempt to close that gap, to make the responsible choice the one you actually want because it’s beautiful, not just because it’s correct.

The use of Savian is worth pausing on. Bio-Fluff’s plant-based fur made its breakthrough in fashion through collaborations with Collina Strada, Martine Rose, and Louis Vuitton, finding a foothold in a luxury market that was already starting to rethink its relationship with animal materials. Moving into furniture feels like a natural extension, and the Alice Stool is one of the clearest demonstrations of Savian’s material potential outside of a clothing rack. Against cool metal cylinders, the fur reads as something almost otherworldly. It’s plush in a way that synthetic faux fur typically isn’t, and the hand-dyed variation in the seat means no two stools look exactly alike.

That detail matters to me personally. Mass production has its place, but there’s a real cultural hunger right now for objects that carry the trace of human hands. The Alice Stool has that quality in abundance. The graduated aluminium tones, the slight unpredictability of natural dye, the tactile generosity of the seat, together they suggest something made with attention rather than efficiency as the primary value.

Studio LoopLoop is a young studio, only four years old, but they’re working with a clarity of vision that feels well ahead of their timeline. The Alice Stool isn’t a concept piece hedged with caveats. It’s a fully formed object that asks a simple question: why should doing the right thing look boring? The answer, apparently, is that it doesn’t have to.

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This Lamp Is Cast From Soda Can Trash But Looks Like Carved Stone

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Upcycled materials have become a familiar part of sustainable design, but most of them still try to hide where they came from. The aluminum gets purified, the recycled plastic molded smooth, and the result looks clean and neutral but loses the story of its origins. Pairing genuine sustainability with aesthetic character turns out to be a harder problem than it looks, and most attempts quietly sidestep it.

Tokyo-based product designer Kenji Abe took a different approach with Aperire, a lighting fixture cast entirely from discarded aluminum cans. Rather than refining the material beyond recognition, he deliberately left in the impurities. The wrinkles, air bubbles, and traces of ink from the original cans were preserved as surface texture, turning what most casting processes would filter out into the fixture’s defining character.

Designer: Kenji Abe

Melting the cans down without removing too many impurities is what produces that surface. Each piece ends up slightly different, carrying unpredictable marks that no two castings will ever replicate. Traces of ink from labels and other irregularities seep through the metal, and the result reads less like manufactured aluminum and more like weathered stone or bone. The artificial origin becomes genuinely difficult to place.

The finish that results reads almost like a natural material. The same surface might show shallow depressions, irregular ridges, or fine lines that look nothing like machined metal. Paired with the organic, chambered form, it makes Aperire genuinely hard to identify on first glance. The cans are unmistakably present in the material’s history, but they aren’t visible in what the object has become.

The shape itself draws from an equally unexpected source: foraminifera, the microscopic marine organisms whose skeletons are riddled with tiny holes and chambers. Combined with the rough appearance of eroded rock, the form was built through the deliberate addition and subtraction of geometric shapes. Light reflects inside the hollow interior and finds its way out through the openings, seeping gently outward rather than projecting.

The name carries a few threads that converge on the same idea. Aperire is Latin for “to open,” connecting to aperture, the camera mechanism that controls how much light passes through. It also traces back to April, the season when flowers open. For a fixture that lets light slowly leak outward rather than announce itself, the name seems less like branding than an accurate description of what the object does.

The fixture doesn’t make a loud case for sustainability as a concept; it just happens to be made from something that would otherwise be discarded, and it shows it. That quiet honesty gives it a credibility that purpose-built eco-aesthetic objects rarely manage. The cans stop being waste, stop being raw material, and become something that earns its place on a table or shelf without the sustainability narrative doing the heavy lifting. The object handles that part itself.

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What If City Monuments Generated Power Instead of Just Looking Good?

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Public art has long served as a cultural mirror, reflecting what a society chooses to honor. As climate change intensifies and cities face mounting pressure to decarbonize, questions about what our monuments should stand for are getting harder to ignore. Most renewable energy infrastructure stays invisible, buried in utility corridors or mounted on rooftops, rarely acknowledged as something worth celebrating in public spaces.

Santa Fe-based artist Michael Jantzen has spent years addressing exactly that through his Public Eco-Art Proposals. The series imagines a different kind of monument, one that doesn’t merely symbolize sustainability but actively practices it. Each proposal takes the form of a sculpture or pavilion that generates electricity from the sun or wind, collects rainwater, stores energy in batteries, and sometimes sends power into the local grid.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

Jantzen gives his work an aesthetic freedom that most utility-driven designs don’t have. Rather than concealing the mechanics, he treats solar panels, wind turbines, and structural frameworks as sculptural elements in their own right. The visual language is deliberately technological and mechanical, blurring the line between a functional energy structure and art worth stopping for.

Walk through one of these proposed spaces, and you might find yourself beneath a pavilion whose curved solar canopy quietly feeds electricity back to the neighborhood. Or stop to look at a series of angular sculptures lined up across a park, their solar-panel tops tracking the light. What looks like a meditation on shape and form turns out to be a modest power station doing actual work.

The proposals span a wide range of environments. Some are designed for open fields or public parks, while others imagine coastal settings with floating platforms supporting wind and water energy structures. A chevron-shaped sculpture with a solar panel at its angular peak stands in what appears to be a university courtyard. Another piece holds solar panels above cylindrical battery storage pods, blending the practical business of energy collection with an unexpectedly considered form.

This approach also reframes the relationship between art and urban infrastructure. Municipalities already commission sculptures for parks and plazas; so why shouldn’t those commissions do more? A solar-powered gathering space generates electricity, makes clean technology approachable, and sparks conversations among the millions of people who walk through it, most of whom would otherwise never engage with energy infrastructure at all.

Jantzen’s vision extends beyond any single installation. He imagines these structures placed in cities and parks worldwide, shifting how communities relate to the energy they consume by making that relationship visible and beautiful. For him, celebrating sustainability means building things worth caring about, giving clean energy a presence that people can gather around, the way they’ve always done with the landmarks that define a place.

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This €235 Rippling Stone Valet Tray Has a Candle Holder Built In

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Most entryway surfaces tell a familiar story, and it’s rarely a flattering one. Keys get tossed wherever there’s space, coins scatter to the edges, and a watch ends up next to a forgotten receipt by morning. The valet tray was supposed to solve this, but most of them look clinical, forgettable, or like they belong in a hotel room rather than a thoughtfully arranged home.

The Delicato Tray takes a different approach, and the solution comes from a direction you might not expect: ripples. Sold through Oftwise, it merges a valet tray and a candle holder into a single disc-shaped object cast from Jesmonite AC730, a sustainable stone composite. The result reads less like a utilitarian catchall and more like something a sculptor quietly left on your nightstand.

Designer: Joao Teixeira for Oftwise

The ripple pattern isn’t purely decorative. The concentric waves are asymmetrical, with the outer rings wider at the front for bulkier items like keys or glasses, and the inner curves sitting closer toward the back for smaller things like rings or coins. It’s a hierarchy built into the shape itself, making organization almost unconscious rather than something you have to think about.

At the center of those ripples sits a recessed pocket sized for a tealight candle, turning the tray into a mood-setter as much as a catchall. Lighting a candle while dropping your watch and keys into the right grooves transforms a mundane habit into something closer to a ritual. It’s a lot to ask of a disc of stone, but Delicato manages it without breaking a sweat.

The material is what makes that balance possible. Jesmonite AC730 is a water-based, VOC-free stone composite that reproduces the look and texture of natural stone without concrete’s weight. It’s independently fire-rated and impact-resistant, which matters for something that routinely sits next to an open flame. A matte acrylic sealer and a cork anti-slip pad on the base round out the practical details.

Because the tray is hand-cast, no two are identical. Small air bubbles, subtle texture variations, and minor color shifts are natural byproducts of the process, and Oftwise is upfront about that. The available color, Bath Stone, is a warm sandy beige neutral enough for almost any interior. At 2kg, it has a quiet weight that makes a surface look deliberately arranged.

The Delicato Tray measures 24.5cm x 24.5cm with a height of just 2.8cm, low enough to sit under a bedside lamp without stealing vertical space. The candle pocket measures 3.9cm across and 1.5cm deep, a snug fit for a standard tealight. It retails for €235 on Oftwise, which places it firmly in the premium tier for an object of this category.

What Delicato gets right is something many design objects miss: it doesn’t try too hard to be either thing. It’s not decorative at the expense of being useful, and it’s not useful at the expense of looking good. A tray that doubles as a candle holder and a sculptural object sounds like a confused brief, but the ripple form settles all of that quietly.

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IDOM’s 42-Meter Steel Buoy Just Proved Wave Energy Can Actually Work

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Off the rugged coast of Bilbao, quietly bobbing in the Bay of Biscay, is a 42-meter steel buoy most people have never heard of. It has no viral launch campaign, no sleek consumer interface, and no celebrity endorsement attached to it. But the MARMOK-A-5, designed by Spanish engineering firm IDOM, just did something that deserves far more attention than it’s getting. It may be one of the more quietly significant design stories of the year.

In May 2026, an updated version of the MARMOK-A-5 was successfully deployed at the Biscay Marine Energy Platform (BiMEP), off the coast of Bilbao, as part of the EuropeWave Pre-Commercial Procurement program. IDOM is one of three finalists competing for a share of a €13.4 million budget to develop and test next-generation wave energy technology. And unlike a lot of clean energy news that tends to stay in the realm of promises and projections, this one is already in the water, already connected to the grid, and already generating real-world data.

Designer: IDOM

The MARMOK-A-5 is a wave energy converter, and it works on a principle that’s almost elegant in its simplicity. The main structure is a floating spar buoy, 5 meters in diameter and weighing 162 tons. Inside it sits a cylindrical water column. As ocean waves pass through, the water inside rises and falls like a piston. That motion compresses and expands an air chamber at the top of the buoy, and the resulting rush of air spins a turbine. That turbine generates electricity, which travels to shore through a subsea cable. No burning, no drilling, no fuel. Just water moving the way it always has.

The technology has been in development for years. IDOM first deployed the original MARMOK-A-5 at BiMEP back in 2016, making it the first wave energy converter ever connected to the Spanish state electricity grid. That alone was historic. The version now in the water is significantly upgraded, featuring a newly developed power take-off system, controllable turbine blades, onboard batteries, and intelligent control systems built to optimize performance in real, unpredictable high-seas conditions.

What strikes me about this project is how deliberately it was built. Every iteration, every sea campaign, fed into a deeper understanding of how ocean energy behaves at scale. IDOM didn’t rush to market. They observed, adjusted, and came back smarter. The redesigned system focuses on improving power performance while keeping the one quality that sea deployments demand above all else: reliability. A beautiful machine that can’t survive the North Atlantic is just expensive wreckage.

Among the milestones from this latest deployment, one is worth calling out: the MARMOK-A-5 is now the first WEC to connect electrically to the grid through the HarshLab buoy at BiMEP. It sounds like a technical footnote, but it’s a meaningful shift in how ocean energy infrastructure can be tested and eventually scaled. The ability to gather live, grid-connected data from a genuinely harsh marine environment is exactly the kind of proof point that moves wave energy from “promising concept” to “serious contender.”

Wave energy has long sat in the shadow of wind and solar. It’s messier to engineer, harder to deploy, and slower to scale. But it has one clear advantage that doesn’t get discussed enough: oceans are predictable. Waves don’t stop at night and don’t pause on cloudy days, and the world’s coastlines happen to overlap heavily with its most energy-hungry regions. The ocean covers more than two-thirds of the planet’s surface, and most of that constant motion still goes completely untapped. The MARMOK-A-5 is still a prototype, rated at just 30 kilowatts. But prototypes are how industries start.

I keep thinking about how much of what will eventually power our lives is currently sitting, mostly unnoticed, off some coast. Not announced with a keynote. Not trending. Just quietly working, enduring salt and storm, sending electricity down a cable while the rest of us scroll past. The MARMOK-A-5 might be one of the least glamorous objects in clean energy right now. But it might also be one of the most important.

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