ANTI - the waste transformation startup

by Startacus Admin
The startup that's on a mission to put new life into the discarded - ANTI transforms products destined for landfill into sustainable desirable objects...
We in the UK know better than many the struggles of umbrella versus wind. We think we’ll thwart the gods of weather by taking our umbrella into battle against the hammering rain, but just as we think it’s safe to go back into the falling water, we get blindsided by that gust of wind we should definitely have expected.
Our umbrella gets mangled, turned inside out, perhaps even stolen away by our meteorological foe. Now we’re wet and our umbrella is on the way to a landfill, where the nylon canopy will lie for anywhere up to a thousand years, along with the other billion per year. But it doesn’t have to be...
UK ‘transformation’ startup ANTI, created by British designer Mark Howells, is aiming to rescue those fallen umbrellas by turning them into something else; something still useful.
These are used as the primary materials for ANTI’s stylish desk and table lamps, with only 5% of the materials coming from elsewhere. The umbrella parts lend themselves well to the different components of lamps and lampshades - the shades, shade rings, the bulb holders, bulb cages, and the body itself - and the only parts that can’t be recycled from these are 3D printed instead.
Lamps aren’t the only product ANTI aims to create, and umbrellas aren’t the only source of recyclable and upcyclable material the startup can use; they are just the beginning. There are plenty of everyday items out there that are thrown away all the time, when someone with a mind to recycle them could create something unique and beautiful out of them.
And with ANTI’s ‘take back’ scheme allowing customers to return any product in order for it to be disassembled and remade into something completely new, the circular lifestyle starts with lamps! And umbrellas.
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Published on: 5th July 2021
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