Recycling ceramic waste into new ceramics

March 20, 2024 7:35 AM

IKEA's recently introduced SILVERSIDA line of blue-speckled white ceramic dinnerware are made with ~60% post-firing ceramic waste. Broken pottery is ground up into powder then mixed with a portion of raw clay and water and used to make these new pieces.

IKEA is usually fairly quiet about their production processes but the explanation of how they're going about this fascinated me. Perhaps a little "Pepsi-Blue" but I think it's cool.

posted by seanmpuckett (20 comments total)

This sort of thing is neat -- so much ink is spilled on whether we are recycling things properly as end consumers, but the best opportunities for lowering waste through recycling come at the source where a) masses of waste are produced in the first place in some processes and b) that waste is relatively homogenous and uncontaminated so can be recycled more cleanly into new products.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:45 AM on March 20 [15 favorites]

It looks relatively rare and technically difficult to do at scale - UK 100% recycled pottery talks about the challenges in this FT piece. Where I live it’s reuse for ceramics, there’s no recycling facility available for it because it is so hard to return to usable components consistently.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:48 AM on March 20

This is cool. I stumbled across The Great Pottery Throwdown in the pandemic and was struck by how, even on that small scale, there's a lot of material involved in ceramics production and always a chance that the end product will be unusable. I hope this line does well and opens up more opportunities for recycling ceramics.
posted by EvaDestruction at 7:54 AM on March 20 [1 favorite]

Actually very lovely too. I would use this tableware.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 7:59 AM on March 20 [3 favorites]

Those are quite lovely. Don't have a local Ikea though and shipping costs are rather steep.
posted by Czjewel at 8:40 AM on March 20 [1 favorite]

I'm guessing (I don't have an FT account) that the "UK 100% recycled" article covers the work Granby Workshop were doing a few years back.

I backed their Granbyware kickstarter, and have been very happy with my speckled blue dinner plates.

The pandemic threw a massive spanner into an already challenging project, which I think is partly why they aren't doing crockery these days. In the end they couldn't manage 100% recycled glazes because the team they were working with got made redundant, but 99.8% recycled is pretty good going.
posted by amcewen at 8:56 AM on March 20

there's a lot of material involved in ceramics production and always a chance that the end product will be unusable

Crushed pottery is often used as grog.
posted by run"monty at 9:06 AM on March 20 [7 favorites]

…I see though IKEA is re-using waste after its second firing.
posted by run"monty at 9:10 AM on March 20

Greco-Roman antiquity produced a lot of ceramics. A lot of it was pottery to transport olive oil, and anyone who has tried to wash out an olive oil bottle knows that it's easiest just to smash the damned thing and get a new one. There are still hills some 100m high that are just multi-thousand-year-old amphora middens.

And they recycled as much as they possibly could. Pottery shards were used as aggregate for construction work, and old pots were ground to powder to make "grog" so new pots wouldn't crack after firing.

Pottery shards were also the scrap paper of the era, in ways that are still in our language: we use the word "ostracise" to mean a kind of group shunning of an individual. This is because of an Athenian tradition of accepting submissions for banishment by carving the name onto a shard known as an ostracon. Wikipedia suggests it was like scrap paper in that they also wiped their backsides with them, which is a TIL for me!
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 9:14 AM on March 20 [15 favorites]

This is really interesting. Thanks for sharing
posted by tarantula at 10:39 AM on March 20

Crushed pottery is often used as grog.

Thanks. And to be clear, in case my comment sounded like I was saying pottery is wasteful, I didn't mean for it to come across like that. Even though the show wasn't necessarily explicit about it, I picked up enough here and there to know that reuse is possible, and valued. I've seen individual potters turn second-firing fails into kintsugi-style pieces or incorporate shards into other work, for instance. But that kind of effort doesn't really scale, so seeing this happening on an industrial production level is great.
posted by EvaDestruction at 1:31 PM on March 20

This sort of thing is neat -- so much ink is spilled on whether we are recycling things properly as end consumers, but the best opportunities for lowering waste through recycling come at the source where a) masses of waste are produced in the first place in some processes and b) that waste is relatively homogenous and uncontaminated so can be recycled more cleanly into new products.

This really hit home for me recently. I've got a small hobby machine shop in the garage, and I'm always on the lookout for interesting new projects to try. I came across people making one-off cast concrete wall signs and stepping stones, by CNC milling a negative mold into a sheet of styrofoam insulation, pouring the concrete, and then destroying the mold to reveal the casting. All that impossible-to-recycle styrofoam waste, from a mold used only once. I just couldn't. Even the idea of it made me a little sick. I'll find some other way to accomplish what I'm after.
posted by xedrik at 2:05 PM on March 20 [3 favorites]

For close to a couple decades now, San Francisco Building Resources has been making and selling bulk tumbled terra cotta or ceramics. I used to imagine paving a path with tumbled terra cotta, but it's not actually cheap enough for that. It's cool stuff though. Lots of people on Etsy sell tumbled ceramic or pottery chips as well. Nicer than digging up mountains or streams for pebbles to top your bonsai.
posted by oneirodynia at 2:48 PM on March 20 [1 favorite]

Or just buy vintage plates.
posted by Ideefixe at 3:53 PM on March 20

I thought this sort of thing was kind of standard practice in the industry.

The Ikea thing feels self serving and kind of greenwash-y. I'll bet good money that this is a way to increase profit, both for manufacturing and for creating a sense of goodwill toward customers. Which is a good thing, if maybe a little sneaky.

Furthermore, I suppose reducing stuff going to the landfill is laudable in some way. Mostly for operating costs of the factory, really. Landfills themselves aren't really problematic so much as what gets thrown in them. It is a service that does cost money, so there's savings there for the manufacturer. Even then, broken ceramics are some of the most inert things you can possibly dump in a landfill.
posted by 2N2222 at 6:23 PM on March 20

Clay of my clay.
posted by offog at 7:28 PM on March 20 [2 favorites]

Grok the grog.
posted by Fizzy Kimchi at 7:55 PM on March 20

Industries have reduced waste and called it "recycling" for marketing purposes since the 70s. In particular, printers worked out how to make use of tail-ends from paper rolls, which added up to staggering amounts of paper not thrown away. Some of this was just "re-use", some of it was "not being dumb", and some of it was a genuine pulp-and-re-create recycling effort, but mostly the stories about it were misleading PR.

I remember in the 90s it got so bad that proportions of "post-consumer waste" were listed on packaging, because companies could just pass materials from their left hand to their right and say it was "recycling" for a good long while.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:43 AM on March 21 [1 favorite]

Ideefixe: Or just buy vintage plates.

Many old (and new!) ceramics glazes contain heavy metals that are just not good for all applications. Please do be careful if you're doing this!
posted by SunSnork at 7:16 AM on March 21 [1 favorite]

Vintage plates do need to be treated with caution - even some lines of Corelle have significant amounts of lead.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:58 AM on March 21