The Green Vanguard: O is for One of a Kind

Designed by Phil Cuttance

When Phil Cuttance found a plastic fabricator that was tossing scraps into a landfill, the London-based designer found a way to make vases out of them. “I wanted to try to add value to a material that is seen as cheap and disposable, by handcrafting it into an object,” says Cuttance, who gets the plastic from a shop on the edge of London and makes the vases by hand in his studio workshop. “It’s a departure from machine-made, mass-replicated goods.” The different parts of the vase are fused together, an idea that came to him when he saw a plastic bumper being welded back onto a car at a panel shop. The vases are available in three tonal combinations and shapes, and no two are identical; each one is individually numbered on its base.