ddp design fair

Written by Jina Park

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The Milan-based tech startup Krill Design partnered with a family-owned business that manufactures various products from oranges in the Messina province of Sicily to develop a technology for collecting discarded orange peels sourced from the plant, processing them into powders and filaments that can be fed into a 3D printer and creating design products with a 3D printer. It is already supplying eco-friendly containers made from plants to major food and beverage companies in Italy such as Autogrill and San Pellegrino.

The recently launched “Ohmie” lamp is also a design product manufactured by 3D printing with filaments made from orange peels. It offers great durability and excellent quality during its use, however, it is easily biodegradable even in a compost bin and returns to nature when it is thrown away. The “Ohmie” lamp with a height of about 23 centimeters is made from the peels of two or three oranges. It retains the natural bumpy feel and subtle citrus scent of oranges.

Currently, food and beverage processing companies send discarded orange peels to a composting facility instead of letting them decompose naturally into the ground. If disposal requires expenses and a time-consuming process, how about recycling it? Orange peels are cheap and can replace non-biodegradable plastic materials.

Orange peels are dried, thoroughly pulverized and homogenized, added to a biopolymeric vegetable starch base, squeezed out into the form of a filament and printed with a 3D printer programmed by a computer. Krill Design, which has mainly designed tableware and containers for food and beverages that can be easily shaped, is currently developing a more advanced mixing technology of orange peel material so that it can be recycled into a natural fertilizer or biofuel for the local community, when thrown away after use.

Image © : Krill Design, Milano