Ecopixel is an Italian design brand that was established by producer Claudio Milioto and designer Jan Puylaert in early 2017. Both partners have long been guided in their work by sustainable principles of reuse, recycling, and an intense respect for the environment. With their new joint venture, they are taking their goals of reducing waste and recycling plastic to a new level. Located in Porto Valtravaglia, near the Swiss border north of Milan, Ecopixel promotes a “never-ending recyclability concept”—meaning that each piece in Ecopixel’s collection of home furnishings, lighting, and accessories is both made from recycled material and is made to be 100% recyclable. The company's founders poetically describe this as an “in between moment of material solidification; what was and what will become.” The brand's aesthetic sits at the intersection between minimalistic geometry of form and postmodernist exuberance of materials.
Ecopixel began by recycling thermoplastic waste-material—so-called LDPE (low-density polyethylene industrial waste)—transforming off-cuts into richly textured blocks sorted into color families. Because each piece is created from a mixture of sorted LDPE remnants, it displays unique color and texture patterns, ranging from the vivacious 8-hue abstract pointillistic masterpiece that is Alessandro Mendini’s Alex Chaise Lounge for Ecopixel, to the marble-like, understated Delta 50 Stool in white and grey by Jan Puylaert for Ecopixel.
From there, Ecopixel branched out into creating new materials from other categories of plastic waste, including a fascinating collaboration with Belgian firm ECO-Oh!, which transforms 30% of garbage in Belgium into useful raw materials. Trashplast is the resulting collection of tableware, vases, and lighting in the slightly variegated deep grey experimental material, created from 100% recycled trash. Ecopixel’s mission is also educational; spreading the lesson that different plastic waste materials should never be mixed so as to keep the plastics pure, which facilitates reuse after each product life-cycle.
Ecopixel has already garnered a great deal of attention from industry heavyweights, as evidenced by the collaboration with Atelier Mendini. The Alex chaise lounge is now part of the permanent collection at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands. Additionally, the brand has showcased its collection at the Milan Design Week, Homi Milano lifestyle fair, Hotel nhow Milano, Dubai Design Week, as well as debuting Trashplast at Ventura Future in Milan in 2018.
