Shio 潮
A modular public bench pressed from crushed oyster shell waste and recycled HDPE — asking what a discarded material is still capable of.
Where it started
The idea came from a walk through Amanohashidate, Japan, past mounds of discarded oyster shell — a by-product with almost nowhere to go. Back in Sydney, Broken Bay Pearl Farm became the source of the same problem at home: crushed shell waste with real structural potential, if it could be bound into something load-bearing.
Developing the composite
The bench is sheet-pressed from a 75/25 blend of recycled HDPE and crushed shell, engineered to a safety factor of 3 and tested well beyond that, to a safety factor of 10 — reaching a compressive strength of roughly 2500 psi. Modularity meant the bench could be assembled, repaired, and reconfigured in public settings without specialist tools.
Being honest about the sustainability story
It matters to me that this project doesn't oversell itself. The HDPE-shell composite is not currently mechanically recyclable, and "no mechanical fixings" is an aspiration for future iterations rather than a fact of this one. The sustainability impact should be read as modelled, not measured — a promising direction, not a finished answer.