Newspaper Wood: Turn Pages into Recycled Home Products

Mieke Meijer has already shown that logs are not necessarily cut-and-dried wood, literally or otherwise, but in this next chapter his new material idea takes shape in the form of actual furniture, lamps, jewelry and other physical (and useful) objects.

It began as a student design project – stacks of newspapers meticulously and individually glued together, rolled into a tight ‘log’ and left to dry, deform and harden just like living trees would do. After they ‘cure’ these building blocks can be cut, carved, routed, mortised and so forth as one would with normal wood.

Years later, in collaboration with the Dutch design ground Vij5, Mieke began to roll out real products based on these reconstituted pieces of ‘timber’ … the result: a series of practical and experimental items that make structural and/or aesthetic use of recycled newspapers in new ways.

NewspaperWood has grains and rings much like a tree, as well as a unique and variegated texture akin to that of wooden-surfaced craft objects.

Each slice or spin reveals different cross-sections of print with its own visual (as well as structural) properties.

With missing production, assembly, marketing and sales components met by his partners, one wonders if a truly different mass-market material may have just been born.