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CONTACT

For all enquiries including bespoke & trade orders, please email: hello@weezandmerl.com

For urgent enquiries you can reach us on +44 7522 999416 between 10am - 5pm, Mon - Fri.

Alternatively, fill out the contact box below with your query, and we'll get back to you as soon as we can:

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OUR LDPE PLASTIC RECYCLING PROCESS - PART 2

After processing our raw recycled material (PART 1), the next stages of our process are colour mixing, layering, and portioning - revealing the marbled cross-section!

We start by picking however many 1kg sheets we need for the project, and pop them back in the oven. While they’re remelting, we carefully weigh out the colour which will dye this base plastic - for example, bright orange Sainsbury’s carrier bags.

Our base plastic is usually clear or translucent grey, and because coloured plastic bags have a massive amount of pigment in them, we only need a tiny amount of it (as little as 0.01%) in order to create translucent tones.

Next comes the fun bit - mixing the plastic on our roll mills! These machines are like giant heated pasta rollers, with barrels spinning towards each other. We feed the plastic in, and it is squished into a thin sheet, allowing us to roll up the material as it comes out. Eventually, after passing the rolled up sausage through a few times, the pigment becomes evenly mixed through.

We used to do this mixing stage by hand, but it was hugely time-consuming, as well as being backbreaking work; we can now colour mix more plastic in less time, and with less of a toll on our bodies!

Not included in this video is the degassing stage, where we press the coloured plastic into thin discs to force all of the air out. If you’re interested in seeing this stage, we’ll soon be uploading the long form versions of all these videos to our new YouTube channel 🎥

Next is layering, and here we can introduce ‘veins’ of colour, usually in the form of plastic bags - think of it like adding icing to a layered sponge cake. After layering all of our different colours, we then fold and cut this big mass of plastic in specific ways, then we cut the ‘cake’, revealing the marbled cross-section inside. These cross section slices become the ‘faces’ of the final piece! We use a lot of strange terminology here in our plastic kitchen.

Follow along for PART 3 to see the next stages: marbling the ‘faces’, pressing, and the final result!

#recycledplastic
#sustainablemarble
#satisfyingprocess
#sustainablematerial

A coffee tabletop we made for a client recently.

Blues, greys and black in a very natural looking marbling style. Absolutely love the complementary wisps of orange veins!

#recycledplastic
#bluemarble
#sustainablefurniture
#ecoproducts
#coffeetabledesign

OUR LDPE PLASTIC RECYCLING PROCESS - PART 1

We collect the waste LDPE plastic (low density polyethylene) from various local shops and businesses; the stock they order from their suppliers arrives to them individually wrapped in this packaging. It’s mind boggling how much plastic waste is produced in this way!

This video goes through the beginning stages of our recycling process - the cleaning, melting, kneading, and pressing.

We ‘clean’ the plastic by removing any contaminants, such as paper labels, sticky tape and sealing strips. This is a long and fiddly, but very therapeutic process!

The plastic melts in bundles (we call them ‘pillows’) in our ovens at around 150°C, before being kneaded by hand using heat resistant gloves. Kneading the plastic removes a lot of the air that was trapped during the melting process - as the plastic stretches, the air pockets expand and burst.

We then cut the plastic into 1kg portions before pressing into sheets in a hydraulic press.

The stacked sheets of plastic become our ‘stock’ material, which we can then pull off the shelf ready for the next stages of our process: colour mixing, degassing, layering, marbling and eventually pressing.

More videos of our making processes to come - follow our plastic recycling journey all the way to finished piece ♻️💚

#plasticrecycling
#sustainablemarble
#satisfyingprocess
#sustainablematerial

Thanking the sunshine for bringing a splash of Spring today 🌞

Spot the recycled @sainsburys plastic bags in these Mandarin coasters 🍊

#recycledmaterials
#colourfulhome
#orangeandpurple
#springtable
#springcolours

A quarter of a tonne of single-use waste plastic went into these 19 tabletops - equivalent to around 10,000 bags for life! The waste came from local businesses in Brighton & Hove, including packaging from the bar industry, clothing retailers, and carpet and fabric shops.

We revisited @thetownhousealresford a few weeks ago for a quick spruce up after 3 years of heavy cafe & restaurant use. They’ve held up incredibly well, developing the same kind of patina that you would expect from a natural material like wood. We fixed some air pockets that had been there from the start (which we didn’t know how to fix at the time!), and tidied a few scuffed edges.

When it’s time - probably in another few years - we’ll come back and do a full restoration service, sanding the tops back and polishing them up to be good as new.

The beauty in this material is that we can repeat this restoration for decades to come, or even remelt the tabletops to be turned into something completely new!

Feauturing gorgeous forged recycled steel legs by @glyndeforge 👏

#sustainabledesign
#zerowastematerial
#circluareconomy
#sustainableinteriors
#marbletable

Here's a little bench we made last year in collaboration with Thomas Gontar @glyndeforge. Will never tire of the recycled plastic and steel combo! Love the colours in this one.

Beautifully shot by @leodavut 📷

#recycledplastic
#recycledsteel
#ecomaterials
#sustainablemarble
#sustainablehome

Here's a little video of us melting down some colour tests and mixing the colour smooth - did not expect them to go this gorgeous aubergine colour!

It's been about a year now since we got our roll mills, and it's safe to say that these guys have saved our arms and backs from a lot of unnecessary manual labour! We used to colour mix all of our plastic by hand, and mixing anything between 1 - 20kg would take literally all day, because each portion had to be kneaded in multiple rounds with waiting for it to remelt in between. Now, we can mix up to around 1.5kg in minutes 🥲 plus, it's fun, and very, very satisfying.

There are so many creative, time consuming stages of our process that need to be done by hand (that we would never want a machine to do for us) so it's been life changing to have help with this laborious part of the process. It's actually put the fun back into creating new colour recipes, as it's so quick to tweak them, and we're not exhausting ourselves in the process.

Hope your eyes enjoy this as much as ours do!

#recycledplastic
#colourmixing
#processvideos
#satisfyingprocess
#sustainablematerial

Last summer we had the pleasure of working with @oliviaoutred studio to make a bespoke dining tabletop for her client in our colourway Sand Peony. This piece was our largest tabletop to date at 2400 x 1150mm and 30mm thickness, and it weighs a whopping 76kg.. that's about 5500 plastic bags!

This was a real moment for us - we've always wanted to make big tabletops like this!

Not even including prepping all the plastic, it took a whole month and four test presses to get it right: tweaking the marbling, as well as the formation and weights of the individual masses of plastic on the bed of the press... but finally we did it!!

We are so pleased to finally share this with you all, and look back on the epic journey.

Thanks to Olivia and her wonderful team, and of course the lovely clients 💚♻️

#recycledplastic
#marbletable
#sustainabledesign
#sustainablefurniture
#ecofurniture

Happy to share another W&M & Thomas Gontar @glyndeforge collab - some bar stools, sitting pretty in their new home.

Beautiful shots by the great @leodavut 🙏🏻

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