The city beneath our feet is both the cradle of civilization and a colossal metabolic entity. With every breath, resources are consumed, and waste is generated. Yet, in the cycle of renewal, every end is a new beginning. What has been forgotten awaits awakening. What has been discarded holds the code for rebirth.
ReSilt Vitro, a client project featured at Shanghai Design Week, aims to explore the potential of transforming toxic urban sludge into green, sustainable, and aesthetically pleasing glass materials.
Future Minerals: Transforming Urban Sludge into Glass
We turn our attention to the endpoints of urban metabolism: the sewage sludge, once viewed as a burden. Within the complex equation of urban material metabolism, we recognize sludge as one of the future mineral resources of city metabolism. Through the dual empowerment of design and technology, we transform Shanghai's wastewater treatment waste into silt-glass, completing a value leap from environmental burden to a newly visible material language. ReSilt Vitro™ is our first excavated urban mine, our first practical case of converting urban waste into future assets.
Ecofeminism Approach: Reimaging Regeneration Through Material Care
In the philosophy of ecofeminism, the city is not an abstract machine but a living body whose wounds, metabolism, and forgotten sediments deserve care. To work with urban sludge is to confront the silent violence embedded in our infrastructures, yet also to acknowledge the possibility of repair. By vitrifying the sludge with heavy metal contamination into stable glass, we seal toxins into crystalline stillness, preventing their return to soil and groundwater. In this act of material care, protection extends outward to rivers, wetlands, and the fragile lives that grow within them.
This is why my design glass pieces take the form of fish eggs. Each sphere carries within it a miniature sequence of cellular division - one, two, four, eight - formed by blending vitrified sludge particles into the molten glass. The suspended inclusions resemble early biological growth, echoing the rhythm of reproduction and the quiet insistence of life. The material remembers what the city tried to forget and transforms it into a gesture of renewal.
Through this ecofeminist lens, ReSlit Vitro becomes more than a recycled material. It becomes a metaphor for urban healing, a reminder that regeneration begins when we acknowledge what we discard. By giving toxic residue a stable new body, we protect the waters that nurture fish, plants, and future ecologies. What was once harmful now becomes the vessel of potential life.
Handcrafted in collaboration with artisan Zhao in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi, China
My initial CAD models and renderings
The sludge powder is on the glass workshop table.
