Focus on good and scalable business cases
Founded in 2005, Form Us With Love is an industrial design studio with a core focus on sustainability and using recycled materials that’s worked with global companies like IKEA and Samsung, as well as quintessentially Scandinavian design groups like Muuto and +Halle.
According to Agnes Svensson, Design Manager at Form Us With Love, the firm is built on the core belief of design that should have a positive impact on people and the planet but also the bottom line.
– The focus can’t only be on sustainability. In order to create real environmental impact, the solutions also have to make good and scalable business cases. You have to see the business potential in sustainability and sustainability in business, she explains.
Svensson says that the entire team at Form Us With Love worked on the project at one stage or another. They gathered details like pain points and target groups in the pre-study, developed and tested potential applications in the studio, incorporated feedback from EasyMining, and then reached out to other industries and built partnerships to produce the prototypes.
– The biggest challenge was the complexity of the project, starting from the material and working to end up with something more tangible, like a product, and really looking at the full value chain. But that’s also what we really loved about this project, says Svensson.
Designing for the value chain & circularity
Not all of the roughly five development tracks Form Us With Love put together will immediately move on into the validation stage. Applications like concrete or terracotta tiles require such a large amount of sand for further use case testing that they’re being put on hold until the first Ash2Phos plant is up and running. But other tracks, such as the paint and wood wool for acoustic panelling, can continue on with development using just the sand from the Ash2Phos pilot production and lab testing currently in operation.
For Stiernström, that comprehensive variety of development tracks was the main reason to work with Form Us With Love.
– They didn’t see the problems or applications that we saw. They saw all these opportunities and talked to all these people that we never come in contact with or think about. For example, paint wasn’t something we had ever thought about at all, she explains.
The tracks help demonstrate the full potential of Ash2Phos's red silica sand for partners throughout the whole value chain. Yet, ultimately, it's not to boost sales or increase market share but to ensure everything from the process becomes part of the circular economy.
– When you create a solution, you often focus on one thing. In this case, it’s recycling phosphorus. But to have a true circular solution, you have to recycle everything, says Stiernström.
