Sustainability has been a feature of the entries to the Optician Awards for many years so it was a natural progression for it to command its own category. In recognition of the importance sustainability holds in modern business life, Optician commissioned the designer and artist, Yair Neuman, to make a bespoke trophy for the winner of the Sustainable Practice Award sponsored by CooperVision.
To highlight the importance of sustainability, Neuman is making a one-off Awards trophy from a material he has patented. Delerex is a material created from the waste lens blanks used in every frame and practice, up and down the land. The resulting material is attractive, pearlescent and light, and reflects the artist’s desire to embed sustainability within optics in a practical way.
‘I grew up with a sculptor mother and a surgeon father and my interest in making things by hand started very early on,’ says Neuman. ‘I studied art and design at the Design Academy in the Netherlands and my first interaction with the eyewear world was at Ron Arad’s studio working on the PQ Eyewear range. This was an amazing introduction to the field and got me hooked on designing glasses, which I see somewhere between product and fashion design.’
Neuman continued his interest in frames with his own designs, which included inventing a seamless hinging system embedded into a metal wire. This led to his own optical business Wires Glasses, which took his invention to market.
‘Since then I’ve been designing eyewear for other brands in the UK and in Europe and continued my work on innovation with a focus on materials. In 2020, I released Delerex, which is a material made from 100% recycled demo lenses collected as waste from the industry,’ he says.
Neuman’s Wire Glasses venture was conceived when he broke his sunglasses while travelling; his response was to create a new pair from a single piece of wire. That sustainable ethos has to be promoted, Neuman stresses. ‘Ever since I started designing eyewear, I felt that the amount of waste generated in the process of making and selling glasses has to be addressed. Apart from our duty to protect the environment, it is pretty clear that it is only a matter of time until the public and regulators will demand a dramatic change in the way the industry is managed.’
In addition to his spectacle design work, Neuman decided to focus on the problem of waste in optics and his focus fell on one of the most wasteful and polluting aspects of the spectacle sales chain – dummy lenses. He turned his attention to looking at how these blanks could be recycled and brought back into the production chain. ‘It took me over two years to come up with a material that is stable, resilient and visually pleasing enough to be reused in the making of new products,’ he says.
The result is Delerex, a material made from demo lenses collected from independent opticians, glazing labs and suppliers. Demo lenses are popped out and thrown away in optical practices and labs by the million. Despite being essentially new lenses, they are destined for landfill or the incinerator. Neuman took these demo lenses and processed them into slabs of useable material. ‘This protected process involves several carefully timed steps of kneading and moulding, eventually providing an attractive raw material that can be machined similarly to acetate,’ he adds.
Having developed Delerex he says it made sense to use the material for light-related objects. ‘I wanted to keep the basic purpose of light manipulation that the lenses were originally made for in the second life I was giving to them. As a result, my first pieces made from Delerex were lamps and I developed a collection of those made entirely from Cubitts’ waste lenses in a collaboration that was very successful.’
The ultimate goal was to ‘close the loop’ and bring Delerex back into the eyewear industry in the shape of new frames, he says. ‘This has now become possible and my Delerex frames are already available to purchase. Future opportunities for Delerex are almost endless and I’m currently working on new collaborations with companies from several different fields.’
Neuman is tight-lipped about the fine detail of his process but shares his thoughts on his interpretation of the iconic Optician Awards trophy. He says he wants the design to be light and airy and for the finished trophy to express the desire to stress the environment as little as possible. ‘The design is only using the necessary elements for its structure, for example, it does not have an extra base part and there is no added weight to it,’ he says.
The Delerex trophy uses 67 lenses, underlining the potential for millions of lenses that are wasted every year.
Enter the 2022 Optician Awards and find the criteria for the Sustainable Practice Award here.