Scraps take centre stage at London Design Festival

Offcuts stole the spotlight at the London Design Festival in London.

Dezeen rounded up seven pieces of furniture and products made from simple scraps that would otherwise have gone to waste on 24 September 2026, days after the festival closed. The list turned workshop leftovers into things for the home.

The 2026 festival was the 24th edition. It ran from 12 to 20 September with product launches, workshops, open studios, guided tours and talks. It closed on Sunday 20 September after a week of exhibitions and installations.

Many of the scrap-built works appeared at Material Matters, a design show inside the festival. Its fifth edition ran from 15 to 17 September at UNLOCKED Shoreditch in east London. A selection of designs shortlisted for a 2026 Wood Award was on display there.

One was the Dagwood Bench by Lewis Duckworth, co-founder of the guerrilla collective Design Everything. It is built from timber end pieces left over from furniture production, the small ends and trimmings usually thrown away. The bench uses a single laminated plank, layers glued together for strength, sandwiched between two timber faces.

That thrift earned it a place among 34 designs shortlisted for a 2026 Wood Award. Shortlist means a narrowed list of contenders. The bench was shown alongside other shortlisted works at Material Matters.

Another was Second Song by Spared, a Brighton-based design studio. The collection is a set of bird-shaped collectable objects. They were cast, formed in a mould, using a resin-free mineral binder mixed with offcuts including shell, stone, workshop sawdust and thin scrapings from plastic chopping boards used in industrial kitchens.

The birds were presented at Material Matters. Nothing was new. Everything had been something else first.

A tissue box by designer Tom Golland took a different route. It featured in Out of Worky, an exhibition of bespoke pieces made using scrap materials collected over years of work as emerging designers. Bespoke here means made to order, one by one.

Elsewhere in London, another project 3D-prints furniture and lighting from tea and coffee waste, VoxelMatters reported on 21 September. The method builds objects layer by layer with a printer rather than cutting them from solid stock.

What makes this stand out is the shopping list. Shell. Sawdust. Kitchen plastic. Visitors did not need a design background to get it.