These designers are using toxic waste to make gorgeous pottery

After hundreds of tests, a group of students at the Royal College of Art have created a way to transform this toxic mud into beautiful ceramic pottery, proving that it could be used as a replacement material for clay or potentially even concrete. Working with materials scientists at Imperial College London and KU Leuven in Belgium as well as a refinery in France, the students were able to use red mud to create pottery that looks almost like terra-cotta. The series of pots were aesthetically inspired by the material’s industrial beginnings, with shapes that resemble factory smokestacks.

Red mud is the result of the refining process for aluminum oxide or alumina, which is then smelted into aluminum. For every piece of aluminum oxide that’s refined, the process generates more than twice the amount of toxic red mud, which is discarded and stored in giant pits. These pits are so large that they’re visible from space.

The students, Guillermo Whittembury, Joris Olde Rikkert, Kevin Rouff, and Paco Bockelmann, also turned the red mud into blue, red, and black glazes for ceramics. Now they’re in the process of getting these glazes certified as food-safe–a serious concern for a material that’s considered toxic.

The project’s goal is to raise awareness about the environmentally destructive production process of refining common materials like aluminum, while also showing that a material that is currently considered industrial waste could have a productive use.

“We valorize Red Mud by creating high value items, to show that it could be a viable replacement for materials such as clay that are used to make items from bricks to vases,” the students told Fast Company via email. “These materials would otherwise need to be mined. By demonstrating the versatility of red mud, we show that the [164 million tons] produced annually is in reality a colossal material asset, waiting to be used.”