Mapping out the future of sustainable design – one recycled plastic layer at a time

On the fifth floor of a mixed-use building in Montreal’s St-Michel area sits the buzzing studio of Cyrc, a 3-D printing-driven home accessory and furniture design business operated by Guy Snover and Daniel Martinez.
Cyrc was founded in 2021 with the intention of creating items such as vessels and bowls from the confounding volume of consumer waste found on the planet. Using filament made from extruded preused plastic, Snover and Martinez mechanically hew the brand’s offering of colourful and curvaceous wares. Cyrc’s unique mission and captivating products have caught the attention of similarly sustainability-minded design insiders including Treana Peake, founder of the socially conscious design company Obakki. Last year, she tapped the studio for its mentorship-focused Interior Design Show x Obakki Design Incubator initiative.
More recently, during May’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York, Cyrc showcased a collection of larger-scale pieces for the first time. Called Houf, the moniker winks at how the hard-surfaced objects resemble ubiquitous multifunctional poufs. Cyrc’s Houf line includes various sizes of hollow, barrel-shaped pieces that can be used as planters, stools, side tables – even “a makeshift drum”, as the brand’s website notes.
The making of Cyrc’s dynamically dimensional wares starts on the computer, with Snover inputting series of numbers into a software program to plot how the 3-D printer will eventually map out the item it’s crafting. “I’m playing around with the language of pattern,” he says of this aspect of the design process. The often-inscrutable ensuing document, which Martinez laughingly refers to as “alien work,” generates a sculptural combination of curves.
Snover and Martinez use a variety of plastic filaments to craft Cyrc’s products. Some comes from the Amsterdam-based company Reflow, which transforms food packaging into a rainbow of spooled plastic strands. The duo also creates filament in their studio, demonstrating how they’re taking steps to adopt a closed-loop approach to their production.
Cyrc’s studio contains boxes full of off-cut materials from designs, prototypes and even products customers have returned after their use has run its course. “Once we have enough of one colour, these pieces are broken down with a bandsaw,” Snover says. From there, the chunks are fed into a granulator to chop them down further. The pellets are sorted by hue (Snover and Martinez can manipulate colour schemes from wildly playful gradients to mature Dutch Master-esque tones) and then extruded and wound onto an empty spool.
The spools are attached to vitrine-like printers that Snover has custom built, which are programmed with the computer data that’s used to inform the direction that a printer’s nozzle moves. A vase, for example, is fabricated layer-by-layer in a hypnotizing flow that Snover likens to “icing a cake.” Wheels grab the filament to feed into the nozzle that pushes it out in a specific pattern, while the bed of the printer moves up and down according to the object’s desired dimensions.
Some of Cyrc’s pieces can be made more quickly than others. The Houf collection’s wares require between 12 to 24 hours to be printed. Regardless of the labour needed, in an additional effort to curb over-production, Cyrc’s work is typically made-to-order with lead times of between two to four weeks.
As the business evolves, so too will Cyrc’s output. “We get to take more risks because our path from development to launch is all in-house,” Snover says. Taking on this risk has come with great reward, especially for the accelerating momentum of eco-conscious design.
For more information, visit cyrcdesign.com.