2021 Edition

In 2016 Gruppo CAP, together with Cyrcus, launched the contest ‘Public water and digital fabrication, we need your idea’. In-Visible was the winning project, signed by Carlotta Antonietti and Marzia Tolomei, two young designers just graduated from the Politecnico of Turin with a degree in Design and Visual Communication. The project revisited one of the most typical examples of Italian urban design, the drinking fountain. They transformed the classic drinking fountain with the idea of turning a weakness into a strength: what is almost invisible and ignored becomes something capable of surprising people and attracting attention. They decided to maintain the traditional shape of the fountain and defined only the outline by using the laser cutting technique. Furthermore the designers used a painted and folded metal sheet in order to create the right thickness to cover the water pipe. The last detail was the tap, that was designed and positioned in such a way as to give the illusion that the water actually came out of it.  In 2019, the project took a further step. Gruppo CAP made a deal with the dairy industry Danone to start an innovative circular economy process at the treatment center of Sesto San Giovanni.  Danone started giving to Cap all those products that couldn’t be in the distribution chain anymore, in order to create a circular economy process and transform them into biogas and then into electrical energy. When the products that have come out of the cold cycle arrive at the CAP center the first step is to put them in a machine that separates the organic part from the packaging. While the organic part ends in a biodigester, which transform sludge and waste into biogas, the packaging is collected separately. The biogas is then transformed into electricity and quantified in order to donate to Banco Alimentare the euro equivalent.  That’s when that the fountain project is taken up and redesigned. The idea is to reuse the Danone packaging to create a new prototype of a fountain made of recycled plastic. The making of the new fountain has been entrusted to Design Differente thanks to its interest in the circular economy process: the start-up in fact uses waste in order to create new objects and services and return them to the community. The waste obtained from the Danone packages is shredded through an industrial mill and then melted through a heated press for the construction of the panels. The process used to make the fountain is innovative and unique; plastics are usually recycled with a process of division/selection, shredding and granulation and then re-placed on the market. This time we’ll use subtractive techniques (cnc and similar) in order to create the structure of the fountain. We expect to use approximately 80/100kg of recycled plastic to build each fountain.