Mayday

There's absolutely nothing ordinary about the way a lamp such as Mayday achieves such a power of expression. Although it falls into none of the traditional categories of an object of this kind, you understand exactly what it is and what function it performs the very first time you see it.

You understand instinctively that, with its big hook, you can hang it up anywhere and that, with its conical form, it's stable and can be placed on a table. And if you look at it carefully, you realise that the triangular hole in the diffuser means that you can hang it from a nail, just like a painting on the wall, to direct its light upwards.

One of the secrets of the success of Mayday is its empathy with the users, who immediately get the message that it's a simple object that's great fun to use. The other secret is in the material - Mayday is robust, and it comes to no harm even if you let it fall to the ground.

It's exactly what you'd expect of an object which solves your problems rather than creating new ones.

And now, many years after the initial presentation and the limited die-cast metal edition launched to celebrate the twentieth anniversary, it's become clear that the time has come to make such a versatile, popular object fully sustainable.

To do this, the handle and diffuser of Mayday will, from now on, be made of polypropylene obtained from industrial processing scrap.

In this way, a continuous flow of a material normally regarded as waste will be rerouted and reused to take on new life.

And if you need to get rid of your old lamp, that's not a problem either.

As no glue is used in the assembly process, you can just dismantle it into its component parts and divide up the different materials for disposal.

The plastic in particular can be recycled yet again, to create other objects which, we hope, will be as useful and intuitive as Mayday.