Upclycling Unwanteds - Snooker Balls

The task of upcycling is where waste materials are transformed into new products that are both functional and appealing. This has great importance in today's society because of the excess waste in our society. For my project I have chosen to use billiards balls. My rationale behind this is as follows, there are hundreds if not thousands of bars and pubs which have billiard tables, and a common occurrence is for balls to go missing (commonly stolen by lowlife scum). From my research it is not possible to replace a selected ball. Instead an entire set needs to be purchased. Thus, the remainder of the balls become redundant. Similarly balls get chipped and scratched requiring replacement. Furthermore there would be manufacturing defects unsuitable for use.

Billiard balls are made of Phenolic resin (Bakelite) which is essentially a very hard and strong resin. In the past there have been no options for recycling this material other than incineration. Thus these 'waste' balls would be nothing more than an environmental burden.

In coming up with my final design of a bowl I explored other ideas. The first being jewelry, in particular rings. There were two reasons that I did not do this. Firstly, I felt that perhaps I could find a more economical use for the balls, as there was a great amount of wastage. Secondly, after further research I discovered that someone had already made something similar. It was at this point that I decided a bowl could be quite charming.

I made the bowl by slicing the balls into discs using a bandsaw. I then sanded and polished them. I experimented with several construction methods, the first being strategically chamfering the edges of the balls so that they could be glued together to form a bowl shape. I then experimented with using wire jump rings and rivets. Neither of which worked. The final result was to join the discs with aluminium straps and small bolts with dome nuts. Whilst I am happy with the way that the final product turned out, more time for refinement and tweaking would have improved it. Be that said, this is just the first prototype and which should be considered.