1Collect
Plastic in. Chip out.
We collect plastic from communities and sites where it would otherwise become waste. It goes into the shredder, comes out as chip, and that chip is what gets pressed into the sheet the leg is cut from.
How it’s made
From recycled plastic to a bed in a remote home.
Plastic gathered on Country. Pressed and cut inside a shipping-container factory. Built in five minutes by the family who’ll sleep on it.
20kg
Recycled HDPE per bed
5 min
Assembly, no tools
200kg
Load capacity
10+ yrs
Design life
The loop
Plastic doesn’t leave. It changes shape.
Twenty kilos of plastic that would have gone to landfill becomes the legs of a bed that lasts ten years. Off-cuts go back in the shredder and come out as the next sheet. Same plastic, two or three more presses out of the same batch.
2Press
Shredded chip becomes solid sheet
The chip goes into a heat press inside the containerised factory. Under heat and pressure the HDPE fuses into a dense, weather-resistant sheet ready to be cut. Press cycles are timed and monitored. Nothing leaves the container until the sheet passes a finger-test for warp and finish.
3Cut
CNC-precise leg blanks
A pressed sheet goes onto a 4×8 CNC router bed. BlueCarve software steps each cut to nest leg blanks against the sheet so off-cuts go back into the chip stream. Same plastic. Two or three more presses out of the same batch.
4Finish
Edges smoothed, drilled by hand
Once the legs are cut, the edges get smoothed with a bull-nose router. Then the young people from Oonchiumpa drill the holes and fit the screws and bolts that hold each leg together. By the time the parts ship, they’re ready to click together in a remote community in five minutes flat.
5Assemble
Built by the people who use it
Two galvanised steel poles thread through canvas sleeves. Four recycled-plastic legs click onto the poles. No tools, no fasteners, under five minutes. The Stretch Bed is designed so the person who lives with it is the person who assembles it, and so a kid can rebuild it next time the family moves house.
6Land
In a home, on Country
Beds travel by road train and barge to remote communities across the Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australia. Every Stretch Bed is logged under a QR code that links to a public field-note: where it landed, who unpacked it, what the family said. The work is traceable from chip to canvas.
“I'll be rocking up every day to make them.”
Production
A factory inside a shipping container.
The plant is designed to lift, move and re-deploy. Two 20-foot containers hold the shredder, the heat press, the CNC router and the workstation. Power and water plug in. A community can take ownership of the whole production line and run it from their own yard.
The capital buys the path, not just the press. The plant can transfer to community ownership and run from their own yard.
The model
Made by community. Made for community.
“When someone asks ‘Who makes these?’ the answer is ‘We do.’”