People / Absolute Beginners Factory CIC
Absolute Beginners is a new kind of factory on Park Royal Industrial Estate, where young people learn how to make everyday products in radically sustainable ways. We run paid workshop programmes where local 17–21 year olds learn to make a single product from scratch, using waste materials, simple tools, and off-grid or low-carbon power. We want to help local young people gain the skills and experience they need for the jobs they want, at the same time as asking: how can we make the things we need in ways that don’t cook the planet?
100 Year Dustpan
Absolute Beginners is a new kind of factory in Park Royal, northwest London, where young people learn how to make everyday products in radically sustainable ways. We help our young people design and create products using waste materials, simple tools and low-carbon power – and pay them London Living Wage for their time on the project.
We’re limited by working with the materials we can find – the 100 Year Dustpans are made from boiler covers, discarded in the streets – and by the process of skilling up our young people, who have no experience of manufacturing. But these limitations are what makes our products so sustainable: using simple hand tools and scrap metal means our dustpans are almost entirely off grid.
We want to ask: how can we make the things we need in ways that don’t cook the planet?
Corner Lamp
The Corner Lamp was made with 99% reclaimed materials, including scrap key clamp railing, and the tops of Nitrous Oxide canisters, which we found on the street. And our young people used simple tools to produce it: hacksaws, files and a pillar drill to construct it. Together, this means we created less than 20g of carbon in making our lamp (not including the fitting). When we say ‘radically sustainable’, we mean it.