Every material choice is a trade-off. Here's ours, and why we made it.
What PLA actually is
PLA (polylactic acid) is a bioplastic made by fermenting plant starch — usually corn. It's not a petroleum product, and unlike most plastics, it's industrially compostable at the end of its life. It's also one of the only materials that lets a 3D printer build genuinely complex, continuous sculptural surfaces — the kind of wave-ridge and coral-branch textures a mould or a lathe can't easily produce.
Why not resin?
Cast resin is petroleum-based, and casting requires a mould — which means every lamp in a run is identical, and iterating on a design means cutting an expensive new mould. Printing means every piece is built line by line from a digital file, so the studio can hold texture and detail that casting would blur, and refine a design without throwing away tooling.
Why not ceramic or glass?
Both are beautiful, and both are fragile in a way that changes how you live with an object — you handle it carefully, you worry about the movers, you don't let a toddler near it. A PLA shell is rigid but forgiving. It survives being lived with.
What it means day to day
PLA is stable and odourless once printed — there's no off-gassing smell some people associate with plastics. It's safe to have in a room you spend hours in. If a piece is ever damaged beyond repair, it's compostable in industrial facilities, unlike resin or most consumer plastics, which are landfill by default.
The trade-off, honestly
PLA softens at lower temperatures than ceramic or glass — keep it away from direct heat sources (a radiator, a sunny windowsill in summer) and it'll hold its shape for years. That's the one real limitation, and it's a fair trade for a material that's plant-based, repairable, and lets us sculpt shapes nothing else on this list can produce.