Try Again : putting the right people in the room to give surplus material a second life

CLIENT: IMPACT VALLEY · FOCUS AREA: CIVIC / CIRCULAR ECONOMY

When a build needs partners who don't normally work together, someone has to put them in the same room. For Impact Valley, that was us. We connected their design side with one of our favourite developers, Meet Pilou, and the two shipped try-again.eu — a live platform that turns industrial material headed for the bin into raw material for creative work.

The problem

Every year, usable industrial material gets discarded — not because it's spent, but because there's no route from the company that no longer needs it to the people who could use it. The first edition of Try Again? centres on 15 million brand-new glass containers from GSK's former syringe stock: clean, intact, medically inert, and otherwise written off after a model change.

Impact Valley wanted to build the platform that opens that stock up to artists, designers, architects, and makers through open calls. They had the concept and the design direction. What they needed was a development partner who could ship it properly — and a way to bring the two sides together without a long procurement detour.

What we did

We didn't take the brief and disappear. We convened.

• We connected the build team. We put Impact Valley's design work next to Meet Pilou, a developer we've shipped with before and trust. That's the Co-Labs job here: match the right people, then get out of the way so they can build.
• We got stakeholders who don't usually collaborate to work together. An industrial material owner with surplus stock, a client running the initiative, a specialist developer, plus the cultural authority and production partner who mapped the technical and logistical constraints. Different worlds, one build.
• We kept the throughline honest. The point wasn't a nice website. It was a working route from surplus to reuse — an archive of submitted projects, expert support for feasibility, and secured venues and partners to exhibit the results.

This is what we mean when we call Co-Labs a laboratory as well as a studio: we experiment with how things get built — who's in the room, who talks to whom — not just what ships.

What got built

try-again.eu — a live platform that:

• runs multiple, diverse open calls so solutions can come from any field;
• gathers every open call in one place and doubles as a public archive of submitted projects;
• gives selected participants free access to the recovered glass stock, funding for research and creation, and visibility through partner exhibitions;
• holds every project to clear principles: start from real needs, let the material lead, extend its lifespan, and turn surplus into social, cultural, or community value.

Built by Meet Pilou, designed off Impact Valley's direction, connected by Co-Labs.

The outcome

The platform is live and the first edition is open. The recovery itself now runs through the open calls it enables.

• Material in scope for Edition 2026: 15 million unused GSK glass containers (as stated by the initiative).
• Open calls launched : 3
• Projects submitted / archived to date: 123
• Objects and artworks produced from recovered material: 3

We'll fill these in as the numbers are confirmed — we don't publish figures we can't stand behind.

Why it matters

Waste like this isn't only an environmental problem. It's a coordination problem: the material exists, the makers exist, and nothing connects them. Try Again? builds that connection, and Co-Labs built the connection behind the build — a client's designers and a developer we trust, shipping one thing together.

That's the model. We work next to our partners, we bring in the right people, and we back ventures that create measurable value for the people and systems they're for.

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