— By Andru Shively — 

Awards season is in full swing, and while the meaty names of Hollywood have taken over the spotlight, you may have missed out on the real treat: the winner of the university competition Pleiades – Plastic European Innovation Award for Design and Sustainability.

Cooked up by various stakeholders in the plastics industry and Italy’s IUAV University of Venice, the aim of the initiative is to promote design and sustainability in industrial manufacturing with a focus on injection moulding, with an awards ceremony held at the university at the end of last year.

And the Pleiades goes to…

“Donut-ella” by Caterina Gasparini, Matteo Bazzacco, and Paolo Levorato from the IUAV Vicenza campus. Selected from 38 student submissions, the winning design is a compact, three-part cable winder resembling a doughnut that pairs functionality with everyday practicality to prevent cable clutter, but also “to consciously evoke joy”.

As the winner, the donut-ella is set to be manufactured industrially, with a mould made by Uniform, hot runner systems from Ewikon, and PA 6 material supplied by CGT – all baked together by German injection-moulding machine maker Arburg. 

The first batch of the plastic pastries are set to come out of the oven live at the upcoming Arburg Technology Days on 11-13 March in Loßburg, Germany – so, save room for dessert!