Polyonyx was founded in 2020 by Maxwell Carr and Edward Linacre, two Australian designers brought together by a shared commitment to elevating waste through design. With complementary backgrounds in industrial design, craft, and material innovation, their collaboration is rooted in a desire to reframe how we see recycled plastics, not as discarded byproducts, but as materials of intrinsic beauty and enduring value.

Maxwell, a senior product designer at one of the world’s largest toy companies, brings high-level expertise in industrial design and product development. His journey with recycled plastics began in 2018 during his university thesis, where he developed a unique process of pressing plastic into solid blocks and slicing them to reveal striking marbled patterns. What started as hand-made wallets, balancing functionality, beauty, and sustainability, has grown into a full product range and a commitment to reimagining waste as a premium material.

Edward, an internationally awarded designer and artist, approaches the work with a sculptural and systems-thinking mindset. Drawing inspiration from nature, light, and geometry, his designs explore how human creativity connects to the structures of the natural world. Influenced by his grandfather’s early experiments with plastic recycling in the 1970s, Edward continues this legacy through a contemporary lens, bending, diffusing, and refracting light to reveal unseen dimensions.

Together, Maxwell and Edward treat recycled plastic as a craft medium, marbling, pressing, and shaping it with the care of a stonemason. Each piece is made with intention, transforming waste into luminous, one-of-a-kind surfaces that challenge the stigma of recycled materials.

At POLYONYX, we believe waste can be beautiful.