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Keep Life is born of an intuition from the designer Pietro Petrillo. In the South of Italy during Christmas holidays Italians consume a lot of dried fruit. Pietro noted how shells, devoid of their own fruit, were composing a harmonious and irregular mantle, characterized by different shades of colors and sizes… Starting from these observations, Pietro began to experiment with shells and in early 2017 Keep Life brand was born, with its patent for industrial invention. At the beginning of 2018 designer Ilaria Spagnuolo joined the project.

Keep Life is a composite material with a wooden nature, malleable and self-hardening, generated using the shells of hazelnuts, chestnuts, walnuts, almonds, pistachios and peanuts, with the addition of a binder free of harmful substances, fillers and fillers, solvents and formaldehyde. (part of the patent).
Each shell has two common peculiarities: on one hand the wooden/mechanical one, which gives strength, hardness, rigidity and density to the shell. On the other hand the seasoning. This occurs in two moments: during the fruits ripening and after its collection.
The process starts with a selection of the shells: they are divided for strength and color through a first granulometric analysis, performed by sieving. Once the desired combination has been reached, there’s the mixing phase, entirely handmade, which takes place using the waste and the binder.
The procedure continues with the drying of the material with consequent self-hardening inside molds, custom designed and made by 3D molding with natural filaments. These are then subjected to compression through the use of a hydraulic press. The entire drying process lasts from 20 to 30 days and is carried out in a completely natural way. The last stage of processing involves the use of traditional carpentry equipment with the use of CNC technology.

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The result has three different shades of color, from the lightest to the darkest, and three different types of sanding. We go from a surface that highlights the material aspect, to a semi-material, up to one smooth and compact surface, non-porous, free of visible joints, which meets the highest standards from an aesthetic, constructive, functional and hygienic point of view.

Keep Life (which means keeping alive) finds its natural place in the field of furniture and construction, becoming part of
of those categories of eco-sustainable, innovative and bio-inspired materials. With the use of this material we create products that range from the micro scale, such as lamps, supporting furniture (seats and tables), container furniture (sideboards, wardrobes, bookcases equipped walls, etc.), to the macro, such as the realization of coatings and technical partition walls.

The purpose of Keep Life is to create a valid alternative to wood, so as not to have a decrease in global greenery, but on the contrary, an increase and an encouragement to make it grow. In the green vision of the brand, there is the intention to make a real contribution to the increase of the common green area, by reforesting public areas with useful trees
to the cause of the material, interacting with the relevant bodies. This action aims to make Nature and the community complicit, making the latter aware of the direct knowledge of the environment and the wealth present in the Italian territory.

It is not about recycling, nor about reuse, Keep Life is continuity, it represents a process that tries to generate a concrete alternative of matter, transforming itself into a new wrapping and thus becoming an extension of the fruit tree inside a domestic or urban space.

Per saperne di più visitate il sito di Keep Life o seguite il brand su Instagram!

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