From studio waste to system change

How MFA student Kendall Traylor turned discarded ceramics into a sustainable studio practice

At Grant Street Studios in downtown Phoenix, Kendall Traylor’s sculptures are speckled with color: terrazzo-like surfaces made from crushed remnants of past projects, test tiles and broken ceramics. What looks decorative at first glance is anything but accidental. Each fragment carries a history.

“People don’t realize how much ceramic waste is produced,” Kendall says. “Especially in a university setting.”

A third-year MFA student in ceramics at the School of Art, which is part of Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Kendall splits time between teaching on the Tempe campus as a graduate teaching assistant and working in her studio downtown. Originally from Southern California, she completed her undergraduate degree at Cal State Long Beach in ceramics, with a minor in biomedical illustration, a background that still shapes her work today.

“I use drawing a lot for pre-planning sculptures and mapping out ideas,” she explains. “I make large-scale ceramic sculptures, so drawing really helps me understand spatial placement.”

A scrappy beginning

Kendall describes herself as “scrappy,” a mindset that took shape long before graduate school. “Even when I was a kid, I’d come home from ballet practice and be outside playing in the dirt and picking up bugs,” she says. “I’ve never really been a super girly-girl.”

That instinct carried into her early ceramics practice. Clay is expensive and Kendall wanted to make large work. At Long Beach, she noticed massive dumpsters filled with discarded clay and ceramics. “Hundreds, thousands of pounds,” she recalls. “That’s where it started. I liked manual labor, I liked being connected to the material and I thought, ‘I’ll just make clay from this trash.’”

What began as a financial solution quickly became something deeper. “Clay is already so bodily,” Kendall says. “A vase has a lip, a shoulder, a foot. When you’re working with something soft and malleable, you can’t help but be connected to it.”

Seeing the system

When Kendall arrived at ASU, she expected a similar recycling system. Instead, she found a gap. “If the studio tech doesn’t have the ability to recycle clay, it just gets thrown away in the normal trash,” she says. “That didn’t sit right with me.”

While unfired clay is biodegradable, fired ceramic is not. “Fired ceramic will be in a landfill for thousands of years,” Kendall explains. “It doesn’t break down.” Add to that the carbon footprint of producing and shipping clay, often from Southern California to Arizona, and the issue became impossible to ignore.

“I realized this wasn’t just an art problem,” she says. “It was a sustainability problem.”

Building solutions by hand

Kendall began experimenting with ways to reclaim fired ceramic, turning it into grog: crushed material added to clay for strength, especially important for her furniture-scale sculptures. Early grants allowed her to purchase basic tools and a manual rock crusher.

“I even bought old toilets from an ASU surplus auction,” she says. “I smashed them up with sledgehammers and crushed them down.”

The process worked, but it was grueling. “It took a huge toll on my body,” Kendall says. “I was doing hours and hours of manual labor just to keep up.”

Crunching the numbers

To understand the scale of the issue, Kendall turned to data. In a clay research course, students produced dozens of test tiles each. “Each tile weighs about the same as a pack of gum,” she explains. “If you do the math, one class can produce 500 to 1,000 pounds of ceramic waste in a single semester.”

That calculation became the foundation of her Change the World proposal.

“I wanted to show how much waste was actually being produced,” she says. “And how we could realistically deal with it.”

Change the World

Through ASU’s Change the World competition, Kendall proposed purchasing an electric rock crusher, a 220-volt machine capable of processing fired ceramics safely and efficiently.

“The electric crusher changed everything,” she says. “Not just faster — like, 100 times faster.”

More importantly, it transformed her individual workaround into shared infrastructure. Students began saving their test tiles intentionally. Entire classes came to Grant Street Studios to crush materials together. Faculty incorporated the process into coursework.

“One student showed me a bowl she made and said, ‘Look at all the toilet chunks in here,’” Kendall laughs. “That full-circle moment made everything worth it.”

A system that lasts

What began as one student’s response to waste has grown into a communal studio practice, one that will outlast Kendall’s time at ASU.

“For me, it’s about care and lineage,” she says. “I make a point to credit where materials come from, whose test tiles they were, whose work broke. These materials belonged to someone.”

With her graduation show approaching this spring, Kendall hopes to continue teaching and working in community spaces, including special education programs. But wherever she goes, the mindset and the system will travel with her.

“Change the World didn’t just help me,” she says. “It made it possible for sustainability to be shared.”

See Kendall’s exhibition

Kendall Traylor’s MFA exhibition opens Friday, March 20, 2026 from 5 to 9 p.m. at Grant Street Studios in downtown Phoenix. The exhibition runs through Friday, March 27.

Present your idea at Change the World

If you have an idea that could make a difference, we invite you to apply to the Change the World showcase. On March 18, 2026, Mountain America Stadium will come alive with art displays, idea pitches, live performances and innovative solutions created by ASU students just like you. 

This is your chance to share your vision, compete for prize money, and join a community of Sun Devils committed to global impact. Applications are open until February 27, 2026. Take the leap: submit your idea and join the movement to change the world.