In 2008, designer Thomas Thwaites decided to build a toaster from scratch-and not the “from scratch” that would land him in Home Depot for a couple of hours. He was interested in the seemingly magical process that turns what we pull out of the earth into the stuff that litters our houses. So Thwaites decided to take on the toaster, and what followed was an adventure that illuminated just how far removed our everyday items are from the raw materials that go into them. More