You may have heard about the huge floating islands of garbage swirling around in the middle of the Earth's oceans. Much of that waterlogged rubbish is made up of plastic and, like Electrolux with its concept vacuum cleaners, U.K.-based Studio Swine and Kieren Jones are looking to put that waste to good use. As part of an ambitious project, they’ve come up with a system to collect plastic debris and convert it into furniture.
The Sea Chair project hopes to create a win-win for the marine ecosystem and a fishing industry in crisis. Rather than collecting plastic that washes ashore or is snagged as by-catch in fishing nets, the team hopes to one day go where the trash is, collect and convert it to something useful while still at sea. Sea Chair envisions adapting fishing boats into floating chair factories that trawl for plastic and put it into production on-board.
Taking the notion of retro-fitting entire industries in its own image to an even more radical level, they also describe a future in which dormant oil rigs in the middle of the oceans are put to use for harvesting reserves of plastic trash that will eventually sink to the bottom of the sea.
While many of the Sea Chair project's grand ambitions for the fishing and petroleum industries still remain far off, it has managed some more humble innovations to collect and convert waste plastic into furniture.
The team created a contraption it dubbed the "Nurdler" to sort through tons of beached marine debris in search of pieces of micro-plastic called nurdles. Nurdles are pellet-like pieces of plastic about 4 mm (0.15 in) in diameter that wash into the sea from industrial facilities. According to the Sea Chair website, nurdles have not yet been injection-molded, making them ideal for production. The Nurdler is a bit like the Sea Chair project's equivalent of panning for gold.
The team also created a combination furnace and hydraulic press which can fit on a small fishing vessel to create chairs from collected nurdles and other plastics while still at sea – or wherever. The press can also be used to compress collected seaweed by-catch into briquettes that can then be burned to fuel the furnace for chair production.
The result of all this so far has been a pretty simple three-legged stool made up entirely of melted-down and re-purposed sea plastic. Each chair created is tagged with the geographical coordinates of the location where the plastic it is made of was collected.
The first sea chairs popped up at the Furniture Fair in Milan earlier this year, but no information on future availability or pricing have been made public just yet.
Source: Studio Swine
ghpacific, why dont you do it? it seems simple enough:)
This process could be used for many things, ecofriendly and affordable!
The bread crumb trail for this trash issue led to the discovery by Capt Charles Moore ( link : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7K-nq0xkWY ) that trash from the USA gets caught in the Pacific gyre and winds up on our shores here in the Philippines, not to mention out own trash.
The Filipinos are inventive and creative people, in The Green Arks Project page you may have already seen the green plastic bottle boat built here by some inventive mind and hands, this is the tip of the "trash-berg"…The Plastiki (http://www.gizmag.com/plastiki-plastic-sailboat-voyage/15643/) sailed 8000 miles on 12000 recycled plastic bottles that made up the hulls of this ocean going "green" catamaran. When these elements all came together, The Green Arks Project was born.
To read this article gives us great hope that there are like minded Projects that could combine and join forces, the more the better, for we all have a lot to do, as fast as possible. I hope you have a chance to peruse the page of ideas, and I look forward to hear from you about how we might get in touch with this company you shared about so we can see about joining forces on this really malevolent issue of trash and plastic. Many thanks in advance for your reply. Great Gizmag, GREAT. Thank you.
Mr. E..vans, I have explored building some products, such as retaining wall blocks with plastics and contacted some who are building benches and railroad ties, but the costs of setting up are incredibly high. Simple needs to be spelled $imple in this case. Unfortunately.