SUSTAINABILITY | DESIGN
Recycled plastics are starting to be used in furniture, but designers face technical challenges and need to work out how to deal with them. David Eldridge explores the world of plastic chair design
Chair designers learn all about recycled plastics
The humble chair fascinates designers. At some point in their career, furniture designers, product designers and even architects want to create their personal variation on the seat-plus-legs template. With its simple form and functionality, a chair presents the challenge of how to design something different, desirable and destined for classic status. In the 1950s, chair designers seized the opportunity given by a new, highly adaptable material to create chairs with a more moulded shape than was possible with wood and other materials. Plastics enabled Charles and Ray Eames in 1950 to make the DAR armchair with a fibreglass shell seat and metal supporting frame- work. Then plastics materials became a major focus in new chairs from designers: Robin Day even called his 1963 combination of plastic seat and metal legs the Polyprop chair. The PP seat in Day’s chair was injection moulded, enabling mass production and widespread utilisation in British schools. Furniture designers have come to know a lot about plastics, their properties and their potential for achieving an aesthetic vision. They have often worked closely with materials companies and manufacturers in the development of a new chair. A good example is Konstantin Grcic who collabo- rated with BASF on the MYTO cantilever chair, injection moulded in Ultradur High Speed. “The design was significantly influenced by the material,” says Grcic. “Chemically speaking, this
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material belongs to the family of polybutylene terephthalate (PBT). Its high flowability, coupled with the strength of this plastic, allows an elegant transition from thick to thin cross sections.” MYTO was presented for the first time on BASF’s stand at K 2007. It rapidly became a classic, and in May 2008 was selected into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
But since plastics have been caught in the glare of negative publicity about
ocean waste, designers have turned their attention to the sustainability of the materials they use. From this, furniture companies and their designers have decided to relaunch some plastics chairs to include recycled material. Outdoor furniture company Loll Designs has updated the wooden Rapid Rocker designed in 1939 by architect Ralph Rapson to use HDPE recycled from milk bottles. Norway-based Flokk has issued a limited edition of the HÅG Capisco Puls office chair, designed in 1984 by Peter Opsvik, using PP recycled from snow plough markers. Some designers are also specifying recycled plastics when developing new chairs, such as the N02 Recycle, designed by Oki Sato of Nendo for Danish furntiure company Fritz Hansen, which uses post-consumer plastics. The trend to include recycled content in injection moulded chair components was shown last year in
Main images: Vitra’s Evo-C chairs,
designed by Jasper
Morrison, are manufactured using gas injection moulding technology
March 2022 | INJECTION WORLD 13
IMAGE: JASPER MORRISON
STUDIO / VITRA
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