SUSTAINABILITY | DESIGN
progress. Currently, 60% of the materials IKEA uses are renewable and 10% are recycled... We already use a lot of renewable wood-based materials, and we’re increasing the amount of recycled materials such as recycled plastic in our products.” No matter what the sustainability vision is of a designer or design-led company, recycled plastics are not a simple drop-in solution to replace virgin plastics. Contamination is a major issue for recy- cled plastics in consumer products, as Pripp-Kovac indicated when talking about the Trollbo children’s lamp, which has a lampshade and other elements made from recycled PET bottles. “It’s a challenge to make recycled plastic translucent. Our product development team had to play around with different grades of PET bottles to achieve this, but they succeeded in the end and the result is great,” she said. It’s also difficult to source clean recycled materials in enough quantity, she said. Performance questions around recycled plastics informed furniture group Muuto in its reworking of the Fiber range of chairs originally launched in 2014. The shell seat is a wood-plastic composite and in its new iteration the plastic material includes recyclate. “It might sound like a modest challenge, yet
reproducing the same strength and durability as the forerunner was a result of diving into the wildly complex world of mechanics and material proper- ties,” says Trine Mulvad Steffensen, CSR Manager at Muuto, on the company’s website. “After two years of intense research and devel- opment here we are – we have proved our initial hypothesis to be possible.” The Fiber armchair and side chair use a minimum of 80% recycled plastic. Muuto says it opted not to go for 100% recycled content because of concerns about lower strength. “To us it is a reasonable trade-off — creating a highly durable chair that will last for years to come, still using at least 80% recycled plastic. We believe that this will impact the environment less than creating a more frail chair with a shorter lifespan made in 100% recycled plastic,” it says. Leading furniture design group Vitra
diverges from other companies and has not set itself recycled material targets. Instead, its approach to sustainability is to develop products that last as long as possible and it backs this up with long product warranties. Nora Fehlbaum, Vitra CEO, says: “Vitra’s greatest contribution to sustainability is the creation of products that omit non-essential elements and last a long time. Our roots in modern design would allow nothing else.” This approach to quality design and longevity can
www.injectionworld.com
be seen in Vitra’s Evo-C chair designed by Jasper Morrison in 2020. Evo-C is a cantilevered chair manufactured entirely from PP that is made possible through gas injection moulding technology. “There were many complexities,” says Morrison, discussing the chair on his website. “The main struggles were the thickness of the legs, the length of the foot (to avoid tipping) and the detailing of how and where to end the gas-moulded tubular parts.” He continues: “There were many more struggles on the engineering side, and stress simulations which had the computers running for weeks to estimate whether the design was strong enough and if not then where it needed strengthening. Then there were test moulds of the legs to check them in reality, with snaking lengths of tube to simu- late the flow of the gas through a certain length without building an expensive larger mould. Eventually when everything seemed to be working well enough they started cutting the mould which is a monster of moving parts and channels for the gas to get in. The achievement is nine parts engineering to one part design. I think the final result has a Zelig-like ability to fit in to different kinds of spaces.” In order to design a suc- cessful cantilevered chair Morrison decided to avoid recycled plastics. He says on the Vitra website: “For the moment the chair would not be strong enough to be made
with post-consumer plastic, but no doubt the time will come when it could be. For now it’s important to keep in mind that a well made and designed plastic chair has a useful life of 20-30 years and can be recycled after that.” Evo-C is a significant chair in design, engineering and manufacturing terms. Vitra’s iconic cantilevered Panton chair from 1965 was the point of departure
March 2022 | INJECTION WORLD 17
Above: The seat shell of Muuto’s Fiber range of chairs uses wood-plastic composite and in its new version the plastic material includes 80% recyclate
Left: The Vitra Evo-C chair during
development
IMAGE: JASPER MORRISON
STUDIO / VITRA
IMAGE: MUUTO
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