When Life Gives You Oceanic Garbage Patches
Learn to extrude recycled plastic furniture
Contemplating the state of our oceans—filled as they are with chemicals, garbage, and especially plastics—is a depressing exercise.
The scope, causes and consequences are so vast that many simply don’t know how to begin approaching the issue, which is why British design duo Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves hope to provide a place to sit and think about the problem, literally.
Their Sea Chair project repurposes the plastic refuse gathered from polluted beaches and waters, melting it down to create simple (but surprisingly fetching) three-legged stools. The idea was inspired by a tradition among some fishermen who kept their woodworking skills sharp at sea by crafting sturdy chairs out of driftwood. But there is a lot more plastic polluting the oceans than wood. In fact, nearly 90 percent of the hundreds of millions of tons pollution in the ocean is plastic.
The designers don’t see transforming the stuff into stools as any kind of long-term solution to the problem, but they hope it’ll serve as a platform for discussing it.
“Each chair does represent that plastic out of the ocean, but that’s not the answer,” says Groves. “The answer is definitely changing our culture around it going [into the oceans] in the first place … so we started very locally and just wanted to see it for ourselves, because you can’t get your head around 100 million tons, it’s just too vast.”
Whether the ubiquitous bottle caps and bags, raw plastic nurdles, or the impossible-to-collect gelatinized goo that may represent the bulk of the stuff, the health of the oceans are in a state of emergency and at a scale few appreciate. Many have heard of the great Pacific Garbage Patch, caught in a nation-sized cyclical flow called a gyre. But there are actually five such gyres in the world, all of which are sucking up our commercial and industrial waste.
In the face of addressing a topic of that scale, Groves and Murakami—known together as Studio Swine—decided to start local. For the Sea Chair’s first phase, they traveled with fishermen along the Cornwall coast gathering debris from the water and sand. They then heated the bricolage of plastic in various home-made furnaces before pouring the molten sludge into presses and molds to create the chair components.
The chairs they’ve made so far, hand assembled with brass screws, carry a definite aesthetic charm. Each is made from mostly color-sorted plastic, and tagged with a unit number and the location where the plastic was sourced.
Now they’re crowdfunding the next phase. They plan to hitch a ride on the sailing vessel Sea Dragon to collect plastic debris from the North Atlantic gyre, and the shores of the Azores and Canaries. They’ll also be bringing along a new device: a solar-powered, hand-operated 3D printer that can melt down and mold the plastic debris into a new batch of sit pieces.
“The idea is that plastic is in every part of the world, every part of the ocean, totally off the grid places,” says Groves, “and we’re interested in what you can do with it when you’re not near a recycling facility.”
Using a gyro-stabilized parabolic metal reflector to heat an extrusion screw, the DIY 3D printer guides the melted plastic onto a printing bed that can be moved in three dimensions. All operating within a glass heat trap, the printer is easily able to reach with sunlight alone the roughly 200°C required to get the plastic flotsam to flow.
The team will be manufacturing stools and other rewards for backers as part of their outing. They’re also bringing along a filmmaker to document the expedition, and hope to create a traveling exhibition out of the work if funding permits. As part of trying to extend the reach of the message, schematics for making the chair and a rudimentary furnace are also being offered as an open source project to anybody interested in taking part themselves. Ultimately the goal is less about removing a significant mass of plastic or creating a bunch of chairs as it is about encouraging thoughtfulness and a reduction of the waste that inevitably starts on land. “It’s going to be so costly collecting plastics at sea, that the best thing is always to stop the cycle of them going into the ocean.”
By turning discarded plastic into useful objects, Sea Chair also engages the valuation of the uber-ubiquitous material. Part of the reason there’s so much of it in the oceans is that many people view it as essentially worthless and disposable. Would you pay for a plastic grocery bag? What will it cost to pull that worthless bag out of the middle of the ocean after you’ve thrown it out? Now that this discarded material has had extra labor applied to it and been made into something useful, the material itself is given a new context to show its potential value.
Hopefully, we can all start seeing the potential—good or bad—in the materials we use mindlessly on a daily basis. That’s as critical to solving this problem as any collection or recycling effort could hope to be.
“Plastics are too cheap as a resource,” Groves says. “If you calculated in some of the cost of the problem they’re causing, then it would change the economy around [them]. We’ve got to change that culture as well.”
All images courtesy of Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves
