Snøhetta’s new chair is made from ocean plastic

Sustainability used to be a tradeoff—do you want something eco-friendly or do you want something that looks good? That’s changed recently, with a slew of high-design products, buildings, and installations that show how cool sustainability can look.

International architecture and design studio Snøhetta bolsters the cause with the S-1500 chair, a simple plastic chair that’s a thing of beauty.

Photo: Bjørnar Øvrebø/Snøhetta via Fast Company

A couple years ago the furniture company Nordic Comfort Products tapped Snøhetta to reproduce a version of its R-48 chair, a basic design used in schools and businesses. Snøhetta had been experimenting with designing objects from recycled plastic and wanted to see if they could design the new chair using recycled material harvested from their direct surroundings in Norway. The resulting chair is manufactured from plastic gathered in just a 12-mile radius, most of it in the form of used fishing nets in colors like green, blue ,and yellow.

As it turns out, the fishing nets produce some beautiful upcycled plastic. After the nets are ground down to pellets, the plastic is injected into a mold. The marbling effect, as Fast Company notes, is the product of feeding the pellets into the mold in a specific sequence. Absolutely no dye is added.

The S-1500 will go on sale later this year.

Via: Fast Company