Studio Swine’s Sea Chair: Into The Gyre
Using solar ovens and a 3D printer, two designers turn ocean clogging plastic to furniture
After creating the award-winning Sea Chair (made from discarded plastic washed up on beaches), London-based design duo Studio Swine has decided to take their project to the next level. Not content with the attention they have already drawn to the disastrous reality of plastic ocean pollution, artist Alexander Groves and architect Azusa Murakami decided to take their project to the source of the Sea Chair project: the high seas.
Sea Chair was born out of the realization that plastic waste is choking the globe’s oceans—all of them. Since the 1997 discovery of the Great Pacific garbage patch (a clump of floating debris and trash trapped by the water’s current, estimated to be twice the size of Texas), more gyres have been found in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans. The Studio Swine team now has the opportunity to visit the North Atlantic gyre aboard the Sea Dragon, a research vessel populated by scientists and ecologists collecting information about plastic in the sea. And they want to make Sea Chairs on board. Not only will the collective effort continue to raise awareness, but they will take dumped plastic from the sea and make something useful with it. The duo has designed a solar-powered oven to “cook” the plastic and will produce the chairs using a 3D printer—all onboard the ship.
Donations of just £5 result in an illustrated manual explaining how to make your very own Sea Chair, while all other rewards are made with sea plastic that the design duo will be collecting during the trip from trawl nets, fishing boats and beach cleans. Visit the Sea Chair Kickstarter to find out more about the admirable project.
Images courtesy of Studio Swine
