German designer Carolin Pertsch has used bundles of seagrass to create an eco-materials that kinds the seats for a assortment of stools.
Pertsch harvested Zostera Marina seagrass from the German coast, the place thousands of tonnes of it are washed up every single yr.
According to the designer, the aquatic plant – also recognized as eelgrass and seawrack – often ends up as unique waste in landfills in order to sustain clean seashores for visitors.
“With regards to our resource-wasting society, there has to be a fundamental rethinking,” explained the designer. “I determined to challenge myself to see if there was a way to use the eelgrass as a materials.”
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Pertsch mixed shreds of the grass with a bio-resin created from vegetable oil, generating a reinforced eco-plastic that she then moulded into stool seats.
“A massive challenge was to discover the right bio-based matrix in which the cleaned eelgrass could be bedded,” she told Dezeen. “Just before using the eelgrass it need to be cleaned, and algae or little shells rejected.
“Almost everything started out in the kitchen in our co-doing work space,” she added. “Instead of cooking lunch, I place with each other organic components, like starch, water and vinegar, for producing my very own bioplastic, which I could use as a variety of glue.”
Pertsch has made 3 four-legged stools for the assortment, every single of which characteristics a subtly distinct shade of material – produced by sorting the grass into various shades.
The embedded strands of eelgrass are exposed in the stools’ seats which, in accordance to Pertsch, truly feel comparable to cork.
“Beside creating a new eco-materials, an additional aim of these experimentations was to open people’s eyes to believe in new alternative methods for potential resources,” she stated.
“There is no much better way to confront men and women with a new material than in furnishings. Furniture usually demands an interaction in between human and object. With its minimalism it focusses on the new eco-materials.”
“I chose a stool as an instance to display the stability of the fibre reinforced eco-plastic,” she added. “The one-centimetre-thick seat is steady sufficient to sit on.”
Seagrass also featured in a variety of furniture developed by London designer Ilse Crawford for Ikea.
Swedish studio Glimpt had a a lot more colourful take on the grass, wrapping rolls of it in the thread that is usually utilized to make hammocks to develop a assortment of stools.
Other experiments with furniture made from all-natural resources incorporate Henry&Co’s stool created of bound hay and grass, and Jonas Edvard and Nikolaj Steenfatt’s seaweed and paper chair.
