open source ‘sea chair by studio swineall images courtesy studio swine the ‘sea chair’ by london / são paulo – based studio swine is a seating design made entirely from plastic recovered from our oceans.since the discovery of the pacific garbage patch in 1997, which is predicted to measure twice the size of texas, five more have been found across the world’s oceans with the atlantic gyre predicted to be even larger. the plastic from these plots takes thousands of years to degrade, broken up into ever smaller pieces by ocean currents and remaining in the environment. the gyre stretches from the coastlines of california to the shores of japan. recent studies have estimated 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometer of the world’s oceans. the number of plastic pieces in the pacific ocean has tripled in the last ten years and the size of the accumulation is set to double in the next ten. the ‘sea chair’ – first presented at the royal college of art show in 2011 with kieren jones – repurposes this waste through an open source method of making, where the creators built devices to collect and process marine debris into a series of stools.
the design has now been developed to the point where the seats can be fabricated on board the vessels from which the waste has been collected using a specially devised manual so that others can build the pieces themselves. the manual can be downloaded here. the material plucked from the water’s ‘debris soup’ is organised according to colour, fragmented and then melted in a makeshift furnace at 130°C. the mixture is then compressed between two flat slabs of heavy metal or stone to form the various elements and then left to cool and solidify by the sea water. the seat and three legs are tidied and assembled together to create the final design. since the discovery of the pacific garbage patch in 1997, which is predicted to measure twice the size of texas, five more have been found the plastic from these plots takes thousands of years to degrade, broken up into ever smaller pieces by ocean currents and remaining in the environment the ‘sea chair’ re-purposes this waste through an open source method of making