From FT Weekend for The Art of Travel September/October 2020
Thousands of tonnes of marine pollution is retrieved, repurposed and returned to our homes
Louis Wustemann in FT Weekend JULY 17 2020
Marine plastic: there are hundreds of thousands of tonnes of it, swirling in gyres in the great oceans, washing up on beaches, sticking in the throats of sea animals. And, figuratively, in our own, since people such as David Attenborough drew attention to the scale of the problem.
We pollute the seas with plastic by many routes. The single-use bottles and bags that litter our streets blow into rivers and into the ocean; fibres float off our synthetic clothes every time we wash them; waste is dumped illegally offshore.
In May, researchers from Manchester University reported finding up to 1.9m tiny plastic fragments per square metre on the Mediterranean seabed off Italy.
Now this material can end up back in your home, as designers are turning reclaimed ocean waste into contemporary furniture.
Once plastic waste leaves the land, it is a struggle to recover, let alone recycle, the small scraps of different polymers. “It’s incredibly hard to collect at sea,” says Alexander Groves. He should know: he has made furniture from plastic landed in fishing nets off England’s south coast.
As one half of design duo Studio Swine with Azusa Murakami, Groves became aware of the problem of ocean plastic pollution eight years ago while the pair were students at London’s Royal College of Art.
What started as a degree project morphed into a performance piece, filmed in 2012. The three-minute film shows Murakami and Groves on the deck of a lugger boat from the small fishing fleet at Hastings in East Sussex, picking plastic waste from among the flatfish caught in the boat’s nets, reducing it to a tarry sludge in a portable furnace, casting the legs and seat of a simple three-legged stool, then bolting them together. All while at sea.
Nine years on, the Sea Chair is still in occasional production, says Groves, though now made on land from plastic waste gathered on beaches. “There’s quite a waiting list. I make them between other projects,” he says.
A second project (and film), Gyrecraft, saw Studio Swine use a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to fund berths on the research vessel Sea Dragon and sail from the Azores to the Canary Islands through the “north Atlantic garbage patch” in which millions of plastic fragments circulate in the vortex currents.
This time they formed the plastic they recovered into a sculpture shaped like a whale’s tooth in homage to the scrimshaw — elaborately carved teeth and bones — fashioned by sailors on long whaling expeditions.
Tiny plastic fragments trawled from the sea by Studio Swine
Studio Swine’s scrimshaw sculpture made of ocean waste
Groves recognises that the amount of waste they scooped from the Pacific gyre is tiny, and even the 50 kilos of ocean plastic in the 10 Sea Chair stools made to date make a negligible dent in the thousands of tonnes of waste in the seas.
But the stools mostly go to museums for environmental exhibits and the Sea Chair film has been viewed 2.5m times online. That was the point of the exercise, he says: “We wanted to bring people’s attention to the problem; it’s mass communication rather than mass production.”
Others are looking to larger volume production. Danish furniture manufacturer Mater recently reissued the Ocean garden chair and table by acclaimed mid-century Danish designers Nanna and Joergen Ditzel using recycled plastic from fishing nets.
Ocean is a 1955 design, originally made from plywood and steel. Dennie Ditzel, who manages her mother and father’s design archive, licensed Ocean to Mater in 2018. “They were born for it,” she says of the chair and table’s stripped-back, Bauhaus-influenced designs.
The timber slats that formed the table top, chair back and seat are not only easily reproduced in plastic, but the recycled polymer is also more resilient against the elements outdoors. Apart from the materials, the originals were faithfully reproduced, though 5 per cent larger to accommodate expanded 21st-century waistlines. “Most things from the 1950s you have to remake bigger,” says Ditzel.
Nanna and Jørgen Ditzel with their wooden designs, 1955
Mater Design’s plastic-waste chair based on the Ditzels’ wooden model
Just under a kilo of waste plastic is used in each chair and a little more in the table tops. It comes from used fishing nets and ropes that might otherwise have been dumped at sea, becoming so-called ghost gear.
The nets are recycled by Plastix, a company in North Denmark, which buys the maritime waste and turns it into pellets that can be substituted for virgin plastic in consumer products.
Another Plastix customer making garden furniture is ScanCom International, which uses the pellets for a chair and table set in its Lifestyle Garden range. The DuraOcean chair’s one-piece tub base is moulded in recovered plastic and sits on FSC-certified eucalyptus wood legs. ScanCom says that for each of the chairs sold it will donate $5 to ocean clean-up charities.
The chair featured in an exhibition last year at the Eden Project eco-centre in Cornwall, which demonstrated the scale of the problem by recreating a beach in Cyprus where more than 3,000kg of plastic waste washed ashore in one year.
ScanCom International’s DuraOcean chair, made of ocean-waste pellets
House & Home Unlocked
Plastix’s logic in concentrating on used fishing nets and ropes is that targeting volumes of plastic waste before it reaches the ocean is better than having to fish it back out of the sea when it may already have harmed sea life.
David Stover came to the same conclusion eight years ago when his start-up Bureo was looking for a way to reuse ocean plastics. “Naively, we envisioned this ability to go down and gather trash that was washing up all over the world and melt that into products,” says Stover, who left a financial consulting job at Ernst & Young to co-found the company of which he is CEO.
But as Studio Swine had found, beach plastic is made up of hundreds of different polymers, most of which cannot be combined for reuse. Bureo needed a large stream of a single plastic type.
How can we survive without plastic?
“We stumbled across fishing nets,” he says. Thousands of tonnes of nets end up in the sea, making up as much as 10 per cent of all ocean plastic, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
“Some are dumped or cut loose when they have tangled or snagged, or at best they make it to landfill or are dumped on beaches,” he says. Others are clumped together and anchored to the ocean floor as “fish aggregating devices”, artificial islands that attract species such as marlin and tuna.
Most nets are made of the same polymer: nylon, which is easily recyclable and highly durable. Bureo works in Chile, Argentina and Peru, where it has developed relationships with boat owners in more than 50 fisheries, who know that if they pass their old nets on to the company they will be paid per kilo and that Bureo will make a contribution to local education and recycling projects.
Pellets made from old nylon fishing nets used for recycling © Alfred Jurgen Westermeyer
“If every fisherman knows there is an incentivised system to place their waste at the end of life, you are certainly going to see a reduction in the amount of material out there,” says Stover.
Having gathered the nets — ranging in weight from a few kilos to three tonnes — Bureo’s centres clean them and shred them, then pass them on to a third-party recycler to turn into nylon pellets, which are then sold to manufacturers.
Over the past seven years, some 400 tonnes of Bureo’s pelleted nets have made it into products including skateboards, sunglasses and caps for the
Patagonia clothing brand.
Most recently, they have been used by office furniture manufacturer Humanscale for the frame of its Smart Ocean Chair (the imaginative design of products made from marine plastic is not mirrored in their names).
Humanscale’s Smart Ocean Chair
The chair has the ergonomic virtues of the best office seating but its slim lines and optional aluminium trim give it a less corporate look than many, making it a strong candidate for the growing numbers of people looking to improve the furniture in their home workspace as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Like the Mater and DuraOcean garden sets, the Humanscale chairs are easily taken apart and recycled at the end of their lives.
By their contribution to curbing single-use plastics and to a circular economy, in which one person’s waste is another’s raw material, these products are not going to solve the problem of the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of indestructible marine plastic already circulating in global waters, and the millions more in the sediment below. But they show how we can stop that volume increasing.
“There is a long way to go,” says Groves, “but at least it is on the agenda.”
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