Projects
Sea Chair
© STUDIO SWINE 2011
1.THE GYRE
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a vast mass of marine litter trapped in the swirling vortex of currents of the North Pacific Gyre. More of a ‘plastic soup’ than a tangible mass, the spread and density of which is growing at an alarming rate.
The plastic waste takes thousands of years to degrade, remaining in the environment to be broken up by UV light into ever smaller fragments until the plastic polymer chains become single molecules, forever irretrievable and infinitely more ubiquitous.
The concentration of this plastic soup continues to increase, recent studies estimating an average of 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre of the world’s oceans. The number of plastic pieces in the Pacific Ocean has tripled in the last ten years to what the UN estimates amounts to 100 million tons worldwide, current trajectories predict this figure to double in the next ten years.
2. FOOD CHAIN
Contrary to common expectations, the fact plastic breaks down has far more harmful consequences to the marine environment.
Plastic fragments act as sponges for harmful hydrophobic chemicals such as pesticides and fertilises, with concentrations of up to a million times greater than the surrounding seawater they form little toxic pills. The plastic resembles small sea creatures and enter the food chain leaching chemicals into fishes fats and raising the toxicity of marine life. Samples from the Pacific gyre have shown a ratios of 6 pounds of plastic to 1 pound of plankton.
3. THE SAMPLES
Exploring the stradline of Porthtowan beach, a small blustery cove on the southwest. Extremity of the British Isles one finds a great range of flotsam, jetsom, lagan and derelict. Porthtowan is a sink beach facing the vast North Atlantic beyond from which great swells bring in a daily tide of exotic rubbish, revealing the state of our marine environment.
Porthtowan beach is the UK’s most polluted beach for micro plastic the most prevalent of which are industrial plastic pellets, otherwise known as nurdles. The pellets are around 4mm in diameter, their small size means they aren’t picked up by waste systems and being buoyant they will float on the sea surface taking over a thousand years to biodegrade, all the while resembling fish eggs.
These Nurdles haven’t been injection molded yet, but rather have been lost through spillage in transit and poor storage at factories. More than 250 quadrillion nurdles will be made this year and The UN states 13,000 nurdles are floating in every square mile of the ocean, however the concentration of these varies greatly according to currents and weather conditions.
4. HISTORY
The connection between chairs and seamen originates with sailors requiring carpentry skills for repairing wooden ships at sea; upon retiring many would continue to make wooden furniture in Britain’s port towns. We envisage rather than fisherman making wooden furniture at sea they would collect and mould marine plastic into chairs.
During the early part of the century, Britain’s coastline was a flourish of industrial activity, and beaches like Porthtowan were not just trawled for fish but also mined for precious metals such as gold and tin.
5. THE NURDLER
Much like the early miners, we have taken inspiration from this rich heritage & produced a sluice-like contraption that has allowed us to sort vast quantities of marine debris quickly and efficiently.
The Nurdler consists of a hand powered water pump and a sluice that sorts the micro plastic from the stradline grading the particulates by size and using a floatation tank to separate materials by density, allowing us to separate the elusive plastic fragments to be recycled.
6. FLOATING FACTORIES
Britain’s fishing community is in decline with depleting fish stocks and industrial trawling miles offshore. With the E.U unveiling plans to pay fisherman for plastic by-catch, advances in the development of nets for collecting plastics and by collecting washed up plastic on shore we have designed a floating factory ship that recycles this marine waste into sea chairs. A ‘fishing for litter’ campaign involved fisherman from Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK who returned all litter caught in their net to the shore, landing some 500 tonnes from 60 boats in 2004. By diversifying modern fishermen’s skills to restore our ocean environment is an increasingly viable alternative to make sustainably sourced, hyper local sea-chairs that will help regenerate Britain’s once strong fishing community.
7. MACHINERY & TOOLS
All our machinery and collection tools are refurbished agricultural machinery sourced from salvage yards, re-envisaged and adapted for the purpose of harvesting plastic.
SEA PRESS
The Sea Press is a furnace and hydraulic press that fits on a small fishing vessel for the production of chairs and briquettes at sea.
8. OIL RIG 2050
Scientific research carried out in the Pacific gyre has led to predictions of up to 70% of the plastic in the ocean eventually sinking to the sea floor. Research trawls carried out off the South West coast of France, which is subject to high tourism found mixed plastics to make up over 90% of debris found on the sea floor, accumulating in canyons off the Continental shelf.
With the depletion of oil within the earth’s crust, oil rigs will one day become dormant. We envisage a time when they could be adapted to harvest rich reserves of plastic as a source of fuel and re-usable materials.
SEAWEED BRIQUETTES
After sorting the marine debris we are left with roughly a quarter of organic material such as seaweed and wood. This is compressed with our press into briquettes to burn as a bio fuel for melting the plastic.
The Sea Chair 001: Porthtowan
The stool has been made with simple moulds and tools that would enable production at sea, the chair is tagged recording to its geographical coordinates and production number.
The ‘Sea Chair’ is made entirely from plastic recovered from our oceans. Together, Studio Swine and Kieren Jones have created devices to collect and process marine debris into a series of stools.
The United Nation estimates the world’s oceans to contain some 100 million tons of plastic. As our society’s consumption grows, the concentration of plastic increases. Harvesting this plastic we have made the first Sea Chair which has been launched at Milan Furniture Fair 2012.
Porthtowan beach, Cornwall, UK. The origin of Sea Chair No. 001
