Plastic? Yes Please

To learn more about the state of the art of this research in the furniture sector, we turned to Anna Pellizzari, executive director of Material ConneXion Italia: “The furniture sector is not yet an area in which recycled or biobased plastics are extensively used. Of the one million tons of pre- and post-consumer recycled plastic, only 9% goes into furniture.

There are difficulties on a production level, but the main problem, especially in Italy, is that the market is accustomed to innovation that mainly concerns style. Companies prefer to invest on the sustainability of processes, which objectively have more impact than products, if we are talking about durable goods. Nevertheless,” Pellizzari continues, “progress has been made in the use of recycled and biobased plastic in terms of processes of chemical recycling – those that take the material back to a monomer state – which at the moment are more costly and not very efficient in terms of energy use, but in any case are quite interesting.

And in the use of new compounds, like the WPC used for the Odger chair by IKEA, which are usually extruded to make planks or molded to make small objects. Today recycled or partially biobased materials are available that do not differ, in terms of looks, from their standard counterparts.”

In 2005 Sawaya & Moroni was one of the first brands to experiment, in collaboration with Corepla, with recycled PET for a seat made with a single injection mold, which also came in a version in recyclable transparent polycarbonate. The choice of using a single material facilitates post-production recycling.

The Dutch company Ecopixel makes it into an aesthetic feature, producing furnishings made with ‘confetti’ of post-consumer polypropylene of low density, which is 100% recyclable. An ecological version has also been developed for the famous Flow model by MDF Italia, made with a shell in biobased material laden with natural fibers that determine a different coloring: pale if beech fiber is used, dark in the case of coconut fiber.

A polypropylene 90% derived from industrial scrap, on the other hand, is used to produce the Alfi seat designed by Jasper Morrison for Emeco, which already in 2012 was making a chair created by Philippe Starck in PET from recycled plastic bottles.

The experience of Kartell, known for its aesthetic research on plastic, is significant, leading to the decision to produce a chair in Biodura, a material made from renewable botanical sources. “The creativity of our brand,” says Claudio Luti, president of Kartell, “has a thousand facets: transparency is one of the best known, but we have always invested in technological innovation to find creative solutions and different materials.

Through the use of renewable raw materials not involved in the production of foodstuffs we have approached the challenge of ecosustainability, becoming the first company to experiment with this type of material in the furnishings sector, specifically for injection molding and other kinds of molding. Our objective,” he continues, “is to make the possibility of sustainable furniture a concrete option in industrial terms.

The circular economy is a reality, and it is increasingly necessary to design products by thinking through their whole life cycle, creating a new approach of responsibility and care for the environment. In 2014 Kartell was granted Greenguard certification for its collections, a guarantee of a controlled, non-polluting and non-hazardous products.”

He concludes: “We will continue to work in this direction, trying to improve the performance of materials and their capacity to return to a second life after recycling.”