Print Your City! Designs Chair From 100 Pounds of Plastic Waste

Architects Panos Sakkas and Foteini Setaki, founders of 2-year-old Dutch studio the New Raw, set out to tackle a mounting problem: the proliferation of plastic detritus, of which only 9 percent is currently recycled. “Plastic has a major design flaw,” Sakkas states. “It’s only used for a short time, but lasts forever.”

The pair collaborated with Aectual, a maker of sustainable building products, to develop ways to process discarded bags and bottles into raw material suitable for 3-D printing into furniture. The Print Your City! initiative’s civic-minded debut, XXX, a double-sided rocking chair for public spaces, utilizes 100 pounds of plastic waste, the amount generated annually by two Amsterdam dwellers. Units were produced via a large-scale pellet-extrusion 3-D printer, a method that allows for endless customization. The two-seaters are also fully recyclable: The plastic can be shredded and re-printed up to seven times. In this way, XXX is not just a chair, “but a way to close material cycles and strengthen local production,” Setaki adds. X marks the spot.