Hasta La Ideas

London designers Studio Swine built a mobile foundry and used it to cast aluminium stools from drinks cans they collected on the streets of São Paulo (+ movie).

Over 80 percent of the city’s recycling is collected informally on carts pulled by independent waste collectors known as catadores. Studio Swine wanted to create a system that would help them recycle the rubbish they collect into products they can sell.

The pair collected discarded cans from a street vendor and used cooking oil for fuel to smelt the aluminium on site, turning the street into an improvised manufacturing line. They made moulds by pressing objects they found locally into sand collected from construction sites in the area.

The resulting stools have tops that bear the impressions of ventilation bricks, a palm leaf, the base of a basket, a hub cap and plastic tubing.

“Unlike the conventional aluminum furniture, they’re each unique and expressive,” said the designers. “Manufactured on the spot, they transform ephemeral street materials into metal objects, providing a portrait of the street.”

The resulting stools were donated to the vendor who provided the cooking oil and the furnace remains in São Paulo, where the project will continue with a new series of products and furniture made in a favela.

“Mining the city for materials, the perception of the city changes,” said the designers. “Where once you saw rubbish, now you can see resources to be transformed into new products.”

The project was commissioned by Coletivo Amor de Madre Gallery in São Paulo and involved working with several catadore co-operatives to find both the materials to make the furnace, and the oil and cans to use it.

“Each stool takes around 60 cans, but catadores collecting cans around a football stadium on a match day bring in many thousands of cans,” Studio Swine told us. “The idea is that catadores will share a furnace and greatly increase the amount of money they can get for the materials they collect.”

They suggest that the furnace can be used to cast anything to sell, including small items like souvenirs for the 2014 World Cup or 2016 Olympic Games. “However, the potential of open sand casting lends itself very well to larger pieces and we are interested in how this can be incorporated into small scale architecture,” they added.

Finding ways to enhance local industries by making products from waste on-site is familiar ground for Studio Swine, who graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2011 with a project that proposed making stools from waste plastic picked up by fishing trawlers, melting the material down and moulding it into furniture onboard the boat.

They’re also no strangers to making and selling in the streets, having designed a mobile food stall for cooking and selling pig heads the year before.

Here’s some more information from Studio Swine:

In nature, everything is interconnected and there is no concept of waste, but in cities there are lots of loose connections.
The city has so much potential, there’s a strong culture of improvisation here. The streets are busy with people looking to make a living in ingenious ways, ever flexible to emerging opportunities.

In a city with some 20 million residents the waste is on a massive scale, however over 80% of the recycling is collected by an informal system of independent Catadores, pulling their handmade carts around the streets.

We looked at the way they worked, the materials they collected, and how we could learn from them to create a new model of manufacturing – taking waste materials that could be readily found, to manufacture goods on the street, with the potential to make livelihoods extend beyond rubbish collection.

The world is becoming increasingly more globalised, something that we are interested in is how design can help retain a strong regional identity.

We wanted to tap into this existing street culture – to turn a public space into a manufacturing line. We went around the streets collecting things we can cast. Mining the city for materials, the perception of the city changes, where once you saw rubbish, now you can see resources to be transformed into new products. The city consumes a lot of fried food so we collected used cooking oil for free and plentiful fuel.

Then we needed to make moulds which are cheap and adaptable. As Sao Paulo is under constant development, construction sand can be found all over the city.

What is the future of manufacturing? Where the industrial revolution was built on the concept of making the same thing thousands of times, will future manufacturing incorporate individual characteristics or even chance?

There is something magical about the moment cold hard metal becomes a hot liquid – the moment it’s quickened and given life. We wanted the surface to reverberate with the texture of the sand and the metal’s molten state, to bear clearly the impression left by the objects we found that day.

We made stools for the food vendor that provided the waste cans & oil. Unlike the conventional aluminum furniture they’re each unique and expressive. Manufactured on the spot, they transform ephemeral street materials into metal objects, providing a portrait of the street.

Where the majority of carbon cost is in the transportation of goods rather than their production – we could see manufacturing returning to our cities, adaptable to customisations and able to ‘cast on demand’.

The potential of mobile sand casting is endless, offering another way to produce. From small items to architectural elements, it can change the face of the city.

The project was made possible with the generous support of Heineken.

The post Can City mobile aluminium furnace
by Studio Swine appeared first on Dezeen.

This movie by designers Studio Swine demonstrates how waste plastic picked up by fishing trawlers can be transformed into chairs on board the boats.

Studio Swine first presented the idea in collaboration with Kieren Jones at the Royal College of Art show in 2011 and have since simplified the process to build the chairs using a small factory onboard vessels. They have released a manual so others can build the chairs too.

Plastic caught in fishing nets or found washed up on the shore is sorted according to colour and chopped into small bits, then melted at 130 degrees centigrade in a DIY furnace.

Some is then squashed between two flat slabs of heavy metal or stone to create the seat, while more is scraped into a mould formed from bent scraps of aluminium.

Cooled and solidified by the sea water, the seat and three legs are then scraped with a knife to tidy the edges and screwed together to create the Sea Chair.

Studio Swine have also designed a mobile food stall for cooking and selling pig heads and glasses made from human hair.

Scroll on for instructions for creating a Sea Chair from the studio:

Open Source Sea Chair by Studio Swine

Studio Swine has created an open source design based on ‘Sea Chair’ by Studio Swine & Kieren Jones, accompanied by a film of the process where a chair is made on a fishing boat at sea.

The United Nations estimates some 100 million tons of plastic waste to be contaminating in the worlds oceans, a proportion of which washes up on coastlines across the globe, last year Japan had over 200 thousand tons of plastic debris wash up along it’s shores. This abundance of plastic presents an opportunity where the material is delivered by the sea to coasts where it can be processed to make new products with the intention of removing the plastic from the marine environment for good. The open source design uses readily available materials and basic DIY skills to enable the the creation of a sea chair.

You can download the Sea Chair manual here.

Things you need:

Furnace: a camping stove, a food tin, a steel kitchen pan with lid, a cooking thermometer, thick tin foil, glass fibre roofing insulation, crushed charcoal (for best results use perforated charcoal from an old water filter)

Moulds: a scrap aluminium L section (6cm x 6cm x 40cm approx.), two steel sheets (for best results polished stone off cuts from kitchen worktops, sink cut-outs or leftover floor tiles), Wax for mould release (beeswax or car polish)

Tools: a metal scraper, hacksaw, drill + metal bits, screw driver, three long screws, one or two small bolts & nuts

For Collecting: two buckets, kitchen or fine garden sieve, dustpan and brush, big bag, rubber gloves

The steps:

1. Collecting

Collecting plastic on the beach is the easiest way to get sea plastic; it prevents the washed up plastic returning to the sea to harm marine life.

Look at beaches during low tides where materials have been deposited, these are generally sandy beaches with debris along the strand line.

A dustpan and brush is effective for collecting small plastic pellets known as nurdles. These are often found deposited in lines below the main strand line of heavier materials such as seaweed. If the sand is flat and damp, then they can be swept off the surface without collecting the sand. Where sand is collected, they can easily be separated by sinking in a bucket of water and scooping out the floating plastic with a sieve.

Try to sort the plastic at this stage using the plastic chart, separate PET from LDPE, HDPE & PP which share similar melting points. Dispose of any PVC or Polystyrene collected. Small plastic pieces and nurdles are not possible to identify easily but if your averages are correct with the large items, the mix will work.

The plastic should all be broken up into pieces around 1cm x 1cm, this can be done by hand or a kitchen food processor. Add some water to the mix when using the processor to avoid the plastic from melting around the blades.

Remember: Dry the plastic before melting.

2. Melting

*Precautions*
Some essential precautions should be taken when melting plastic. Some plastics emit toxic fumes when melted. The lid and filter will help minimalise exposure to these, but also do any melting in a very well ventilated place away from others, outside if possible. Use a good mask and goggles to protect your eyes from smoke. Hot plastic will stick to the skin, so always wear thick gloves and long sleeves, leather gardening gloves are fine.

In the manual, there is a chart to identify plastics. However, chances are you won’t be able to easily identify a lot of the plastics you’ve collected. The key is to collect a sizeable amount of plastics of the same type so that they will mix well together when melted. It’s common to find large amounts of the same type of nurdles on a particular beach near where a spill once occurred, after you’ve identified the melting point they can form the majority of the mix that glues the rest together. Other beaches may contain mostly PET due to large amounts of discarded drinks bottles whilst some beaches contain a mix.

The majority of plastic waste is made of type1, 2, and 4 plastics. Wherever possible, avoid polystyrene and PVC, as they emit toxic fumes. The plastic pellets, or “nurdles”, are all thermoplastics, which means they can me re-melted. Small plastic fragments found in the top layer of the ocean are most often HDPE, LDPE, and PP, as they are less dense than sea water and float, but, even if the plastic you find are thermosetting (which do not melt) they will still form an aggregate within the melted mass.

Once you have sorted your plastic and prepared it for use you can add them to the furnace.

Check the pan when the temperature reaches around 180ºC. If the mix is still hard, turn the heat up to 250ºC, checking at intervals to see when the mix is molten. As soon as the mix is molten enough to form a doughy ball in the pan when stirred, it is ready to use. Don’t worry if some of the plastic pieces aren’t fully melted, as long as the majority are, they will form a colourful aggregate within the material. Be careful not to leave the mixture too long, or the plastic will begin to burn and create more toxic smoke.

You need to decide whether your plastic mix is mostly Type 2, 4 & 5 or Type 1. In most cases it’s best to make a mix that mostly consists of Type 2, 4 & 5 which melt in the range of 110 – 170°C and use the Type 2 (melts at 250°C) as a aggregate.

If melting mainly Type 1 (PET) the plastics with a lower melting temperature can be added when the mix is molten and the stove turned off just before filling the moulds.

To make a stool, it’s recommended you heat around 3 batches of plastic separately, filling the pan each time about 1/3 full. Adding too much in one go will make it difficult to achieve an even temperature through the mix. An improvised windshield may be required for your furnace to reach higher temperatures.

3. Casting

Polish the leg mould with a cloth, and preheat the mould over the gas stove.

Use a metal scraper to scoop the plastic into the leg mould, overfilling them slightly. Press the full leg mould upside down against the flat surface used for seat mould. Press down on the mould until the metal sides are flat against the surface and the excess plastic squeezes out from either end. The excess should be cut off with the metal scraper and added back into the pot to be reused. Submerge the mould in cold water, this speeds up the curing process and makes the plastic contract away from the mould making it easy to remove.

When three legs are complete, a large blob can be melted to form the seat. Polished granite or marble kitchen worktop off cuts are the most effective surface for casting against, a sheet of smooth metal can be used as well, but it should be lubricated with oil or wax to avoid sticking to the plastic. Preheat the surface of the mould so the plastic stays in a molten state for pouring which will result in a smoother finish.

4. Assembling

Mark out an equilateral triangle on the base of the stool where the legs are positioned. Drill holes and screw in legs with screws approximately 3 inches long. If required, use some of the leftover melted plastic to weld the legs to the base of the seat to add strength and prevent them twisting.

The post Open Source Sea Chair
by Studio Swine appeared first on Dezeen.

What if plastic polluting the seas could be harvested by a retired fishing trawler, then transformed into chairs by an onboard factory?

The Sea Chair project by Royal College of Art graduates Alexander Groves, Azusa Murakami and Kieren Jones proposes just that – sorting through the plastic debris for tiny pellets used in injection moulding machines.

The designers claim that 13,000 of these pieces of virgin material are floating in every square mile of ocean, spilled in transit or leaked from factory storage.

They’ve built a machine to scoop along the shoreline and sort the debris by size, using a floatation tank to separate out other, denser materials, and trialled it on the beach at Porthtowan, England.

Their work has been nominated for the Victorinox Time To Care Award and you can vote for it here. “If the project gets enough votes to take us into their top three, we would secure enough money to see our project fully funded,” says Kieren Jones. If successful the designers intend to show a set of chairs made by the trawler in Milan next April.

They presented the project at Show RCA earlier this summer and it will be on show at Sustain RCA during the London Design Festival next month.

This isn’t the first project on Dezeen to tackle plastic pollution: last summer the Plastiki boat made of plastic bottles sailed from across the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Sydney to raise awareness of the problem and at DMY Berlin this year Dirk Vander Kooij presented a robot that prints plastic chairs made of recycled refrigerators.

The information that follows is from the designers:

London designers Alexander Groves, Kieren Jones and Azusa Murakami are proposing to turn a retired fishing trawler into a plastic chair factory, fishing plastic from the polluted seas and beaches around the South West of the UK. Their ‘Sea Chair’ project has been shortlisted for the Victorinox Time To Care Award, -to support the project, please cast your vote by visiting and help make the project a reality.

The Sea Chair project proposes to turn a retired fishing trawler into a plastic chair factory, fishing the plastic from the polluted seas and beaches around the South West coast of the UK.

The Sea Chair project looks to address the problem of accumulating plastic in our oceans by raising awareness and removing plastic that will continue to circulate for thousands of years.

With increasing EU quotas, competition from large commercial trawlers and not to mention depleting fish stocks, Britain’s fishing industry really is in crisis.

Further afield, a ‘plastic soup’ of waste floats in the Pacific Ocean. Growing at an alarming rate it is already double the area of the United States. The ‘Pacific Garbage Patch’ as it’s known, stretches from the coastlines of California to the shores of Japan.

Since the discovery of ‘The Pacific Garbage Patch’ 5 more have been found across the World’s Oceans with the Atlantic gyre predicted by many scientist to be even larger. This plastic waste doesn’t sink and takes thousands of years to degrade, remaining in the environment to be broken up into ever-smaller fragments by ocean currents. As our society’s consumption grows the concentration of this plastic soup increases.

These fragments include a large amount of nurdles or ‘mermaids tears’, which are the plastic pellets that are the virgin raw material for injection moulding. These nurdles can be found littered on almost every shoreline in the world.

During our research trip to Porthtowan beach we discovered the most prevalent marine litter was plastic pellets, known in the plastics industry as ‘nurdles’. These pellets are around 2mm in diameter & represent an estimated 10% of all marine litter worldwide, 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.

These Nurdles haven’t been injection molded yet, but rather have been lost through spillage in transit and poor storage at factories.

The nurdles act as a sponge for harmful chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in concentrations up to a million times greater than the surrounding seawater. Resembling fish eggs they enter the food chain raising the toxicity of our fish.

More than 250 quadrillion nurdles will be made this year and The United Nations (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.

Porthtowen Beach has been identified as one of the most polluted beaches in the UK for micro plastic due to it being a deposit shoreline that through its unique topography collects great amounts of sea plastic and makes it an ideal place to pan for nurdles.

Currently beach cleaning tractors remove the large plastic debris from the beach but micro plastic remains quite elusive. We have been developing methods and tools for collecting and separating the micro plastic from the other debris to be used again.

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.

Much like the early miners, we have taken inspiration from this rich heritage and 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 sorts the micro plastic from the stradline grading the particulates by size and using a floatation tank to separate the denser materials from plastic.

Alongside this contraption, and with the help of the local fisherman, we would like to fabricate plastic chairs that support their community and make use of their rich and diverse skill sets. With the E.U unveiling plans to pay fisherman for plastic by-catch, advances in the development of nets for collecting plastics with minimal damage to marine wildlife and by collecting washed up plastic on shore we have designed a floating factory ship that recycles this marine waste into sea chairs.

Please support this on-going project and help make the ‘Sea Chair’ a reality by voting for it here.

See also:

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Recycled plastic chairs made by a robot	Plastiki boat made of plastic bottles	Chairs made of injection moulding remnants