As part of a project called Print Your City, design studio The New Raw is recycling plastic waste and using 3D printing technology to create street furniture.
Working with local citizens to simultaneously shape their surroundings and recycle plastic waste in the process, the ultimate goal of the project is to create a closed-loop system for plastic waste in cities around the world.
The project’s first furniture piece was the XXX bench designed for the Municipality of Amsterdam. Made out of recycled plastic bags, the amount of plastic waste used to create a single bench equals to the amount produced by two Amsterdam citizens each year.
With their success in Amsterdam, the studio has since partnered with Coca Cola as part of a “No Waste Future” program in Thessaloniki, Greece.
In order to involve community members in their project, Panos Sakkas and Fonteini Setaki, the founders of The New Raw, created a website that allows users to customize the furniture that will be distributed throughout their city. With the ability to choose the colour, functionality and even the public space where the furniture will ultimately be placed, the website tells the user how much plastic waste will be required to create the furniture.
“More than 2,900 citizens of Thessaloniki voted where and how they wanted to see the new furniture of the city,” the designers told Dezeen. “For the production of the furniture, we recycled more than 800 kilos of plastic waste.”
At the Zero Waste Lab, the donated plastic waste is sorted, washed and shredded. Melting and combining the plastic with colour pigment, a robotic 3D printing arm is then used to transforms the mixture into furniture.
The studio has set out to recycle four tons of plastic waste by May 2019.
“Plastic has a design failure. It is designed to last forever, but often we use it once and then throw it away,” said Sakkas and Setaki. “With Print Your City, we endeavor to show a better way of using plastic in long lasting and high value applications.”
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