It’s always great to see waste recycled as something unique and useful, and that’s exactly what this project involves. When Carolin Pertsch, a designer from Germany learned that tons of seaweed were being dumped into landfills each year, she sought out to find a way to offset this problem. What she came up with is this stylish stool, which would not look out of place in any apartment, house or cabin. It’s also the perfect size for use in tiny homes.
The main reason why so much seagrass ends up in landfills is the preparation of beaches in the summer for tourist season. So each year the sea grass is swept up and thrown away, even though it is a very usable material and could easily be recycled.
To make the stools, Carolin first collected enough seaweed of the Zostera Marina (also called eelgrass and seawrack) variety. The next step was to clean it and sort it according to the different colors, which range from almost black to a light brown. She then shredded the seaweed, placed it into moulds and added bio-resin to create the seats of the stools, which is about half and inch (1 cm) thick. The bio-resin is made of all natural ingredients, such as starch, water, vegetable oil and vinegar, and works great as a sort of glue to hold the seaweed together.
By separating the seaweed by color before shredding it, she can now supply the stool in three different shades. The texture of the finished seat is a lot like cork. Form the images it seems normal plywood is used to build the legs. No word on whether she plans on making other types of chairs or even tables in this way, but I imagine it would be quite simple to do with just the use of appropriate moulds.
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