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Design company just unveiled outdoor furniture line made of 70% recycled post-consumer e-waste
Mater continues to push the bar for material innovations in furniture design, turning another waste stream into a resource.
By JOHAN MAGNUSSON
8 Mar 2024

The Danish brand launched outdoor furniture line The Ocean Collection five years ago, in 2019. However, originally, it is a 1955 design by Jørgen and Nanna Ditzel, both among the 20th century’s most renowned designers.

— It was originally designed in wood veneer, but we’ve reimagined the elegant designs in an effort to tackle various waste streams, Ketil Årdal, CEO, explains. The first edition was made from recycled fishing nets. Following this, we introduced a version made in collaboration with Carlsberg Brewery and a:gain, which is formed using upcycled Carlsberg’s plastic beer kegs. In 2024 we present a Burnt Red version of the Ocean Collection, made with recycled post-consumer e-waste plastic.

You’re certainly a sustainability trailblazer in the industry. How sustainable is this launch? Have you conducted any LCA?

— Post-consumer e-waste, due to our consumption habits, is one of the fastest-growing waste streams in the world. The e-waste is collected and all plastic parts are separated and granulated into a form that can be used as a base for injection moulding, which is how the slats for the collection are produced. The collection is made from 68% recycled post-consumer e-waste, which amounts to 1.84kg of e-waste per chair. Furthermore, the frame is made of 20% recycled steel. LCA analysis is conducted on all our pieces of furniture and these numbers can be found on our product sheets, which are available for download online.

What have been your major challenges when creating the line?

— Testing new waste streams for our products always involves a process of finding out how much recycled material we can use and still obtain the stability and quality that we require. We consider ending up with almost 70% recycled post-consumer e-waste a success.

From your perspective, what’s required to make your industry more sustainable?

— Overall, the key challenge to address is that we consume too much globally, and this is only growing. For the furniture manufacturing industry, this translates into the key challenge that we consume too many virgin materials and that we must become more circular-minded, Årdal states. He continues:

— New building projects must meet a wide range of sustainability requirements in relation to building materials and processes. Fortunately, we see a demand from these projects for more sustainable solutions. We work a lot with hotels, restaurants, and office buildings on the contract market, and these are areas where there is a huge impact of choosing sustainable products. If for example, we sell 200 chairs to an office building, then that’s a very large amount of waste materials recycled into the furniture we provide. 

— We are continuously committed to finding and testing new sustainable materials that we can apply to our technology, called Matek, and thus recycle into furniture. This spring, we’ll reveal a new groundbreaking blend of our material that you should keep an eye out for.