It will be used to turn ocean trash into chairs

Sep 23, 2014 06:52 GMT  ·  By

Trash is not something anyone wants to be in the vicinity of, but there is a regrettably large quantity of it in the world, most of it, if not all, produced by us humans. Fortunately, there are always some people working towards getting rid of it.

Most methods have their pitfalls though. Dumping garbage in a landfill pretty much dooms the land, burning trash causes pollution, and normal recycling methods have no hope of getting rid of even a tenth of the total amount of trash on Earth.

3D printing technology is too young to make a difference there, but everything has to start somewhere. That's why the latest project (or one of them) posted on Kickstarter is so promising.

The solar-powered 3D printing boat

Alexander Groves and Azusa Murakami run a design studio in London, though they started out in Cornwall, UK, a while ago.

They've come up with an idea: a 72-foot / 22-meter steel hull sailing vessel called Sea Dragon. Technically, the ship was built in 2000 as a yacht for the Global Challenge Race, but they repurposed it, installing lab scape, surface net trawling, long-range journey capabilities, even dissecting microscopes.

The ship already goes out to sea to “harvest” and process plastic into furniture, but the two inventors are trying to raise £6,500 / $10,625 / €8,267 to fund a trip to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swathe of plastic rubbish covering an area the size of a whole country in the North Pacific. Yes, that kind of pile of trash actually exists.

The origin story of the ship

Initially, Alexander Groves and Azusa Murakami collected plastic rubbish that washed up on the shore, then built their own shredding and extrusion machines, in order to create filament from the refuse.

Once they had enough filament, they used it to 3D print what they now call the Sea Chair, even though it's more of a stool than anything else. A three-legged stool to be precise.

They didn't think that was enough, though. And they didn't feel like reeling trash to land and processing it there was quite as proactive as it should.

So they instead traveled out to sea on a fishing boat and began to use their 3D printing technology to create more chairs (or stools) from plastic caught by fishermen nets.

Eventually, this led to the problem of finite power, so they went ahead and made their 3D printing tech solar-powered. After that, they bought and upgraded the vessel, leading to their current plans.

The Sea Chair project (5 Images)

The Sea Dragon
This was once a chairPlastic hunting on the shore
+2more