‘20 years ago, a designer would only think about the head of the product: How do we produce it? How can we sell it, how will people use it?’ declares Nendo founder, designer Oki Sato, swivelling slightly on the wheels of his latest creation for Danish furniture brand Fritz Hansen. ‘I think more and more designers now look at the tail of the product, how will it be thrown away and what’s going to happen after that.’
Sat in his Milan showroom on a grey Sunday in September, the Scandinavian-inspired colour palette of the scattered flock of chairs is the only source of pigment in the otherwise stark white shopfront space. The chair in question is N02 Recycle, both Sato and the brand’s first foray into recycled materials: a moulded, stackable system made from recycled household plastic, Polypropylene, sourced nearby in central Europe.
Polypropylene is the kind of plastic we all know intimately. Food packaging, water bottle lids, straws: any type of household plastic waste labelled with the recycle code ‘5’. To transform your discarded tomato packaging into Sato and Fritz Hansen’s new chair, the recycled materials are ground up into pellets and melted into their new roles, a process that can be repeated, in theory, ad infinitum. Uniting, as Sato describes, the product’s head and tail.
Working with Polypropylene, though, presented a number of challenges: the recycled material by nature is slightly more rigid than the plastic typically used for a stacking chair, so allowing for flexibility and comfort was key. ‘Controlling the thicknesses within the shell was the biggest challenge,’ explains Sato of the chair’s design, which tapers from a relatively deep base outwards like a curved flower petal, preserving movement and bounce while ensuring structural integrity.