South Korean designer Haneul Kim has collected 1000’s of used disposable face masks from his college campus and recycled them to create a stackable stool.
Known as Stack and Stack, the venture hopes to set an instance for a way the 129 billion single-use face-masks that the world goes via each month in the course of the coronavirus pandemic may be diverted from ending up in landfill and in our oceans.
“At first, I stockpiled disposable masks utilized by me and my associates however the amount that could possibly be collected on this approach was restricted,” stated the Kaywon College pupil. “So I put in masks assortment packing containers on campus and emptied them periodically.”
After quarantining them over a interval of days, Kim stacked the masks inside a mould and melted them one after the other utilizing a warmth gun.
Regularly, the fabric constructed as much as create a sturdy seating design, with round 250 masks wanted to kind every leg and one other 750 for the seat.
The ultimate outcome wants no glue or resin to carry it collectively and is totally constituted of the recycled private protecting tools (PPE), with no added supplies. Even the stools’ marbled white, blue and pink patterns are derived not from added dyes or paints however merely from the color of the unique masks.
“I take away the steel wire that tightens the nostril and the cotton ear loops. This leaves the polypropylene filter surrounded in a non-woven plastic material, which I soften utilizing sizzling air of greater than 300 levels Celsius,” Kim informed Dezeen.
“When the liquefied plastic slowly cools and hardens once more, this creates a tricky, sturdy plastic.”
As face masks turned obligatory in lots of public areas and nations internationally because of the coronavirus pandemic, international gross sales of the disposable face-coverings reached $166 billion in 2020 in keeping with the United Nations Convention on Commerce and Growth.
That is greater than 200 instances as a lot as within the earlier 12 months, when gross sales totalled solely $800 million.
The UN estimates that as much as 75 per cent of those masks will find yourself in landfill or in our waterways, with PPE already discovered on 30 per cent of all UK seashores.
Designers and activists, together with Nienke Hoogvliet and Parley for the Oceans founder Cyrill Gutsch, have additionally expressed concern that the coronavirus pandemic is hindering the hard-fought transfer away from single-use plastics.
“Plainly most individuals prioritise the pandemic and put the atmosphere second,” industrial designer Dave Hakkens informed Dezeen.
In response, his recycling initiative Valuable Plastics has launched a protecting face protect that’s constituted of recycled waste plastic.
Equally, Adidas was among the many first big-name manufacturers to launch a reusable face masks, fashioning it from a high-performance recycled material that’s free from virgin plastic.