THE SEA CHAIR PROJECT

KIEREN JONES, ALEXANDER GROVES, AZUSA MURAKAMI

A ‘plastic soup’ of waste floats in the Pacific Ocean. Growing at an alarming rate, it is already double the area of the United States. This plastic waste doesn’t sink and it takes thousands of years to degrade. Plastic fragments include a large amount of nurdles, plastic pellets about 2mm in diameter that are the virgin raw material for injection moulding. These nurdles can be found littered on almost every shoreline in the world, and the United Nations estimates that there are 13,000 nurdles floating in every square mile of the ocean. How can we solve the problem of accumulating plastic in our oceans? The Sea Chair Project aims to turn a retired fishing trawler into a plastic chair factory, fishing the plastic from the polluted seas and beaches around the South West coast of the UK. With the EU unveiling plans to pay fisherman for plastic by-catch, and advances in the development of nets for collecting plastics with minimal damage to marine wildlife, a floating factory ship that recycles this marine waste into sea chairs would support fishing communities and make use of their rich and diverse skill sets. Integral to this plan is the ‘Nurdler’, a hand-powered water pump that sorts micro plastic from larger and denser materials and collects washed up plastic from the shore.