Chairs made from Coca Cola bottles

Each of these Emeco 111 Navy chairs is made from the plastic in 111 coke bottles.

[via Apartment Therapy]

• [Pixel]

  I prefer chairs made from Pepsi bottles.

  I know all the seating tests say you can’t tell the difference, but my butt can.

• [fencesitter]

  The problem is that the design of that chair takes advantage of the properties of aluminum, not rPET.

  You’d think that some design company would create a distinctively styled chair that takes advantage of the recycled PET’s properties and not count on 40% other stuff in it.

  And not make it look like a piece of garden furniture.

• [AllisonWunderland]

  – Waiting to see disposable diapers turned into energy efficient building insulation.

  Let me go on record as recycling everything. Composting food, and the rest gets burned for heat. No garbage pick-up for more than a decade. (And no, my house doesn’t look like a dump.)

• [hobomike]

  $230 each? I’ll just sit on the floor, thank you.

  Seriously. Okay, it’s a bit more attractive, but what’s the basic difference between these and the $5 (or less) plastic patio chairs you see all over the world?

  • [dculberson]

    The same chair made out of aluminum is over $400. Not all furniture is made in china by people earning $5/day.

    [my current desk chair originally cost over $3,600. mind you, I didn't pay anywhere near that, but still. damn.]

• [pomokey]

  was anyone else expecting a glass chair?

  • [Felton]

    Now that you mention it, a green-tinted glass chair would be infinitely cooler in my book. :^D

  • [robinite]

    I was! My mental picture was way awesomer than what I clicked to find :(

• [kwhitefoot]

  How about just re-using the bottles instead of recycling them? Seems to work pretty well here in Norway. Bottles and drinks cans all have a deposit and supermarkets have machines that take the bottles and give you a ticket that you redeem at the checkout.

  The cans are automatically crushed and the bottles stacked for return to the bottling plant.

• [SamSam]

  $230 really is absurd.

  Probably half the $10 plastic chairs you sit on are already made out of recycled coke bottles, or recycled something at least. Is the price because the designers took the (probably environmentally-inefficient) route of melting down the bottles themselves, instead of simply buying plastic that was recycled at a larger plant?

• [neurolux]

  If I gave them 111 plastic Coke bottles, would they give me a deep discount off one of these chairs?

  • [hungryjoe]

    It’s funny you should ask that. Until about a month ago, you could send your old Emeco chairs in for recycling, and they would give you something like 50% off the price of a shiny new Emeco chair. But that was probably the retail price.

    @SamSam: They buy the recycled rPET from Coca Cola’s recycling facility in South Carolina. To make this plastic version of the classic Navy Chair, they had to build an entirely new mold. So there’s a fantastically big expense they need to roll into the cost of these chairs.

    I’ll bet their total cost to produce and ship one of these chairs is about $50/unit. They probably sell to dealers for ~ $100/unit, and of course the dealers roll in their costs and profit for selling retail, and voila: $230/unit.

    I have mixed feelings about Emeco. They’re kind of litigious. But I will say this for them, God bless ‘em–they make their chairs here in the USA out of largely post-consumer recycled materials. That is a Big Deal in this day and age.