The author clearly states their love of plastic, but of course has to throw in the standard, poorly-thought-out obligatory environmental complaint about the material as well:
"At the same time, plastics have created a contaminated, toxic world that needs to be reconsidered and resolved. There is great hope in biodegradable plastics, 100% recycled plastics, deriving plastics from sugar cane, plant-based and other renewable sources..."A biodegradable chair? Wooden chairs are already biodegradable, but I am completely unaware of any facility will take them and compost them. You can burn wooden chairs, but you can burn plastic chairs as well. And as I discussed in the past, plant-based plastics will largely be identical to the petroleum-based plastics that we have today. Huge investments are being made to make bio-based ethylene, propylene, etc that will protect the huge investments already made to polymerize and process these plastics. Novel monomers (and thereby novel polymers) are possible, but it can take a decade and more to get a new polymer to be profitable, meaning that you need plenty of money and the guts to keep spending it when you don't see a payoff anytime soon.
While people love novel designs, no company is going through the expense of developing a new material just so that designers can be creative with it. I hate to be the one to disappoint the designers, but the future feedstocks for plastics chairs will look pretty much like what we already have today.
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