Reclaim Chair
Stackable office furniture from recycled hardhats.
Over six million HDPE hard hats are sold annually, each one with a five-year shelf life. With few recycling facilities, this results in a significant increase in landfill each year from the construction sector.
When faced with the material centred product design project, my group and I discovered a gap in the market for hardhat disposal, and with a passion for design and furniture, we created the Reclaim Chair.
We set out on this project to design a luxury lounge chair with modular capabilities. The reclaim chair uses a symmetrical design to allow it to flip onto another lounger to create a workspace or table to adapt to any room dynamic. Rotation moulding will be used to create a strong, one piece design that can be moved around the users space freely due to its hollow nature.
This clip showcases a cross-section view of our injection mold we designed for our half scale model of the Reclaim Chair. This Fusion 360 model got sent to the uni's CNC router to be cut out in four different pieces, then bolted together to accept molten HDPE from expired hardhats which we sourced from construction companies operating in the Lyttelton port.
Here you can see our prototypes. The ones in our hands were created using thermoforming, and the one on the table is created from injection molding using expired HDPE hardhats which we put in a shredder and then melted.
From this project, we were selected to present in Entre's Dragons Den pitch competition at The University of Canterbury. While we didn't clinch the main cash prize, we instead received the "Design for the Environment" award which underscores the importance of designing with environmental consciousness in mind.