How furniture design is tackling the plastics paradox

In a mid-1950s essay, Roland Barthes described plastic as “the first magical substance which consents to be prosaic”. In that short phrase the French philosopher captured our love-hate relationship with the defining material of the past 100 years.

A new exhibition — Plastic: Remaking Our World — at the V&A Dundee explores how we have come simultaneously to depend on and disparage plastic, and looks at how we might learn to throw less of it away.

Though indigenous people in Malaysia had used hardened rubber tree sap to fashion implements for hundreds of years before, the story of modern plastics starts with the invention of the first semi-synthetic plastic, celluloid, in the middle of the 19th century. Alexander Parkes, who mixed camphor and nitrocellulose to make solid mouldable sheets, exhibited knife handles made of his new material, branded Parkesine, at the International Exhibition of 1862.

“Celluloid was the first major domestic plastic,” says Sylvia Katz, whose book Classic Plastics, published in 1984, was one of the first appreciations of the materials. “It was made into babies’ toys, jewellery, vases, all sorts of things.”

It was even more versatile because it could be dyed. After Prince Albert died in 1861, Queen Victoria set a fashion for mourning jewellery made from the black gemstone jet. “Jet was very expensive,” says Katz. “ . . . [so] you still find loads of pieces of black celluloid jewellery from that time in junk shops and markets.”

At the start of the 20th century in New York, Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland created a new thermosetting resin Polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride, understandably known ever since by its brand name Bakelite. “It was the first totally synthetic plastic; that was a big milestone,” says Katz.

Bakelite was restricted to sombre colours by the dark wood dust that was used as filler to strengthen the otherwise fragile compound. But that did not stop it finding its way into millions of homes moulded as everything from telephones to tea-trays.

By the middle of the century, a clutch of new plastics had appeared. Many were born of global conflict, says Katz: “It was thanks to the [second world] war that many of the plastics we have today were developed. All the ‘poly’ ones, polystyrene, polyvinyl, polyurethane, they were mainly developed in the 1950s. One of the major things that came into the home was Tupperware food containers, made of polythene, which was developed for radar.”

These “superpolymers” — whose names, said Barthes, reminded him of Greek shepherds — used as feedstocks the chemical derivatives of what then seemed like bottomless oil wells. They bolstered the range of potential plastics offered to liberate creativity. Freed from the constraints of carving and joining — essentially editing — natural materials such as wood, or the expense of metal casting, furniture designers were able to realise bold new forms.

Wells Coates’s speaker-shaped Ekco A22 radio and Eero Aarnio’s spherical Ball Chair, both on display in Dundee, illustrate the satisfying continuous curves plastics made possible.

“There was also the advent of mass production techniques,” says exhibition lead curator Charlotte Hale. “Compression moulding, injection moulding; these techniques enabled limitless possibilities for designers. And they brought affordability . . . they democratised design.”

They also brought colour. Where before household objects were brightened with fading, flaking paint, the kitchens of the 1950s and 60s could be filled with durable objects and surfaces where the colour ran right through.

Polymers came in and out of fashion. “I studied furniture design in the 60s,” says Katz. “My heroes were the Italian designers producing polythene foam chairs that sprang up out of envelopes. It was the age of vinyl inflatables and Perspex.”

The synthesised foams, films and fabrics took over our lives — extended them even, by revolutionising hygiene in homes and hospitals.

It is hard to identify a point where all this better living through chemistry tipped over into a cause for concern. Plastic’s cheapness and utility simply led us to use and dispose carelessly of more and more of it. Global production rose from 2mn tonnes in 1950 to an estimated 367mn tonnes in 2020 — and up to half of that is single-use items, according to the UN.

Signifiers of its all-pervasiveness range from the miles-wide gyres of discarded fishing nets and other waste in the great oceans, to the recent discovery by Italian researchers of microplastic traces in human breast milk.

As an example of our profligacy, Hale points to an item of what is effectively disposable furniture, the white polypropylene Monobloc chair, descended from Henry Massonnet’s 1972 Fauteuil 300 and produced anonymously in hundreds of factories worldwide.

“It’s the world’s most used piece of furniture,” she says. “It takes just two minutes to produce; it’s completely affordable — and now gets discarded as waste or washed up on a beach.”

But the Remaking our World exhibition emphasises the potential for change. The exhibition transferred from the Vitra Design Museum in Germany. Christian Grosen Rasmussen, Vitra’s chief design officer, says the furniture company’s own approach is to start by making plastic objects that will become the antiques of tomorrow, to be handed down rather than disposed of.

“Longevity is the keyword,” he says. “We try to make sure our products have lasting aesthetics and zoom out from the shortlived trends.” (Early models of Verner Panton’s sinuous cantilevered stacking chair, developed with Vitra in the 1960s and made of fibreglass-reinforced polyester, change hands for £1,000-plus.)

The company has also set up repair and take-back schemes to help extend the lives of its furniture. Rasmussen says that Vitra always considers waste plastic for new products and is trying to move to recycled materials for its back catalogue. In 2020 it reissued Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby’s tilting Tip Ton task chair as Tip Ton RE, made of polypropylene recovered from yoghurt pots and shampoo bottles collected from German households.

“To take waste and upcycle it into something that can last 20 years or longer, that’s a beautiful idea,” Rasmussen says. The recycled material is not homogeneous like virgin plastic, he says. Close-up it shows little flecks, traces of the varied packaging it once was. “But we have to learn to appreciate that, not to see it as a mistake.”

The exhibition also features an installation from Precious Plastic, an open-source project based in Portugal, which shares the instructions for building small plastic recycling units with hundreds of designers and community groups around the world. The users in turn share their own designs for everything from benches to skateboard wheels made from local waste.

Another part of the eventual solution may be designers working with natural alternatives to fossil fuel-based plastics, such as packaging grown from fungal mycelium or biodegradable polymers packed out with waste materials such as used coffee grounds. Experiments like these take us full circle to early plastics such as casein, made from milk, or Bakelite with its sawdust bulking.

Many of these innovations are only produced on a small scale, but Hale says they will be needed as declining oil production and government restrictions on plastic waste increase demand for them: “If they became mainstream they could make a real difference. It’s about these ideas becoming more widespread and affordable.” She says the exhibition’s message is an optimistic one about our ability to find a path out of the plastics dilemma.

Rasmussen says he believes designers will help show the way. “Developing products, you can contribute to change and making it better. We learn every day.”

For Katz, who still helps organise the UK Institute of Materials, Minerals & Mining’s Design Innovation in Plastic Award, part of the answer lies in our relearning to appreciate plastics’ magical properties rather than the prosaic ones. “I think they are absolute wonder materials,” she says. “If we don’t respect them or dispose of them properly, it’s not plastic’s fault.”

“Plastic: Remaking Our World” is at the V&A in Dundee from October 29 to February 5

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