OTO Chair's Unexpected Colors: Turning Plastic Waste into Design

The OTO Chair, a project by Milanese designer Alessandro Stabile with Martinelli Venezia studio, debuted at Alcova 2023 and returns to Fuorisalone 2024 with a new sustainable chapter. The chair is made entirely of post-industrial recycled plastic, produced in a single flat mold using one-third of typical material, shipped flat in recycled cellulose packaging, and assembled without screws. Its latest iteration, Unexpected Colors, presented at Design Variations in the Darsena garage, focuses on valorizing production scraps of colored plastic. By recovering, cataloging, and selecting discarded pieces, the designers create chairs with unpredictable color combinations, diverting about 5% of each production batch from landfill. This approach addresses the challenge of making aesthetically appealing products without adding virgin materials to correct chromatic irregularities. The project follows pioneers like James Shaw, who has celebrated tonal imperfections for over a decade with his homemade plastic-extruding gun, and DWA Design Studio's Unico for Pedrali, which turns transition-phase scraps into unique turned and polished pieces. The OTO Chair exemplifies circular design within the broader context of UN-led efforts to reduce plastic pollution by 80% by 2040, with 175 countries negotiating a legally binding treaty to be finalized by December 2024.