When you’re on holiday in Amsterdam, you can go for a very peculiar kind of cruise on the city’s famous canals. As you cruise, you fish–for plastic, not bottom-feeders.
These plastic fishing tours are offered by the social enterprise company Plastic Whale, which over the last seven years has transformed the thousands of PET bottles that volunteer fishers have hooked out of Amsterdam’s canals into plastic boats. The more plastic they fish out, the more boats they can build.
Now, the company is setting its sights on an entirely new kind of product: office furniture.
The collection, which was designed by the Amsterdam-based studio Lama Concept and produced by the manufacturer Vepa, was inspired by the anatomy of a whale. The table looks almost like a whale coming up for air; the shape of its legs is derived from the giant animal’s vertebrae. The geometric lamps, which come in two sizes, mimic the barnacles that often decorate whales’ sides. The chair is inspired by whale tails, and the design of the acoustic panels comes from the lines that appear when a whale opens its mouth to feed on krill.
While the inspiration is a little on the nose given the company’s name, the designs themselves are effortlessly modern and would complement any office space. The company has made 20 sets of the conference tables and chairs and has sold seven of them to date.
In a world where designers are increasingly looking to new materials that reuse or recycle materials in a clever way, turning trash into covetable interior design doesn’t just give trash a second chance at life while cleaning up Amsterdam’s canals; it’s also a savvy way to turn the circular economy into a real business.