Recycled PlayStation Chair

When is a black plastic chair not just a black plastic chair?

When it’s made out of recycled Sony PlayStations.

A British company has designed a sustainable chair whose slatted back and seat are comprised of crushed down and remoulded games consoles.

Each ‘REEE’ chair contains 2.3 kg of black plastic which in turn once made up eight and a half PlayStations. (Mostly PS2s. No-one is throwing out PS3s just yet.)

Pli Design – the sustainable furniture company which makes them – said that the chair was an example of "single source recycling", the idea being that customers are more taken by ‘purebred’ recycled items which do not derive from a multitude of sources.

"We’ve learnt that it’s best if a recycled product can tell a story," Christopher Pett, Pli’s director, said. "The customer knows it’s had a previous life, which they can engage with."

All manufacturers of computer hardware would be responsible for collecting ‘disposed of’ parts as of July when the Government’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive comes into effect, Mr Pett said.

So far the company has orders for only 100 chairs, which go on sale in September at £99, but it plans to make them in their thousands, or for as long as the plastic lasts.

Which should be a while. As of December last year about nine million PS2s had been sold in the UK, according to the analysts Screen Digest.