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Walk the corridors of any home furnishings show these days and it quickly becomes apparent that despite the claxon horn of “sustainability” and “environmentally friendly” bellowing in the air, many manufacturers are still enamored with that most reviled material: plastic. From Luceplan’s Hope lamp to vitra’s vegetal chair, stands every-where are showing off new models as well as canonizing market makers of the past.
Have we spent too much time drinking the ABS? (Smelling its off-gas might be enough.)
Polymers have a lot to offer when it comes to the production of furniture. The word “plastic” is actually used to describe the ability of something to be shaped, molded or mod-eled – an apt use of the word to describe the material itself. From the organic, elemental form of Werner Panton’s iconic chair and Neal Small’s works in clear acrylic, to the Bubble Club rotomolded couches by Philippe Starck, the material allows designers the freedom to create the amorphous or geometric, simple or complex, hard or soft – and it gives manu-facturers the ability to mass produce items easily and cheaply. It is the chameleon of the industry.
Hope Lamp by Francisco Gomez Paz
Luceplan | Prominent since the 60’s, “plastic furniture” is no longer synonymous with vinyl slipcovers, shag carpeting, and formica. Many early pieces have become icons, fetching high prices at auction. MoMA’s permanent collection features no less than 600 items made with plastic, including many fine examples of furniture, prompting hundreds of thousands of museum-goers to declare, “I’ve got one of those at home.” Needless to say, this happens significantly less often with the museum’s Warhols, Mondrians, and Modiglianis. But what about their longevity? The material was never meant as a durable solution and this move into long-lasting objects has spawned whole areas of chemistry dedicated to maintaining its existence. The addition of chemicals to the base plastic can affect how the material behaves and how long it lasts. We commonly add stabilizers, absorbers or blockers to improve the material’s resistance to heat and UV light, which are its major causes of breakdown. Stabilizers absorb potentially reactive free radicals, which form when light photons interact with the polymer, whereas absorbers and blockers act as de-fenders against the photons themselves, either – as one would expect – absorbing or blocking them.
The amount and types of additives needed to ensure resistance to this aging will depend very much upon the type of plastic and the intended application. In addition, not all plastics are created equal. Those with good basic resistance include PTFE, PVDF, FEP, and PEEK. The only plastics found with excellent resistance are the imides: Polyimide (PI), used in the Hubble Space Telescope, and Polyetherimide (PEI). PTFE has particularly good UV resistance because of its very strong carbon-fluorine (C-F) bond (almost 30% higher than the carbon-hydrogen (C-H) bond). Most fluoropolymers also do not have the light absorbing chromophore impurities typical of other plastics in their structure that can act as an initiator for photo-oxidation. Those with fair resistance include PET, PP, HDPE, PA12, PA11, PA6, PES, PPO, PBT and PPO, and poor resistors to UV light are POM (Acetal), PC, ABS and PA6/6.Clear indication that a plastic is undergoing deg-radation from weathering is a chalky appearance and increased brittleness, and any walk along a beach will provide you with ample examples of this phenomenon.
But plastics, never meant to be a durable solution, are becoming just that, and as a result, we have to deal with the effects of their aging. This is of particular concern to the conservation department at MoMA. “Plastics permit some amazing designs,” says MoMA conservation scientist Chris McGlinchey, but “unfortunately, some can be so welcoming that they are stressed or damaged from use.” While “wear and tear” is not generally a problem for objects that arrive to the museum straight from the manufacturer, “signs of use can be found in some works from private collections,” says McGlinchey.
So we have two choices: either get used to the aging of plastics, learning to accept and even desire this slow death in the way that we love the patina on leather or certain metals, or we keep the plastics for non-durable items, leaving the traditional metal, leather, glass, stone and ceramics for products we want to pass on to our children. But maybe there is a third way: engineer in the type of degradation you want. If we can get plastics to look like anything under the sun, then surely we can get them to age gracefully, perhaps enabling them to produce an attractive patina, or simply to wear into a more weathered shape. It is only chemical processes after all. If we can get to accelerate or decelerate the ag-ing of plastics, can we not get that aging to produce an old age that we like?
It reminds me of a question I had asked a materials chemist about why we couldn’t produce a more sustainable, less toxic version of a certain product. Her answer was simple: we can, it’s just that you hadn’t asked for it till now. So perhaps we need to simply ask those chemists to give our plastics a little dignity in their old age.
Dr. Andrew H. Dent, Ph.D. is Vice President, Library & Materials Research for Material ConneXion. He has contributed to many publications, most recently co-authoring Ultra Materials: How Materials Innovation is Changing the World and writes Material Innovation, a bi-weekly column for BusinessWeek's online Innovation page.
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