Plastic patio chairs are ubiquitous where I am living. My rented flat comes complete with five of them. If I were furnishing a place of my own, I would splurge on well designed and constructed wooden chairs.
“Portland Chair
Made from 70% Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified Eucalyptus Cladocalyx, a Teak-like hardwood harvested from a plantation in South Africa. The folding chairs are sturdy and ergonomically designed allowing you to truly relax.”
Plastic chairs suck, and not just because they are non-biodegradable and made out a fossil fuels. They make horrible noises when you are scooting them around. They form a vapor barrier for your butt. If you ever do something to cause one of the legs to bend too much, the structural integrity is gone and the chair become a veritable death trap. They blow away in strong winds….
…Ok, I just did a quick focus group and I was confronted with the argument that plastic chairs actually don’t suck. They are sturdy. They are weatherproof. They are cheap. If one blows away in a storm, you are likely to find it still in one piece next door.
Plastic chairs are sold at prices that are almost surreal in their cheapness. We had a short discussion about the true cost of a plastic chair. My wife made my brain hurt by suggesting that we should be paying the future price of the oil that goes into making the chair. The present price of oil doesn’t accurately reflect its finite supply. The environmental costs are pretty hard to quantify.
July 12th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
It amazes me that people will automatically assume a wooden product is better environmentally than a plastic one. First, that one is foreign made and I know many chairs are US made. Tree to wood processes are notoriously ‘dirty’ and one, local plastics chair may have a significantly smaller carbon footprint than a foreign made, multi -part, overseas shipped wooden product. Don’t assume, you know? ps; The wooden chairs ARE much nicer than the plastic ones.
July 13th, 2009 at 8:06 am
Greg, I agree with you on several fronts. I have wrung my hands about various wooden alternatives and recommend that my readers look for locally made stuff, preferably stuff made from reclaimed wood. Back in Canada, I had a neighbour that built Adirondack chairs to order. The wood was milled locally.
The Forest Stewardship Council certification is meant to assure consumers that the wood is harvested responsibly, it doesn’t address the environmental impact of manufacturing at all. As green consumers become more educated about the details, there may be a need for some kind of certification that reviews every part of the process of getting a product to the marketplace.
February 4th, 2010 at 4:25 am
[...] [A2] plasticless.com/2009/07/11/plastic-chairs-suck/ [...]