CARDBOARD FURNITURE

Cardboard offers a good opportunity for the design of sustainable furniture products. 

Sustainability. Card-board is very sustainable. The raw material of all paper products is cellulose fibre and this can come from a number of different plants. Cardboard ban be fully recycled and can be made from up to 100% of recycled paper and cardboard.

Cardboard is ubiquitous. Paper and cardboard products are all around us. Paper and paper products are widely used as packaging in the home. ABS (2003, 1996 & 2000) shows that 88% of paper and cardboard was either reused or put into the recycled waste stream. The paper fibre can be recycled between 1 and 7 times, depending on the final use.

For a long time cardboard furniture appears to be thought more as a fringe product, a material useful for student projects, or for temporary applications such as exhibitions, rather than the mainstream. Frank Gehry's Easy Edges was a notable early exception. However there has been a recent burgeoning of interest in its use for furniture and other products.

During my design Masters I developed a typology that classifies different forms and processes used in making cardboard furniture. In doing so I identified a gap in the field and so developed my own process, or rather hybrid process.