My New Carbon Negative Chairs
Last week, the ecojoiners for my new chairs arrived. I was excited to assemble them with my ecobricks. I've been working on this concept of a "carbon cube chair" for the last year.
Imagine, if you will, furniture and structures that have a greener impact than they do grey.
Imagine, creations that sequester more carbon and more plastic than their production, shipping and sales creates.
Before this week, if you'd asked me, I couldn't think of a single modern example.
Virtually all furniture and most structures rely on industrial manufacturing, which relies on global supply chains and the mining and extraction of resources. And of course all those things rely on fossil fuels to power them. Consequently, any chair that you sit on, has an additive carbon and plastic impact: carbon is emitted and plastic is produced during its lifecycle. For example, a recent report estimates that one of those ubiquitous white plastic monobloc chair has a carbon impact of 17.6kg CO₂e and a plastic impact of 4.7kg.
Alas, net grey, carbon intensive products and process are just the way things are in our modern world.
But what if it could be otherwise?
The Earthen ethics that guide my design process, is all about this: imagining a world where the way we live is ecological contributive rather than depletive.
Actually, its not a new concept: Kincentric cultures, ancient and ongoing, have lived this way for millennia.
Learning and applying ancestral Indonesian craftsmanship, our new ecojoiner concept makes use of bamboo. Bamboo, grows like crazy: grabbing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and building its biomass with it– a process of carbon sequestration. Consequently, the net impact of using bamboo is subtractive: by using bamboo we promote more bamboo to grow and more carbon to be sequestered!
And of course, ecojoiners use ecobricks.
Ecobricks have a tremendous net-carbon impact. First, plastic itself is 85-95% carbon. By concentrating it into a bottle to make a brick we're following Earth's example of sequestration. And second, ecobricking keeps plastic out of the recycling industry, from being burned and dumped– all of which have carbon emissions. The GEA estimates that 1kg of ecobricked plastic has a carbon equivalency of 6.1kg.
A Net Green Impact
Consequently, according to my calculations, each of my new chairs results in 38 kg CO₂ sequestered. You read that right! That's over twice the emissions of a monobloc chair– but not emitted, sequestered!
And, since its made with ecobricks and replaces an industrial chair, each carbon cube chair also delivers a subtractive plastic impact! I calculate that -7.5kg of plastic offset and sequestered per chair.
Its just one chair of course.
But imagine if all the products we used and bought and disposed of were this way.
More to come
We'll be launching a page on ecojoiners, per unit sales, and a carbon cube chair kit in the near future. Meanwhile, if you're into the numbers you can check out our Regen Product Report that lays out the full ecological accounting.
"What should green really mean?"
Online GEA Community Event: Sunday August 31st, 2025 | Free | Zoom
If you'd like to go deeper into the philosophical and practical topics of going deep green in the way we make and design things, check out the free talk this Sunday in which my co-author of the Earthen Ethics, Irene Banayan Angway will be interviewed in a live community event put on by the GEA. Registration is free on GoBrik.