Recycling and eco-friendly design is a hot topic because we need to preserve our planet. Today we are sharing one of such designs, and it’s a furniture collection made of recycled newspapers and called PaperBricks.
Uncanny to cement blocks at a distance, the bricks used to construct the furniture surprisingly present themselves as fuzzy, textural and playful as you zoom further in on the final product. The designer started off by testing tons of different papers and binding materials. He ultimately decided to go with newspaper as it was the most readily available material and would probably make for a lasting sustainable model.
To make the bricks, WooJai Lee came up with a fairly straightforward manual manufacturing process: recycled newspapers were made into paper pulp, which was then mixed with glue and pressed into molds the shape of standard bricks. Lee emulated the standard dimensions of a cement block in order to minimize the material use and deformation while maximizing the strength. Adding his own twist to the forms, he created molds with their own internal joinery system that allowed them to be easily assembled into furniture—a clever solution that may even ensure more consistency than traditional wood joinery methods.