In the spirit of my discovering the hashtag #WastelessWed, not to mention the twitter handle @WastlessWed, I wanted to share something that we've done in the past with some of our left over material.The block we work with needs to be shaped to fit the projects we work with. Since a wall is never easily divisible by 4 feet, nor is the height divisible by 16 3/4", we have to cut away the parts that don't need to be in the wall. It can result in quite a bit of waste, waste that we don't like because for 1), we've already paid for it and 2) it ends up in a landfill, not contributing productively to society ... unlike the energy efficient buildings we so proudly erect.
So, we started bagging it up. And bagging and bagging and bagging. It took up a lot of space, but we wanted to do something with it ... we just hadn't figured it out.Then we did.
While touring around at a homeshow in Toronto a couple of years ago we found a company who made beanbag chairs. As it turns out it wasn't going to work to supply them with pellets to stuff their chairs, but we could start making our own. A lot of time and a few trials later we had a couple of prototypes to play with.
We rented a bail grinder and started separating the leftover block from the plastic webs (which are completely recycable when not part of the block). The beads that came out the machine the first time around weren't quite small enough, and thus took a couple of trys. Once we were happy, we created a funnel to get the beads into our bag shell and voila: Recylced BeanBag Chair.
They aren't designer by any means, but they are homemade with tons of love. Now we have a few chairs to give away at homeshows that we attend, or to families who's houses we build.
The chairs are colourful, comfy and a friend re-use of otherwise useless material.
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