Designer’s Sustainable Material Guide: Recycled Plastics for Modern Furniture

Recycled plastics are no longer just a concept; they are already the core material of full furniture collections in the market—chairs, tables, planters, benches, even boardroom tables. For designers working with large-format 3D printing and pellet systems, these examples are a roadmap of what’s commercially and aesthetically proven.

1. Recycled Plastic Furniture Already on the Market

A. General recycled plastic furniture (HDPE, mixed plastics)

C.R. Plastics (Canada) – Makes premium outdoor furniture (Adirondack chairs, benches, tables) from up to 100% recycled plastic (mostly HDPE from bottle caps and containers). They process millions of pounds of plastic each year into durable, weather-resistant products. C.R. Plastics
vanPlestik (Netherlands) – Uses custom large-format 3D printers that run on plastic waste to produce chairs, tables, lamps, and custom projects, all from 100% recycled plastic. This is one of the clearest precedents for a Personal Factory–style model: 3D-printed furniture as a service based on recycled feedstock. Welcome to vanPlestik
Urban furniture projects with recycled plastic – Various initiatives have used large-format 3D printing and recycled plastic to create public seating and other urban furniture elements, demonstrating that recycled materials can handle outdoor use, vandalism, and heavy loads. All3DP+1

B. 3D-printed planters and sculptural elements

Ontigo 20 planter by Benkert-Banke – A commercial planter made using a 3D printing process from 100% recycled industrial plastic film, reinforced with glass fibre and combined with stainless steel. The product is explicitly positioned as sculptural, with organic forms and strong visual presence. Archiproducts

This is directly aligned with your planters/bookshelves direction: organic, 3D-printed, recycled, and already sold through a design catalog (Archiproducts).

2. Ocean Plastic & Fishing Nets as Furniture Material

Fishing nets and ocean plastic are an especially high-impact material stream: they address ghost gear (one of the most damaging marine pollutants) and have strong storytelling value for designers and brands.

A. Furniture collections from fishing nets & ocean plastic

Mater – Ocean Collection (Denmark)
Mater’s Ocean chairs and tables use recycled ocean plastic, including discarded fishing nets processed by PLASTIX. Each chair is made with hundreds of grams of ocean plastic, and the collection includes lounge chairs, dining chairs and tables. Homecrux+1
Interesting Times Gang – Kelp Collection (Sweden)
The Kelp Collection is a seating collection made with large-scale 3D printing using a composite of recycled fishing nets and wood fiber (based on Stora Enso bio-composite). It’s exactly the kind of application you’re targeting: 3D-printed, sculptural, and explicitly made from nets. Scandinavian Design+1
Ocean Outdoor Furniture (Heals / Nanna Ditzel reissue)
Iconic mid-century designs reimagined in ocean waste plastic (including fishing-related plastic). Tables and chairs are produced using ocean plastic granulate, proving that recycled marine materials can carry premium design brands. Heal’s
POLYWOOD & Zuiver Ocean-type chairs
POLYWOOD’s “Ocean Chair” and Zuiver’s similar ocean plastic chairs use plastic waste collected from beaches and waterways to create outdoor seating, marketed very clearly around the “clean oceans” story. POLYWOOD+1
Plastic Whale – Whale Collection (Netherlands)
The Whale boardroom table, Whale Tail chair, and Barnacle lamp are all made from PET bottles fished out of Amsterdam canals, turned into sheet/structural material for furniture. Not 3D-printed, but an excellent example of circular, story-driven marine plastic furniture. Plastic Whale
Office and contract seating from nets
- Humanscale Smart Ocean chair – Office chair seat components made from recycled fishing nets. My WordPress
- Okamura Renet fabric – Upholstery fabric woven from recycled fishing nets and PET, used on seating collections targeting the marine plastic problem. Okamura

These examples show that “fishing net furniture” is already a recognized category at mid–high design levels.

3. Fishing Nets → 3D Printing Materials (Filament & Pellets)

For your use case (large-format printers like MAMA), the key is not just furniture brands but companies transforming nets into 3D-printable feedstock.

Fishy Filaments / OrCA (UK)
- Fishy Filaments pioneered technology to convert end-of-life nylon fishing nets into PA6 filament and pellets for 3D printing and injection molding. Fishy Filaments®+2Filament2Print+2
- Recent coverage of OrCA (evolution of Fishy Filaments) shows they turn discarded nets into high-value nylon beads and composites, with a carbon footprint claimed to be under 3% of virgin nylon. The Guardian+1
Recycled nylon from fishing nets in AM
Technical reviews emphasize that recycled nylon from fishing nets retains mechanical performance close to virgin PA6 while drastically reducing environmental impact, making it suitable for 3D printing applications where high strength is needed. Zeal 3D

This is important because it links the fishing net story directly to 3D printing—you can realistically specify “pellets/filament from recycled fishing nets” as a material line for certain products (chairs, outdoor structures, maybe furniture frames).

4. How Designers Can Use These Precedents

A. Prove market viability

The examples above show that:

customers already buy planters, chairs, tables and benches from recycled plastics;
fishing-net-based products can live at a premium design level (Mater, Kelp Collection);
3D-printed furniture from recycled feedstock is already commercial (vanPlestik, Benkert-Banke planter, Kelp Collection).

This makes it easier to position Personal Factory as an evolution of an existing, proven category rather than something “too experimental”.

B. Build material stories into each product

For your future catalog/site, you can explicitly differentiate lines by material story, for example:

Urban Ocean Line – furniture printed from pellets made of recycled fishing nets and ocean plastic.
Canal / City Plastic Line – furniture from mixed urban plastic waste streams.
Bottle Loop Line – products printed from recycled PET bottles.

Each product page can reference the real-world precedents and talk about the broader movement (e.g., mention that similar net-based composites are used in collections like Kelp or Ocean chairs).

C. Technical implications for large-format printing

rPP & rPETG – good base materials for planters, bookshelves, and furniture shells.
Recycled PA6 from fishing nets – ideal for high-strength parts, frames, structural elements, or limited-edition pieces with a strong sustainability story. Zeal 3D+1

5. “Remember the Nets” – Why Fishing Nets Should Be a Key Narrative

When you talk about recycled materials on the Personal Factory site and in the magazine, it’s powerful to explicitly mention fishing nets as one of the most meaningful sources:

They address ghost gear, a major threat to marine life. The Guardian
They are visually iconic (everyone understands the problem when they see the green nets).
They already have a design language in the market (Ocean collections, Kelp seating, Smart Ocean chairs). My WordPress+3Scandinavian Design+3Homecrux+3
They now exist as 3D printing pellets and filaments, making them directly relevant to your MAMA printers. Good News Network+3Fishy Filaments®+3Filament2Print+3

You can use this as a recurring theme across the site and magazine:
“From ghost gear to furniture” – showing how advanced 3D printing converts one of the worst marine waste streams into sculptural, long-lived objects.