Cardboard Chair

This week, I decided to research some of the problems that relate to manufacturing cardboard, which is easily the largest municipal solid waste component worldwide. Cardboard is manufactured using pulp, which can only be extracted from trees. Because trees play such a vital art in our environment regulating our oxygen/carbon dioxide levels and maintaining the the rain formation cycle in the world, it makes sense that we should not only attempt to cut down on the amount of cardboard we use but should also attempt to repurpose and reuse the cardboard efficiently and effectively. Since our society relies on cardboard to package and ship products, the only viable solution available to reduce the amount of cardboard would be to find a way to effectively repurpose cardboard. 

 For my project this week, I decided to use some cardboard to create both a functional and aesthetically appealing chair; this unfortunately was an extremely difficult task. For one thing, cutting the cardboard using an xacto knife and scissors was rather difficult since both tools dulled midway through the project and I ended up having to use a saw to cut the remainder of the cardboard and properly fix the minor mishaps that I had made with the knife and scissors. Another problem that I encountered was having the cardboard slabs not properly stick together. Originally, my plan was to use hot glue to stick each of the cardboard pieces together but after realizing that this method was not only ineffective but also extremely time-consuming, I decided to take pieces of string to tie the cardboard bundles together. While this worked without compromising the aesthetics of the project, it was a challenge to make sure that the pieces of cardboard were properly aligned.

 In the future, I intend on finding other items (e.g. paper) to construct recycled art; while the end result was aesthetically appealing and more functional that the previous week's project, I found it far more difficult to construct an art project using cardboard than soda cans since it was more time-consuming to glue and shape.