Upcycling plastic to make high-end furniture

Collaborating with other sustainable furniture brands to make a lasting difference – A Dunia Dream.

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk. PHOTOGRAPH BY PATRICK FALLON — REUTERS

I was reading an article about Elon Musk this week in Forbes where he was cited as being not just the richest, but the most influential person of the 21st century.

It dawned on me – imagine if we tackled the sustainable furniture and eco-friendly home market the same way he went about designing rockets and building cities on planets in outer space. This is his life on top of managing Tesla and revolutionising the way we will drive and travel in the 21st century, along with 6 kids, 2 ex-wives and 6 other businesses he is co-founder and/or CEO of. I thought if I had the chance for an elevator pitch, this would be a walk in the park for him.

I imagined that I managed to grab 5 minutes of his 144, 5-minute slots (which he allows himself per task outside of design work) in his 12-hour days.  What would I say? How would I grab his attention in that amount of time regarding the environmentally-friendly furniture market, conscious consumerism and how we could and should be market leaders in the environmentally friendly furniture design space?

What is our ask, what is our vision and how can we get there?

I would start by saying, “Hey Elon! Thanks for making time for me for the next 286 seconds. Did you know that the current global furniture market is worth 52 billion USD? That would use 594,285,714 planks of our greenwood plastic which is used to make beautiful sustainable high quality designed furniture. This would soak up 4,160,000 tonnes of low-grade plastic lumber (greenwood – saving the equivalent in weight in forest wood) from the plastic waste currently suffocating our world.”

“Now Elon, if we get down to business, this, in turn, could make 21 million of our beautiful and comfortable Kigelia couches priced affordably at $2,500 each. Surely, we could all come together and make this work. Any chance you have the extra bandwidth to become the leading environmental and sustainable furniture brand and lend us some of your super teams to manage the project of collaborations in the sphere, perhaps one massive building and invest in a high-grade Twin-Screw Sheet Extrusion Machine with a spec of 1200mm wide sheet with a throughput of 1 tonne per hour???” I would pay a lot to hear his reply.

Our Kigelia Sofa, recycling 126kg of plastic bound for the oceans.

The more we dig, the more we realise we need other conventional furniture brands, county councils, governments and plastic waste suppliers to work together with us. Like the very nature of biodiversity itself, our world network relies on each other.

For this, it is Dunia’s vision to start linking and plugging into pre-existing environmental brands in the space. Upholsters, those making PET fabrics, carpenters, leading sustainable retailers and suppliers. We need to start to work together to revolutionise the sustainable furniture and eco-friendly home/lifestyle market to give consumers the end product they are crying out for – acting as a magnet to all of that plastic waste suffocating our fish and oceans and coastline.

One can only dream, it’s what got us this far…