The Scrap Lab chair is made out of denim scraps left on the factory floor. The designer, Yongyut Chanapron, is part of Design Team Scrap Lab, a team created out of the Building Innovation and Technology Department of Kasetsart University in Thailand. A lab with a mission to make new products out of leftover materials, scraps, from various manufacturing processes.

I like the denim chair because it elegantly uses these scraps, but I also like the fact that the design could just as easily use old, used denim or any fabric (leather?) for that matter. Better still, the steel frame is made of discarded steel so the entire chair is made of leftovers.

Every part of the chair is thought out. The hand sewn denim pattern is “upholstered”, filled, with even more denim scrap and then attached to the steel structure with ordinary jeans buttons. The chair is also multifunctional; detached the denim section can be used as a fashion item or as a seating pad for meditation or socializing.

Funded by Kasetsart University’s Business Incubation Center, Scrap Lab organizes workshops that bring together students, researchers and industry with the goal of creating prototypes that can eventually be manufactured commercially. Manufacturers often don’t know what to do with scraps other than throw them away, Scrap Lab can help. Here’s hoping that the Scrap Lab project itself is exportable.