PLANCH™ is a product of urban construction waste: plywood and EPS foam are widely used in building and site construction. Because it is relatively brittle, and relatively cheap, huge quantities of EPS end up in landfills all over the world. There it will remain intact for centuries – EPS is virtually chemically indestructible under normal conditions. Our motivation for designing PLANCH™ is to remediate this situation. A planter-bench, PLANCH™ first and foremost combines potentially toxic chemical product with a plant. Phyto-remediation is one way to deal with vast quantities of toxins that we produce daily. While this is not a quid-pro-quo situation, PLANCH™ explores the notions of toxic & safe, banal & unique, manmade & natural in desperate search for balance and coexistence.

© Austin + Mergold

special thanks to J.R.G.Bowman of Local 204, Frank Parish & Yevgeniya Kononenko