The sofa made by recycling the barricades from Paris protests

If industrial production can no longer afford to waste resources and energy, reuse and assemblage are not only an obvious solution but also among the most viable and practical. Of the millions of tons of waste produced by factories, a good portion of the material retains all the characteristics necessary for its use. It is "systemic" waste that is produced by machinery in a serial and standardized manner: it already contains within itself the DNA of design.

Seeing us a resource and not waste is also the French company Maximum, which designs quality furniture and makes it from those semi-finished products. "We draw on our suppliers' bins for the furniture, thus limiting the extraction of new materials from the Earth," they tell Domus, "in addition, we save energy--already used by the manufacturers--by limiting the energy needed to turn them back into tables, chairs, shelves and more."

In a process that hybridizes artisanal and industrial processes, pieces of a collection of furniture take shape in the Ivry-sur-Seine factory, all strongly characterized by the aesthetic traits of the semi-finished products, which are often colorful and affordable.

Also part of the collection is Bultan, a metal sofa obtained by bending damaged roadside barriers, but still valuable for the strength of their material. "For its structure we recovered the metal road barriers used by the Paris Police Headquarters. Although they are designed to be very sturdy, during demonstrations or protest actions they are often deformed by the crowd. The damage forces the entire object to be thrown away, even when the main structure is intact. Instead, it only takes a few bends to turn a Vauban barrier into the skeleton of the sofa."

The wooden planks are salvaged from the scraps of Bultex, a French company that produces fir bed slats and discards many of them for aesthetic reasons, due to the presence of natural knots. The upholstery, on the other hand, was designed to take advantage of leftover scraps of high-quality foam generated by Maison de la Mousse et du Caoutchouc, which can no longer be used in their production because they are too small. The fabric upholstery comes from Trèves, a company specializing in automotive trim: their models and prototypes, destined to end up in the waste, guarantee the highest engineering and technical quality.