Embodied Land: growing a chair

I found this information via a twitter message.Its about growing a wooden  chair directly on the land. And is a nice way to illustrate the Embodied land approach: we can calculate the energy that went into processing material to create a ” industrial” chair: the factory, the transport, screws, and glue,as well as the land to produce all these materials: the Circular Energy. And then explore several alternatives, to find out which has the lowest Embodied Land, and therfore reduces the potential of resources on earth the least. (In terms of entropy growth etc.)

But this is a benchmark for all these technological advanced approaches: A chair directly produced by land and solar energy: This designer, Gavin Munro , is doing just that: he plants some willow trees, and bends the trees in the form of a chair. Just wait 4-8 years years and there you are.

Its a about 1 m2 of land, for average 6 years: ie the EL is 6 m2-year. Thats about the lowest you can get for the functional service of sitting in a chair.

(The labor is not counted, since without doing this the person would need to eat food ( absorb energy) anyway. Thats part of a personal EL, which is another part of the MAXergy approach.)

The projects website is here.