Well, christ, what do we do with ANYTHING we throw away? I'm not saying it's bad to consider it, but everything we have ever owned or will own is going to end up in a landfill someday. It might take a day or it might take 100 years, but that's fact. We die, our things are out of our hands.

The N ew Stool does not recycle computer parts, resin, and melted aluminum so much as reuse them... it merely delays their appearance in a landfill. The question is whether the junk encased in Alonso's stool could do more work elsewhere? If he (or more likely, someone else) didn't remove the trash so that he could encase it in plastic and sell the stool for big dollars, would it have been recycled instead or just sit in the landfill for another few hundred/thousand/million years? The truly eco-friendly choice would be to use an existing stool or refurbish an old one to your liking, but who said Alonso is truly interested in reducing waste? His stool seems more an ironic object than a solution.

If I owned that stool I would not delay its appearance in a landfill. Yikes.

How about reusing materials in a way that makes people not want to throw it right back away?

It looks like barf

Everything doesn't end up in a landfill. Sometimes people hand things down to others. I don't like this stool but some grandchild fifty years from now might think it was a cool relic from a different time.

What about people whose houses are filled with their ancestors' furniture (that includes mid-century modern, people)? I'm a big believer in re-use. I like to think that my mother's desk that sits in the front hall, in perfect shape, that she used in high school and I still use to pay my bills, will sit in her great-great niece's house some day, still in use. There is no reason why it shouldn't be the case. It better not wind up in a landfill!

That thing is pretty ugly, he should have just used black resin and told us that all that garbage was in there. I'd take his word for it. :)

Matt at http://www.goodnightmoonfuton.com

I don't think it is supposed to be "Green" per say. It says to me look at all the crap we throw away instead of trying to re use it.
I too prefer to use items- even with some tweaking or repair I like the fact that I am giving a new lease on life on something that would be garbage. But what I would really like everyone to do is just to use less. Think about every purchase- do I really need this? Is my old one still good/useful/ etc.. And condsider packaging. So much of our purchases today are just encased in useless extra packaging.

I think I would never have this in my house- but it's an interesting statement.

"but is this stool really wasting any less?" .... just money in my opinion

Everything doesn't end up in a landfill. Sometimes people hand things down to others. I don't like this stool but some grandchild fifty years from now might think it was a cool relic from a different time.

Which I acknowledged. But if you think that something you own will last forever, be cherished forever, you are sadly mistaken. Everything is thrown out eventually.

People seem to have no sense of the scope of time and the impermanence of human existence. I know I'm getting existential here, but seriously. Everything dies, everything is thrown away. Yes, even Grandma's beautiful sidetable, etc.