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Brilliant, Beautiful French Tables Made from Four Types of Waste

…including paint overspray!

By Rain Noe - March 19

in Furniture Design

This handsome Clavex table is by Maximum, the French company that turns industrial and municipal waste into useful, saleable pieces of furniture. It's made from no less than four waste products, some of them quite surprising: Retired scaffolding, glass panels from decommissioned offices, wine corks and industrial paint overspray.

A table with a past

Regularly, [scaffolding supplier] Altrad-Plettac retires a portion of its scaffolding inventory. Worn by long years of rental use, these pieces are no longer fit to hoist a worker high into the sky, yet—closer to the ground—they retain all their structural integrity.

Glass panels too strong to be kept

[In office buildings], glass partitions are cut to fit the specific space they occupy. Tempered as a safety measure, they cannot be recut. When removed, these glass panes—despite being in perfect condition—end up in the landfill. Victims of their fixed dimensions, they are otherwise impossible to reuse. Only a project tailored to their exact measurements can save them from this shattered fate.

Infinite Clavex variations—yet each one unique

[In manufacturing,] epoxy paint is powder sprayed onto steel components before being baked at 200°C. During this spraying process, a portion of the powder is drawn into the ventilation system, where it mixes and blends over the course of days within recovery bins.

The resulting mixture is perfectly reusable. One simply has to accept that each color will be unique and unpredictable.

Reconstituted Cork

The cork used to cap the ends of the scaffolding tubes is made from ground-up wine corks. The glass top simply rests on top—held in place by just enough friction to prevent it from sliding.