If you don't know about the island-sized masses of rubbish floating in the oceans, we apologize for ruining your day. But the gross truth is that there are 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre in the world’s oceans, and that number is growing rapidly.

Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves pair sustainability with smart design at Studio Swine, and their Sea Chair project does just that. Marine plastic is captured from the ocean, shredded, melted down and molded to create a simple, attractive stool. The project is technically open source, so you can find directions on how to make your own Sea Chair (including how to build a portable furnace) at their website.

With that said, the process of gathering, separating, melting down and molding the plastic seems labor intensive, and the amount of rubbish actually removed from the water is negligible. So we wonder, is this potentially a part of a larger solution, or just a nice art project?