Recycled Seat Belts from Cars Are Great for Sitting On

I visited the newest branch of the San Jose Public Library near my home the other day. The brand new facilities were beautiful and I was enjoying the free A/C and WiFi when I noticed the most interesting furniture. The chairs in the library appeared to have seating surfaces woven from automotive seat belts. They had that typical shiny nylon webbing seen in so many cars for the past 40 years. Ok, I’ll admit that noticing this probably raises my “car geek” status a few levels.

I looked into this a bit and found that chairs like this are made by a couple of different designers. Here are some online review of the chairs.

They aren’t cheap, but that webbing can supposedly hold up to 5000 lbs and should last forever. It’s also an interesting way to reuse a waste product. Though I imagine that these designers aren’t using belts out the local junkyards I might need to pay a visit to my local dismantler next time I need to put new webbing on lawn furniture.

While working at eBay years ago I built a trade show display by buying pairs of old car seats online and having them mounted on stands so we could use them as lounge furniture. My favorites were the metallic red vinyl 1965 GTO seats. These seatbelt chairs might be a way to introduce a bit of automotive art into my home in a manner more acceptable to my better half. What do you think?

Steve Haas

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