The Broom Chair: Philippe Starck's Chair Made From Swept-Up Factory Waste

The Emeco Broom Chair is a stacking chair designed by Philippe Starck from a compound of reclaimed polypropylene and wood fibre — factory waste, ground and pressed, rather than new plastic. Emeco launched it in 2012, one of several chairs Starck has designed for the house since 2000, built to prove that what a workshop sweeps into the bin can become the chair itself, not just a footnote about it.

What the compound is actually made from

The recipe is specific rather than a general "recycled materials" claim: 75% reclaimed polypropylene and 15% reclaimed wood fibre — together, 90% of the chair by weight is waste — bound with 10% glass fibre for structural strength. The mixture is ground and compressed into pellets, melted, and injected into the mould with gas, which leaves the finished seat and back hollow rather than solid plastic. That step is why a Broom Chair is noticeably lighter than its bulk suggests: the material is doing the work of aluminium's hollow tube sections, using a completely different process.

A decade-old sketch, remade in waste

The form did not start in 2012. Starck first drew a bucket-seat chair for Emeco around 2001 — a curved seat and backrest set into a simple frame, conceived as a lower-cost addition to the catalogue. It went unbuilt for years until Emeco found a way to mould that shape from the reclaimed-plastic compound instead of virgin material, widening the body and squaring the legs to suit the new process. The result launched as Broom in 2012 — unveiled first in Milan at the Salone del Mobile, then shown in New York at ICFF during that year's Design Week — with the material dictating the final shape rather than the other way round.

Why it's called Broom

Starck's own description of the idea is plain rather than poetic marketing copy: "Imagine a guy who takes a humble broom and starts to clean the workshop, and with this dust he makes new magic." The name is literal, not a metaphor stretched to fit. The polypropylene is offcut plastic from industrial production lines; the wood fibre is sawdust and scrap from lumber mills — the actual sweepings of two different factory floors, combined into one material and one chair.

Where Broom sits next to Emeco's other Starck chairs

Broom followed a run of more formal Starck-for-Emeco collaborations, including the Hudson — his first design for the house, made for New York's Hudson Hotel in 2000 in high-polished aluminium and now in MoMA's permanent collection as a gift from the manufacturer — and the Heritage, a hand-finished aluminium chair from 2001 in the same polished or brushed register. Broom reverses that logic rather than extending it: instead of polishing recycled aluminium to a mirror shine, it leaves the reclaimed compound visibly matte and slightly grained, closer to the texture of the waste it started as than to anything trying to look expensive.

Emeco builds the Broom Stacking Chair in the same Hanover, Pennsylvania factory as its aluminium chairs, rates it for outdoor use, and will recycle a Broom chair at the end of its life back into the same wood-polypropylene material for a new one. In 2014 the house extended the compound into a Broom stool at counter and bar heights, narrowing the seat while keeping the same 90%-waste recipe — evidence the material was built to be a system, not a one-off object.

Objena carries the Broom Stacking Chair at AUD 660, alongside the hand-polished Heritage Stacking Chair (AUD 3,700) as the other end of what Starck has done with this house; the wider story is in the Emeco chapter.

Three questions

What is the Emeco Broom Chair made of? A compound of 75% reclaimed polypropylene and 15% reclaimed wood fibre — waste swept from plastics plants and lumber mills — mixed with 10% glass fibre for strength, then gas-injected during moulding so the finished chair is hollow and light rather than solid plastic.

Why is it called the Broom Chair? Philippe Starck named it for the process, not a shape: "Imagine a guy who takes a humble broom and starts to clean the workshop, and with this dust he makes new magic." The polypropylene and wood fibre are literally factory-floor sweepings, pressed into pellets and moulded into the chair.

Is the Broom Chair suitable for outdoor use, and can it be recycled? Yes to both, per Emeco's own specifications — the compound is weather-stable enough for outdoor placement, and Emeco recycles Broom chairs at the end of their life back into the same wood-polypropylene material for a new one.