Italian designer Tobia Zambotti has used discarded single-use masks as sofa padding to draw attention to the amount of plastic waste generated by the coronavirus pandemic, and the Couch-19 design has been named as a direct reference to Covid-19.
The light blue masks are covered in clear PVC to resemble the tip of an iceberg as a nod to the fact that the 10,000 face coverings used to create the sofa are only a fraction of the 129 billion that have been thrown away globally every month since the start of the pandemic.
Estimates suggest that around 75 per cent of these will end up in landfill or floating in our waterways, where over the course of around 450 years they will break down into microplastics and ingested by marine life.
