Money manufacturers the world over are forever contending with counterfeiters. Before the U.K. introduced a new pound coin in 2017, for example, the earlier version was easy enough to fake that there were tens of millions of fraudulent copies in circulation. The same goes for paper bank notes, which over the years have been printed with increasingly high-tech features such as holograms, watermarks, and distinctive material blends. More recently, many countries have also implemented plastic coatings.
Banque de France, a central money-producing outfit in Europe, has adopted a technology called EverFit, which includes a polymer coating on cotton-blend notes that increases durability. Every year, up to three billion notes may be printed, but they must adhere to the strictest standards of technical quality. If they don’t, they’re shredded. One drawback, though, is that they’re not recyclable. That’s where Paris-based furniture design studio Maximum saw a unique opportunity.
Maximum’s unique line of stools, called Billex, repurposes the masses of discarded bills into modern, functional objects. With a cotton substrate and two layers of plastic coating, the tiny fragments can be manipulated with heat and compressed into a hard shape. Not only is the stool a useful and stylish design piece unto itself, produced in a variety of colors, but the Billex concept is also something of a prototype. It can be employed for a wide range of applications, as the shredded notes—and the stools themselves—can be upcycled and compressed into virtually any shape.
See more on Maximum’s Instagram.
