Made By Monkeys

Red dye is a beast in plastics and especially in cheap plastics, which won't win any prizes for outstanding color stability and UV resistance The kind of plastics that, well, designers most likely chose for the seats in England's new £800M Wembley Stadium. According to the gossipy London Metro, 17,000 seats have faded from a pleasing red to the kind of pink color not typically associated with British soccer fans. So here's the vicious design challenge: ABS and PVC have great color stability and UV resistance but are expensive. But ABS is pricey. And PVC ranks right up there with disposable diapers on the hate list of tree huggers here. Advice to designers: Think beige -- it's the new red, isn't it?