RELAXING in a backyard hammock is one of summer’s great pleasures, right up there with Wiffle ball and barbecuing. There is something inexplicably soothing about rocking gently above the ground while encompassed in a web of ropes.

The prospect of being cradled by stiff nylon straps doesn’t sound quite so appealing. But the Ting Sling, a new hammock made from seat belts, is more comfortable than it sounds — at least according to its designer, Inghua Ting.


“It doesn’t hug you like a string hammock — obviously, the seat belts don’t stretch,” said Ms. Ting, owner of a design firm in London that bears her name. “But it has the right degree of curve for your body.”

Environmental friendliness, rather than comfort, is actually the Ting Sling’s chief selling point. The hammock’s seat belts are all end of line — that is, they were made for vehicles that are either no longer in production or have changed their safety specifications. Ms. Ting, who founded her company in 2000 after graduating from the Royal College of Art in London, also uses such surplus seat belts to produce a popular line of handbags and satchels.

The idea for the Ting Sling occurred to Ms. Ting in summer 2012, while she was swinging in a hammock at a friend’s garden party. She realized that every hammock she had ever used was essentially the same, with crisscrossed ropes that form a diamond pattern.

Ms. Ting resolved to create a more eye-catching hammock, as well as one that would take advantage of her contacts among seat-belt manufacturers.

Weaving seat belts into a hammock was a bigger challenge than she initially anticipated, largely because of the straps’ lack of give. “We started by weaving the hammock completely flat,” she said. “But when we tried it out, we would tend to swing right out of it.”

For later prototypes, she and her design team used three-dimensional modeling software to pinpoint the ideal amount of curvature for the hammock’s center. They learned to place longer segments of seat belt toward the middle, as well as how best to stitch the straps to the hammock’s edges.

After working through nearly two dozen prototypes, Ms. Ting sent a final version to a testing laboratory in Scotland to make sure the hammock could support even the portliest of nappers. The lab reported that the hammock could withstand more than 550 pounds of iron weights; just to be safe, however, Ms. Ting does not recommend the product for people over 260 pounds.

The hammock’s parts come from 10 factories in Europe, including ones in Britain, Spain and Poland. The seat belts’ colors — and thus those of the Ting Slings — vary according to their original purpose. Ms. Ting says she has lately been receiving plenty of lime-green belts from a factory that had intended them for use in British ambulances. She also has a steady supply of bright orange belts, courtesy of a manufacturer that made them for tractors and other heavy-duty machines.

To further bolster the Ting Sling’s green credentials, Ms. Ting buys carbon offsets from Growaforest.com to make up for the energy consumed during production — specifically, the petroleum used to move the seat belts from the factories to London.

The Ting Slings have been on sale since May, when they were shown at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York. So far, Ms. Ting says, she has sold more than 50 to people who’ve made inquiries through her company’s Web site, TingLondon.com.

Sustainable lounging does not come cheap: the Ting Slings are priced at £200, or about $407. A low-end hammock from Wal-Mart, by comparison, can cost under $60. Ms. Ting’s customers are paying a steep premium to swing without guilt.

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