STEELCASE THINK Originally introduced in 2004 as a breakthrough in design for disassembly, Think received an update in 2013 to be more comfortable and dematerialized. It was the first chair to receive Cradle to Cradle certification, and it can now be purchased with CarbonNeutral certification as well. steelcase.com

How the Furniture Industry is Stepping Up on Circularity 

Responding to new studies that spotlight the environmental impact of furniture, manufacturers, dealers, and start-ups are accelerating transparency, reuse, and decarbonization. 

TO UNDERSTAND the holistic carbon impacts of our buildings, we need to look inside them. Specifically, we must direct our attention to interior renovations of commercial spaces, the frequency at which they occur, and what happens to all the discarded task chairs, ceiling tiles, floor coverings, casework, and more once these items are deemed obsolete. In a 2022 study conducted by MSR Design, the firm highlights an EPA estimate that some 8.5 million tons of office assets end up in U.S. landfills annually. “As a result, it is critical to normalize salvaging, reusing, and refurbishing in the design process to reduce furniture embodied carbon,” the authors note. 

One answer to this problem is circularity. This buzzword is displacing the furniture industry’s past focus on recycling, which can be costly, energy-intensive, and, despite its name, a mostly linear process. Further, built-in adhesives and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) embedded in many products—typical of fast-furniture brands like Wayfair and Ikea—make any attempt at recycling this stuff more trouble than it’s worth. Functioning circular economies, meanwhile, rely on sequential and symbiotic relationships between manufacturers, designers, and consumers on dematerializing furniture design and reusing furniture before resorting to recycling. 

A case study by LMN Architects of one of the firm’s office remodel projects confirmed MSR Design’s findings that about nearly half of the embodied carbon emissions of the project were attributable to furniture. Chart Courtesy LMN Architects

Striving for Circularity in Furniture

“What does it really mean to be circular?” asks Jenn Chen, a partner at LMN Architects. “It means anything that still has a service life and is used as is, preferably on-site or as close to the site as possible. Something with recycled content is less good than a chair that’s already been manufactured and can still be in use.” 

LMN’s work in this arena is comprehensive. The firm’s own studies have concluded that the accumulated carbon impact of a building over 60 years due to repeated interior renovations can exceed the up-front (i.e., embodied) emissions associated with the building’s structure and envelope. Several furniture producers have tried in earnest to tackle the issue with EPDs, something Chen admits is good for comparing one task chair to another, for example, “but it doesn’t help me say this one or that one truly has lesser impact.” Chen wants strategic longevity, not more third-party verifications, because only one of these helps divert more stuff from landfills. She cites ongoing discussions at LMN to provide clients with project-specific end-of-life manuals, which can guide better decision-making when it comes to disassembling, salvaging, or even reselling unwanted furnishings rather than calling their local junk removal service. Landlords can even write waste diversion clauses into their leases, she says. “That’s something that at least prompts some forethought.” 

An in-depth study of the embodied carbon of commercial furniture published by MSR Design in 2022 analyzed documents from various manufacturers to provide the ranges of embodied carbon emissions for different offerings within a number of furniture types available today. Chart Courtesy MSR Design

A Second-Life Marketplace for Furniture

 Brandi Susewitz is in the second-life business. Her California-based company Reseat, which operates a marketplace platform for corporate clients looking to buy and sell secondhand furniture, was founded in the summer of 2020, when office buildings were nearly vacant, and tenants were already planning for a downsized future. What prompted Susewitz, an industry veteran, to launch 

 this company at such a time was learning that according to EPA figures, “less than 2 percent of contract furniture is actually receiving a second life or being properly recycled,” with the rest heading to landfills. “That seemed so crazy,” she says. 

Having a software partner to assist in managing large inventories is a huge asset for companies, as is having a navigable second-life market for any corporation that deals with sizable overhead. But arguably, the true value of this SaaS comes down to its receipt ID cards, or life cycle passports, that are provided for each chair, table, carpet tile, and more. An electronic file composed of dimensions, manufacturer, and other specs, including the item’s estimated embodied carbon, enables customers to calculate carbon reductions for a given project. 

This should also prove invaluable for corporations that need to comply with California’s new climate disclosure law, which will require reporting of scope 3 emissions starting in 2026. “It’s got everything you need to know about the product in order to resell it or do anything with it in the future,” Susewitz says. The platform also gives users a “Renew” option, in which they can obtain estimates for refurbishing services, and a forthcoming “Repair” option, which will provide detailed warranty information. 

HUMANSCALE PATH Designed by Todd Bracher and released in 2022, Path is a carbon-negative chair. Twenty-two pounds of recycled materials go into each chair, and rather than consuming energy the manufacturing operations of each chair prevent about 15 pounds of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. humanscale.com
KEILHAUER SWURVE Released in 2020, this carbon-neutral chair designed by Andrew Jones has five parts that are easy to disassemble. The chairs are manufactured in a zero-waste-to-landfill facility, and Keilhauer invested in carbon reduction and climate change mitigation projects to compensate for any unavoidable carbon emissions, such as those released during transportation. keilhauer.com
GUNLOCKE SILEA Developed with IDA Design, the Silea series consists of a host of solutions for private workspaces, including integrated height adjustability and smart storage. A life cycle assessment of Silea was conducted in 2017, and many offerings in the line have a valid Environmental Product Declaration. allsteeloffice.com

Not All Recycling is Wasteful

When it comes to new products entering the market, a growing cast of furniture manufacturers are practicing what could be called a culture of forethought. Since Keilhauer launched its first carbon-neutral product, the Swurve office chair, in 2020, which incorporated recycled metals and nylon and was designed with replaceable components, the company has added more than 20 certified carbon-neutral product collections to its portfolio, according to sustainability officer Joshua Belczyk. 

“We have a very robust waste minimization program within [our] facilities,” Belczyk says. He calculates the company maintains an 84.5 percent diversion rate, which extends to charitable donations, its popular take-back program, and other means. The company also provides end-of-life guidelines for its products, with instructions for proper disassembling, repurposing, or recycling. We select materials that can be reused, Belczyk says. “Keilhauer is a zero-waste-to-landfill operation and has been for a long time. Whatever is not being diverted to recycling is going into energy production.” 

For larger manufacturers with bigger footprints, the risk of succumbing to “greenhushing” is very real. Within HNI, which maintains a family of brands including Allsteel, Gunlocke, and others, the corporation is nearing completion of its in-house database that acts as an evolving chemicals library that can be cross-referenced with EPDs, ILFI’s Red List, and other benchmarks. “Our goal is to understand everything so we could build any product off of that,” says Lisa Brunie-McDermott, HNI’s director of corporate social responsibility. “We’re starting to transition [the database] from a library inventory to a product perspective, which is going to be really valuable.” 

As a large, integrated company, HNI benefits from owning “a significant portion of its manufacturing footprint,” says Andrea Gauss, director of client solutions. This enables them to know supply chains intimately as well as compare products with EPDs and Declare labels with other products in their portfolio, which, according to Gauss, is preferable to measuring one company’s declaration against another’s because calculations differ across brands. “We have to design in a way where reusing and recycling makes sense,” Brunie-McDermott says. 

The desired endgame is to have clients who understand the intrinsic value of the circularity mantra and have the necessary incentives to act accordingly. According to Brandi Susewitz, “We can’t save everything, but reuse has to be part of the conversation.” 

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