
October 10, 2024
How the Furniture Industry is Stepping Up on Circularity

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.”

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.



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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- Allsteel
- Circular Design
- Circularity in products
- Embodied Carbon
- furniture
- Gunlocke
- Humanscale
- Keilhauer
- LMN Architects
- MSR Design
- Reseat
- Steelcase
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