By Rose Morrison, managing editor of Renovated
How much of your furnishings are green or sustainable? Are you confident in your answer? Surprisingly, they are among the most carbon-intensive aspects of built environments. More environmentally friendly alternatives are emerging as awareness of this issue increases. Here’s what the future of furniture will look like.
What Makes Furniture Green or Sustainable?
You may consider the difference between green and sustainable furniture insignificant, but the distinction is essential. Sustainability is a self-supporting closed loop in which items can be reused, recycled or repurposed indefinitely. From an environmental perspective, that means you must be able to collect, produce and use something without depleting renewable resources or harming the planet.
Sustainability also considers functionality and longevity. If something breaks right after you buy it, it probably isn’t sustainable — the effort and resources required to make it usable again may offset any gains, even if you recycle it. After all, the average piece of furniture generates 47 kilograms of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of just over 5 gallons of fuel. For reference, a 30-miles-per-gallon vehicle could take you on a 160-mile trip on 5 gallons of gas.
The broader implications of sustainability involve society. Do the factory workers who make the furniture get paid a fair price for their labor? Are their working conditions clean and safe? Does the manufacturing company engage in unethical business practices? You have to move past the product and consider whether the system as a whole can sustain itself.
In contrast, green furniture focuses on responsible sourcing — whether household items are made from recycled, eco-friendly, upcycled or biodegradable materials. This label only concerns the environment’s health, not the total implications of procurement, production, shipping and utilization. Fundamentally, it promotes environmental well-being. While it can indirectly reduce your home’s carbon footprint, that is not necessarily its purpose.
Why Choose Sustainable Home Furnishings?
Every one of your belongings has a carbon footprint. For example, almost all painted items indirectly produce emissions early in their life cycles. Paint creates greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane and nitric oxide, which account for 75% of paint production’s carbon footprint.
Don’t feel self-conscious if you’ve never considered your furniture’s environmental impacts before — it isn’t unusual. In fact, it’s not uncommon for industry professionals to gloss over fixtures and furnishings when calculating a building’s carbon footprint, thus inadvertently skewing their project’s sustainability metrics.
The Carbon Impact of Furniture
In one case study, researchers discovered that 56% of embodied carbon (EQ) — the carbon footprint of a building before it becomes operational — was not accounted for in standard modeling. Even a typical office chair had an average global warming potential of 90 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent. Most emissions came from material sourcing and assembly. Using salvaged furniture, the team reduced the EQ by 33%, demonstrating design choices matter.
Unaccounted-for furniture could more than double your home’s carbon impact. Even the packaging your items ship in can have an effect. Research shows 36% of all plastic waste comes from packaging, 85% of which is landfilled. To make matters worse, approximately 98% of single-use plastics are made with fossil fuels.
While data from the Environmental Protection Agency shows having an energy-efficient home and a fuel-efficient car can reduce your carbon footprint by 34%, you must consider your lifestyle. The average single-family house is 2,467 square feet — large enough to pack multiple bedrooms and bathrooms with your belongings.
Examples of Sustainable Furniture
You’ve probably noticed an uptick in climate change activism and reporting in recent years. Various companies, research centers and design studios have responded to this heightened awareness by reimagining home furnishings as environmentally friendly. The result is often an experimental creation that comments on more significant societal issues.
VTT’s Bio-Compostable Chair
One example of sustainable design is the bio-compostable chair from Finland’s VTT Technical Research Centre and the furniture manufacturer ISKU. It uses a cellulose-plastic compound containing cellulose fibers, synthetic resin and wood pulp. The two groups sourced natural materials from nearby Finnish forests, likely helping them avoid contributing to forest degradation.
VTT and ISKU repurposed paper-making technology to create the bio-compostable chair. Miika Nikinmaa, the biomaterial solutions lead at VTT, said the process is cost-efficient and scalable. This production method is approximately 26% more affordable than conventional alternatives. Interestingly, Nikinmaa noted that it provides “nearly limitless options” for customizing furniture.
Examples of Green Furniture
As you know, green furniture mainly focuses on environmentally friendly material sourcing. The third Emerge exhibition that took place as part of Singapore’s FIND design fair provided many examples. Since the theme was “These Precious Things,” many professionals focused on the concept of reuse.
Reused Rice Husk and Eggshell Tables
Genevieve Ang and Georgina Foo run a design studio called Gin&G and displayed multiple pieces at the Emerge exhibition. They used eggshells and rice husks — the hard protective coating on grains of rice — to create a chair, side tables and a light. Despite the odd-sounding material choice, you’ll find the furnishings look relatively normal.
Upcycled Plastic and Concrete Sinks
The Los Colados project is another excellent example of green furniture. It is a series of sinks designed by LOCUS — a cross-disciplinary architectural studio — in collaboration with Muebles de Concreto. The idea was to raise awareness about resource scarcity through the strategic use of urban debris, so don’t be surprised if you find the rainbow flecks of plastic scattered in the cement strangely beautiful.
The designers were influenced by Mexico City — it is among the world’s most populated cities, so it generates a lot of waste. They used crushed pieces of old plastic bottles, computer casings, SIM cards and refrigerators as aggregates in a concrete mixture. While concrete and plastics are inherently unsustainable, repurposing them was eco-friendly.
How Can You Tell if Your Furniture Is Eco-Friendly?
Unless you know an extensive network of industry professionals, you likely don’t have pieces from LOCUS, VTT or Gin&G. Fortunately, your possessions don’t need to be displayed at exhibitions to be considered sustainable or green. The first thing to examine is the material choice. Evaluate texture, look and weight.
Material Selection
Reclaimed wood, cotton and bamboo are common sustainable materials that are relatively easy to identify. Determining whether woods, plastics and metals are eco-friendly may be more challenging since you can’t tell if they’ve been recycled or contributed to environmental degradation.
Certification Label
When in doubt, look for a label. Companies often tout their climate-friendly efforts because it improves their brand perception. One example is the Global Green Tag — an independent rating system with a green circle logo. Some certifications are region-specific. For instance, Good Environmental Choice Australia is the country’s only independent, nonprofit eco-labeling program that operates in multiple industries.
Image Recognition
If all else fails, use image recognition technology for a reverse search. If you look at the listing where you bought the item, you can see what it was made from and whether it is green or sustainable. This approach is particularly beneficial because it lets you research the company and suppliers behind the product to tell whether they are environmentally friendly.
How to Spot Greenwashing Furniture Companies
Have you ever heard of greenwashing? Companies use this deceptive practice to make you think their products are more environmentally sound than they are. They typically do this using ambiguous descriptions, misleading statistics or misguided packaging designs. Since terms like “green” and “eco-friendly” are unregulated, they often get away with it.
Even those that you believe are upstanding may be greenwashing. According to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, voluntary certifications often do not meet stringent environmental standards. While some can’t prove furniture didn’t originate from deforested areas, others occasionally make exceptions for deforestation.
Sometimes, manufacturers that violate voluntary standards don’t even have their certifications revoked. With the European Union set to ban goods linked to forest destruction by 2025, many of these greenwashed labels will likely disappear — but this trend will likely remain an issue for you if you live elsewhere.
To spot greenwashing, look at the furniture’s tag. Generally, foam, paint, wood and metal are not sustainable unless sourced and produced responsibly. If you notice a certification label, do some digging to determine whether the claim is legitimate. You want to find specific details on where the materials come from and how the company offsets its greenhouse gas emissions.
The Future of Sustainable and Green Furniture Design
Becoming aware of resource scarcity, indirect greenhouse gas emissions and embodied carbon footprints can help you live more consciously. At the very least, it fills the gap between raw material sourcing and delivery, helping you make better, more sustainable decisions about where you get your belongings.
As more people follow in your footsteps, green and sustainable design may become a staple in every home. While it could take decades to catch on at scale, the long-term benefits of environmentally friendly furniture may help accelerate adoption rates. As a result, the built environment’s carbon footprint would shrink drastically, mitigating climate change.
While activists will likely push for sustainable furniture to become the norm, doing so would require extensive overhauls of supply chains and material sourcing efforts to ensure traceability and transparency. Since pieces often ship internationally or are drop shipped — moved by third parties outside the usual distribution channels — green furnishings are more likely.
About the Author
Rose is the managing editor of Renovated and has been writing in the construction industry for over five years. She’s most passionate about sustainable building and incorporating similar resourceful methods into our world. For more from Rose, you can follow her on Twitter.