Special issue
HOW TO...
The long road from
THINKING
LANDFILL…
In this How To… guide, Joanna Knight identifies some of the environmental issues facing the furniture industry and the practices that can be adopted to support greater sustainability within it
S
urely by now, any doubts about climate change and the impact human activity is having on the planet have been well and truly quashed. Google, for example, has announced that it will explicitly prohibit all advertisements which contradict the “well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change”. With the UK hosting the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow this November (see Hot Topic, page 24), attention is focused on positive action to halt our environmental damage. The office furniture market is not exempt from this damage. Furniture manufactured from virgin resources, which is currently the majority, contributes to 30% of the carbon footprint of a commercial building over its entire life. In 2017, the Furniture Industry Research Association (FIRA) reported that over 600 tonnes of furniture and mattresses are sent to landfill every year, with an estimated £760 million ($1 million) of recyclable and reusable resources from all waste materials being lost to UK landfills annually.
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POSITIVE START BUT NOT ENOUGH
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Some suppliers have made a start by implementing environmental management systems (EMS) and assessing the carbon footprint of their operations. These actions are positive but do not, unless emissions are measured throughout the supply chain, incorporate the impact of components or imported finished products. FIRA’s Healthy Workstations report, back in 2011 meanwhile, acknowledged that in the majority of furniture ranges examined, the embedded carbon contained within the materials and processes used for the manufacture of the product were the highest contributors to its carbon footprint, rather than company factors such as utilities or transportation.
As such, reducing the materials used or opting for lower impact alternatives can considerably reduce an item’s carbon footprint. MEASURING ‘GREEN’
Sustainability is ultimately about balancing three key factors: the environment, society and the economy. Any organisation should therefore be reviewing and committing to an Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) strategy embracing overall corporate and social responsibility – not just carbon emissions. An EMS provides a framework through which environmental performance can be monitored, improved and controlled. Many members of the furniture industry have already achieved the international standard ISO EN 14001, but this is just a starting point. Working on the basis that ‘what gets measured gets managed’, an EMS is based around continuous improvement and a mechanism to set targets and goals.
The office furniture market is not exempt from [environmental] damage Carbon footprint is now an important metric and greenhouse gas emissions are categorised within three scopes. Scope 1 covers the emissions that a company puts out directly while Scope 2 incorporates those it makes indirectly such as the electricity and energy it purchases. Scope 3 is more challenging. This category includes all the emissions an organisation is indirectly responsible for. It works upstream and downstream – from buying products and materials from suppliers all the way to the emissions from the final marketed items when customers use them. There is plenty of guidance available – from government websites, for instance – to assist in
