Furniture’s impact on Earth, we can do better!

If you want to know how much impact our furniture has on the environment just do a quick web search.  There are tons of opinions out there on the topic but to be honest a lot of the information I read didn’t really tell me much.  As a result, we figured we’d chime in on the topic here at Paper Blog as our world’s furniture consumption is enormous and significantly impacts our planet.  In the U.S. alone, retail sales for furniture is in excess of $100 billion a year with over 30,000 retail sales outlets and a few thousand manufacturers who mostly import product from Asia.  This doesn’t factor in all of the used furniture outlets like craigslist, salvation army, consignment stores, garage sales, newspaper listings, office furniture, etc.   Our homes and businesses are loaded with different furniture pieces of all kinds.  The reality is that we manufacture a lot of new furniture on planet Earth when we have a ton of furniture already available to us.  So, what harm does new furniture have on our environment?  There are obvious things like deforestation as the core of any furniture is typically made with wood.  Some lower cost furniture is made with alternative products like MDF or particle board.  These materials are even more harmful to our environment because of the significant emissions from the toxic glues and chemicals used in the construction.  Furniture waste would also have to be considered, a lot of furniture ends up in U.S. landfills letting toxic paints, glues, and chemicals seep into the Earth.  All in all, it’s easy to see furniture consumption has significant environmental consequences much like our current building materials.  It’s also easy to see we have simple solutions like recycling to create repurposed furniture (upcycled furniture).  Repurposed (upcycled) furniture is currently just a tiny fraction of overall furniture sales so big changes would need to take place in order for the environment to benefit.  I hope the popularity of repurposed furniture (upcycled furniture) continues to grow in the world as it provides considerable environmental benefits as it eliminates both the manufacturing of a new item and the addition of waste to a landfill.  It would be great to see a day when a repurposed (upcycled) piece of furniture is more valuable and stylish then new furniture. That would be a good day for the planet, thanks for reading!