How Good Is "Carbon Neutral" Furniture?

According to the EPA, an estimated nine million tons of furniture were sent to landfills in 2018. Last year, The New York Times noted that the pandemic’s shift to remote work brought a four-billion-dollar boom to the fast furniture industry between 2019 and 2021, exacerbating the waste problem. As consumer demand—and willingness to pay more—for sustainable products has increased, companies are starting to take steps to reduce their environmental impacts.

"Ikea has laid out bold climate goals in its sustainability strategy, vowing to become fully circular—using only recycled or renewable materials, and creating zero waste—by 2030," reads the Times story.

While I was wandering the halls of Chicago’s Merchandise Mart during the annual NeoCon convention this summer, the issue of sustainability was at the fore in marketing materials—pamphlets and banners touting responsible and "clean impact" methodologies abounded. Metropolis highlighted some of those companies and products in a "Sustainability Lab" at the event. The designer labels and distributors at NeoCon market to high-end households and offices—the problem, it seems, transcends the "fast" industries. But unlike many of the fast brands turning to post-consumer or recycled materials, higher-end brands are taking hold of the term "carbon neutral"—with questionable inputs or results.

The United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change describes carbon neutrality as, "achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by balancing those emissions so they are equal (or less than) the emissions that get removed through the planet’s natural absorption." Steelcase, which announced its first carbon neutral task chair in 2022 and has since expanded the certification to six other task chairs, offsets its products through projects that support, "renewable energy, forest restoration, more efficient cook stoves and electric transportation." Carbon emitted through production and distribution is "offset" by reducing emissions elsewhere, or it is "removed" from the atmosphere, often by planting vegetation.

But offsetting through plantings is troubling, says architect and climate researcher Michelle Addington, because crops planted tend to be monocultures, and such plantings have limited lifespans. Companies don’t account for carbon released as those flora die and decay, releasing such "offset" carbon back into the environment. Importantly, she says, this conundrum is emblematic of not just the offsetting process, but how we think about sustainability itself.

"We continue to look for the easy out," Addington says. "We want to make something, we want to build something, but we don't really want to change what we're doing. The easiest out is going to be a carbon offset." Instead, she advocates for a fundamental shift in how we manufacture—and importantly, how we consume—design. "I’m into completely rethinking whether or not we need things. What exactly are the kinds of artifacts and systems and structures that we actually need to function?"

The question of determining what we "need" is tricky to grapple with. While much of the internet has agreed that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, small furniture manufacturers are trying something different, moving past opaque carbon neutral marketing ploys and purchasing offsets and instead opting to do deep dives into the materials, sourcing, and lifecycles of their products. Phantila Phataraprasit, cofounder of furniture brand Sabai, wants to think "proactively"—reducing waste at all stages of production—rather than retroactively through offsets.  

"Historically and today, some companies focus on quality and durability in their way of speaking about sustainability," Phataraprasit says. "I think there’s room to go above and beyond that. Whether that’s the materials that are used, how your supply chain is set up, and addressing repair or life extension." The majority of the products used in Sabai’s furniture are sourced locally. Each is made-to-order in North Carolina using ethical labor practices, and the company has a buy-back and repair program—consumers who wish to replace their sofa can sell it back to the company to be refurbished and resold.

Jason Lewis, a Chicago woodworker and furniture designer whose practice is focused on custom wood pieces, grapples with the tension between supporting his small business and considering sustainability.

"We’re making in one way or another luxury goods, and I’m thinking about the sources and wastes that go along with that, especially at a scale," he says. "At the same time, as a small business person, mostly what I’m grappling with is like, How I keep my people employed?" A few years ago Lewis saw the piles of scrap mounting in his workshop. Rather than throwing them away, he decided to launch Offcut, a line of furniture and decor made from waste produced in his workshop; he also resells scrap to local craftspeople and donates it to local architecture and design students.

While these businesses are still putting new products on the market, their ethoses think beyond what Addington calls, "the circle or boundary around the thing that we make." Instead, their thinking is closer to full lifecycle analysis, or a method of capturing the real impact of a product by accounting for harms to health to both humans and habitats during the extraction, refinement, or shipping of materials as well as manufacturing, use, recycling, and disposal. "We don’t [typically] think about impacts that happen years down the road. We don’t think about the web of impacts. A lot of the work on lifecycle analysis has tried to bring all of that into play," she says.

Addington notes, however, that many companies will "truncate" their analyses. "They don’t think about the fact that their very decision to use a particular kind of material might end up depleting an aquifer in another part of the world," she explains. While a specific material might be biodegradable or recyclable, its extraction might require carbon-intensive road construction—a process that might step beyond the boundary of the final product’s lifecycle analysis. "There’s only so far you can go with lifecycle analyses in terms of understanding impacts that may not seem so directly related."

Instead, Addington advocates for a full audit of how we approach sustainability. Perhaps, she says, we should start by asking if we really need that new chair.

According to a study covered in The Onion, no, we don’t. "Representing a five-year inquiry into the nation’s seating availability and quality, the 85-page study…has determined that, for now, the nation has ‘plenty’ of chairs and can get by just fine with the chairs it already possesses," reads the piece. "The Brookings research team maintains that most broken chairs can be fixed—meaning there is no need to replace them—and that when a chair wobbles, simply placing a coaster or small book beneath the problematic leg can usually restore its balance."

The story is satirical, but the idea that we might have made enough stuff is serious. And when we do need to buy something new, Addington wants us all to remember: Energy can neither be either created or destroyed, and any environmental damage can never be truly reversed; any sustainable guidelines or regulations are still subject to the laws of physics.

Top image: Planet One Images/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

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