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The journey of mass-produced and cheap furniture is becoming more and more like the journey of "fast fashion" clothing. Due to the deteriorating quality, the lifespan of the furniture is getting shorter and it quickly ends up in the landfill or destruction.
We will explore where there are opportunities to create feedback loops that would extend the life of the furniture and reduce the consumption of natural resources.
Trends change rapidly, so manufacturers make furniture faster and cheaper, causing high pollution and labor exploitation. Natural resources are spent on the manufacture of new furniture. When buying used or recycled products, we save natural resources, reduce waste and reduce the carbon footprint, which is 82% lower than that of a new product.
In partnership with Kostak, d.d., the Knof Institute launched a pilot project Salon – Reusable Furniture in 2020. As part of the project, which was supported in the pilot phase by the Centre for Creativity and the Ministry of Culture, a system for collecting discarded furniture was designed, which is then categorized and prepared for reuse with an emphasis on creative upgrading in cooperation with young designers. They collect furniture through donations from citizens and through a removal system that is carried out throughout Slovenia. In cooperation with Kostak, d.d., they also established an innovative furniture collection system through regular bulky removal offered by the utility company to citizens. Within 12 months of the start of operation, 1,117 pieces of furniture with a total weight of 12.5 tons were collected. This model of bulky waste management saved 24,869.53 kg of CO2 during this period.
About 50% of the collected furniture is suitable for sale after cleaning and restoration, and the rest needs major interventions or cannot be repaired or restored. Similar to textiles, we notice poor quality of the furniture we collect. Furniture that has not been properly stored often has major injuries, such as rotten bases or it is necessary to change legs, seats, backrests, etc. Most of the collected furniture is made of chipboard, mediapan, plywood, etc., which, when subjected to disassembly, disposal, and then moisture and sun, quickly deteriorate. On the other hand, there are significant amounts of wood residues even in the production of new furniture.
For this purpose, KNOF produced a new product MOWALL, a modular partition that is 98% made of wood scrap, mainly chipboard and plywood. The wall is made of modules with a size of 50x50 cm, which can be assembled and disassembled several times, without screwing. The wall is suitable for temporary or permanent partitioning of office, public or private spaces, such as a fairground wall, a wall for "shworooms", sales premises, etc. The wall is developed to such an extent that it also allows the installation of various niches, windows, doors, shelves, brackets for TV... In case of damage, KNOF also offers service and spare parts, and also offers end-of-life pick-up or purchase and further reuse. Each individual module saves 2,731kg of CO2 emissions, equivalent to the amount of CO2 that 6 trees absorb in 1 day. 1 running metre of MOWALL wall saves the same amount of CO2 absorbed by 47 trees in 1 day.
In the implementation of the NovIKroG project in the promotion of circular and green public procurement, we actively cooperate with the Ministry of the Environment, Climate and Energy of the Republic of Slovenia At the 1st Green Public Procurement Conference in October 2022, we launched an initiative to prepare an analysis of furniture needs in public institutions in order to enable the sector carrying out the activities of collecting, renovating and reusing furniture, properly organise and increase the purchase of reusable furniture by public institutions.
To this end, we designed a survey for analysing the needs of public institutions in the field of furniture, which was sent through the Ministry at the end of October to 1182 email addresses of public institutions. We received 20 responses and the results of the survey showed that:
