The environmental impact of throwing away furniture

Furniture waste environmental hazard

Everything we buy comes at a cost to the environment when it is made, shipped and retailed. That cost comes in the form of energy consumed, the CO2 released, the resources used, the pollution released and the habitats destroyed to facilitate all that.

But even once you’ve bought it, the environmental cost of that product isn’t fully counted. One day that item is going to be disposed of. How and where that happens, what the item is made of and the damage that waste ends up doing, completes the full environmental cost of the things we buy.

There is a considerable carbon footprint attached to producing furniture, we worked out that a 3 piece suite has a similar carbon cost to driving from Edinburgh to Monaco and back again. But carbon emissions are just the tip of the iceberg.

The impact of furniture waste

Furniture is made from a range of materials, typically

  • Foams & fillings
  • Textiles (mostly synthetic)
  • Timber & board
  • Metals
  • Plastics

The majority of these materials are not biodegradable, some release chemicals harmful to the environment, others break into small pieces of micro plastic, just the sort of stuff we’re finding reaching all parts of the animal food chain, including ourselves.

Waste incinerator

Waste incineration facility

Recycling of furniture happens in a wide variety of ways but a lot of the larger scale recycling schemes in the U.K are burning the waste in incinerators to create electricity. It’s hard to see how that quite counts as recycling but it seems to be a common endpoint. This method of disposal has benefits over landfill and they pitch it as a ‘green’ technology but it’s far from clean and creates toxic byproducts and plenty of CO2. We don’t doubt companies state on paper that they always dispose of the toxic chemicals responsibly.

Cleaner forms of recycling like reclaiming metals and woods happens to some degree but it’s not always practical or cost effective to do this. Still, the majority of furniture waste by volume is synthetic foams and filling and that presents the biggest problem.

Despite there being limited recycling options, most furniture waste still ends up in landfill and much of that gets distributed around the world rather than handled here in the U.K. The bottom line is, our furniture waste is adding to our global waste management and environmental pollutant crisis.

furniture waste in landfill site

Landfill waste, it will outlive us all

Fly tipping

Fly tipped sofa

Fly-tipping of furniture waste is rife in the U.K, a constant offence to us all

It’s endlessly distressing for us to see but old sofas are commonly fly-tipped around our countryside. For the 2020/21 year, local authorities in England dealt with 1.13 million fly-tipping incidents, an increase of 16% from the 980,000 reported in 2019/20. As in the previous year, just under two thirds (65%) of fly-tips involved household waste.

So much of this waste comprises of illegally dumped furniture.

Wefixanysofa pay for proper disposal of all waste relating to our business with a reputable commercial waste disposal provider. Proper waste disposal is part of our staff training and an issue we manage day to day as part of doing business. We don’t expect any extra credit for doing this, not only is it a basic moral requirement, it’s the law. Businesses like ours that pay their dues and live up to their responsibilities take a very dim view of irresponsible operators who dump their waste around our countryside.

Fly tipped furniture mostly ends up being processed by the council but not before spreading whatever waste and chemicals it can around the area. It poisons our countryside and is then cleaned up at a much larger expense to the taxpayer and the environment than proper disposal. Fly tippers are leeching from all of us so they can make a little more money, there’s no hiding the fact that furnishings are at the forefront of that waste.

All waste from discarded furniture is a problem.

There are no easy answers. Even when furniture waste is disposed of properly, it still comes at a cost to the planet. If it is disposed of poorly, the cost just mounts and mounts.

So we should always ensure our waste furniture is disposed of legally and as responsibly as possible but even when recycled the waste is still adding to the overall problem.

The best thing we can do, by far, is to waste less in the first place.

Vintage leather chair

A fine piece of furniture is a joy for decades and is always worthy of renovation and care.

Buy quality, look after it, repair and renovate

If we want to seriously reduce the environmental damage caused by our furniture, we need to throw a lot less of it away in our lifetimes and ensure what is thrown away is handled responsibility. This isn’t so hard and it has plenty of benefits in addition to saving the planet.

Here’s our guide to ensuring you have great furniture and look after the planet to the maximum:

  • Buy genuinely well made furniture – Think about durability and repairability before you buy it.
  • Protect and maintain your furniture – Stop it degrading in the first place.
  • Repair & professional cleaning – A great many furniture issues can be rectified quickly and cost effectively by professional furniture repairers. It prolongs the life of your furniture and postpones the need for larger renovations.
  • Replacement foam interiors – Foams wear out over time. It’s unavoidable but easily resolved by professional upholsterers, it’s no reason at all to get rid of the whole sofa. We’ve talked to people frequently who’ve been throwing away sofas with sagging cushions for decades. They simply weren’t aware that interior replacement was a viable option. Find out more about the cost of replacing foam interiors.
  • Renovation – Covers wear out but a good sofa frame can last generations. A good quality sofa is well worth renovating when the covers start to wear out beyond repair. This is a major job where custom covers are made to measure and professionally stitched and fitted over new foams. However by the end, a worn out sofa can be reborn as good or better than brand new.
  • Repeat – Renovating a sofa preserves as much as can be preserved of the original and keeps the waste to a minimum, it also leaves you with a fresh sofa looking brand new. You can keep renovating the same sofa frame for a lifetime. If we all bought and maintained furniture this way, the savings in landfill waste, environmental poisoning and carbon emissions would be staggering.
sofa repair and renovation

Just a few of the thousands of the furniture repair, cleaning and restoration jobs completed by Wefixanysofa.

Recycling isn’t going to solve our landfill and environmental pollution problems any time soon. Reducing the amount of overall consumption and waste in this way is something we can all do right now and it absolutely works.

This is good news for your home

When it comes to furniture, this approach is hardly a hardship, it’s an improvement. You buy a better item of furniture and use local services to keep it in great condition for decades. Yes, that item of quality furniture will certainly cost you more than a cheap one. However as the years pass into decades, the value for money will become astounding and what’s more, you always had a great quality armchair, dining table or sofa suite to enjoy.

Quality items of furniture can be bought and sold secondhand, repaired and renovated through the years and eventually, outlive us all. If you buy things to last, you swap the instant gratification of something new and shiny for the satisfaction of quality and through the years, we challenge you not to develop a certain attachment to the item.

The ‘green’ way of owning furniture brings meaning to your home in a way a throwaway cheap sofa never could.

quality leather sofa repaired to last

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