First furniture manufacturer in the world which declares carbon footprint of all products
Norwegian manufacturer of urban furniture Vestre has announced that it will list CO2 emissions generated by each of its products alongside the price, in a bid to foster greater transparency and accountability in the furniture industry.
For a long time Vestre have been committed to nine of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Now company has created Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for its entire inventory, charting the amount of energy needed to create the outdoor furniture pieces and their carbon footprint, writes dezeen.com These independently verified numbers will be introduced in the company’s 2021 catalogue and subsequently rolled out across the entire website. Vestre hopes that listing this information alongside measurements and materials will help customers to make more environmentally responsible purchase decisions.
A power to demand
According to the company’s CEO Jan Christian Vestre, purchasers have a power to demand sustainable products. But it is just a theory as long as the customer can practically compare sustainability of a product. Certifying with ecolabels and displaying EPD values can make benchmarking brands a lot easier for the end-user. Vestre experimented with the idea at the 2020 Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair, where the brand displayed its products in a re-useable installation that listed the carbon footprint of each item.
Transition into a green and fair economy is possible with transparency, responsibility and full accountability. Vestre demands 100% renewable energy throughout the supply chain, and plan to be self-sufficient in energy by 2025. Factories will gradually be able to feed surplus energy back into the grid.
Labour-intensive analysis
EDP analysis spans everything from how the individual raw materials are extracted to the moment the finished furniture piece leaves the factory, including the energy used in production and any waste streams or transport emissions generated along the way. Talking more of the nergy, Vestre uses 100% renewable energy in their production processes, most of which comes from clean hydroelectric power. Their plan is to become completely self-sufficient by using only renewable energy from the sun and wind. Factory in Torsby, Sweden, already produces enough solar power to be energy self-sufficient – at least on sunny days!
So, counting in materials, energy, waste and transport, one of the freestanding Folk benches for example, which Vestre created in collaboration with Swedish design studio Front, is responsible for 41 kilograms of CO2 and consumes 839 megajoules of energy. In comparison, the April chair is smaller but made of steel instead of aluminium, meaning it has almost double the carbon footprint at 76 kilograms while needing 1,154 megajoules of energy to produce.
Although this process of tracing and cataloguing materials is initially labour-intensive, Vestre says that once all of this raw data is logged, its analysis can be run without much additional work.
Having in mind Big Data is increasingly collected worldwide, EDP analysis shall be possible and achievable for every furniture producer. Though Vestre is the first furniture manufacturer in the world to record environmental impact in this way. They do it for the entire range, not just a random selection. In this way both end clients and architects can make more informed decisions.
By the way, EPDs don’t trace what happens to a product once it reaches the end of its life.
