Furniture Wrap Specialist

Furniture is made from a range of materials, typically

Foams & fillings – Textiles (mostly synthetic) – Timber & board – Metals and 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.

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 by-products 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.