Eco-Friendly Design: Sustainable Practices in Bespoke Furniture Making
Sustainability - a vast and deeply important topic that touches all of our lives in many different ways. We wanted to take some time to talk about the things that we can do when we design and make kitchens and furniture with an eco-friendly, sustainable mindset.
1 – Making kitchens and furniture to last
For us making things to last is, of course, an integral part of what we do and why we do it. It’s one of the most important choices we can make when trying to work as sustainably as we can. Choosing to make and buy things this way is far preferable to something that will need replacing a few years down the line. And so to us, first and foremost, a sustainable kitchen is a kitchen that will last – a practice that we follow to the T.
2 – Buying the best quality that suits your budget
It can be tempting to buy something that appears cheap in the short term, only for it to become costly in the long term. We like to aim for the general principle of buying the highest quality that suits your budget (and of course, budgets are always a very real consideration). When considering eco friendly kitchens and furniture, we think in terms of:
Quality of design – A kitchen or a piece of furniture that has been designed to specifically suit you, your tastes and your lifestyle will be something that you will love using and find satisfaction in for years to come.
Quality of materials – Using high quality, durable materials are crucial in making kitchens and furniture to last. This is especially true of these items, which are subject to the wear and tear of daily life.
Quality of manufacture – When furniture is made to the highest standards, without cutting corners, it can be used again and again for years to come.
3 – Buying local
Just like trying to reduce food miles, buying from local suppliers helps to reduce carbon footprints. In order to make sustainable, eco-friendly kitchens and furniture, it’s important for us to consider what local businesses can we use in our supply chain. It’s the reality of our situation that some of our material suppliers operate nationally, but there are also some excellent local timber suppliers, for example, that we are lucky to have on our doorstep (we love English Woodlands Timber and Copford Sawmill).
A huge benefit to being a small, independent business is that we are able to foster a local network of craftspeople that we can collaborate with when we need to look beyond our own in-house skills. This means local makers and suppliers are supported, but also that the ‘craft miles’ are kept low too - a win-win.
If you are able to support a local business when choosing to buy a kitchen or a piece of furniture, then not only will your carbon footprint be small in delivering your kitchen to you, but you will also be helping to support the wider local network which that business has developed.
4 – Choosing eco-friendly, sustainable materials
When we are designing kitchens and furniture, the materials we use and where they come from are one of our biggest considerations in terms of sustainability.
A baseline for the industry is using FSC certified wood. This means that we only buy wood that meets the highest environmental, social and economic standards, set by the Forest Stewardship Council UK.
Timber merchants like English Woodlands Timber specialise in the supply of certified British & European timbers, championing the use of woods sourced from sustainable silvicultural management. There are even some very forward thinking and innovative timber suppliers in the UK like Fallen and Felled, who only use (you guessed it) fallen or felled urban trees from London that would otherwise be woodchipped or burned.
There are also many innovative man-made products being developed with sustainability as their driving force, which makes it a particularly exciting time to be in this industry. Alongside these new products, well established suppliers are changing their practices to become more and more environmentally conscious too.
Such a material that has come onto the market in the last few years that we love is Foresso. It’s a beautiful terazzo surface made from waste wood, here in the UK. It’s made from timber offcuts from city maintenance and local sawmills, and even wood dust - a waste product that is hard to make use of. They aim to use waste streams that do not have an associated circular economy. Take a look at our Pellbrook Road project to see how we used Foresso in a kitchen.
Valchromat is another innovative product that we love to use in kitchens. In fact, we like it so much that we wrote a whole blog post about it! It’s described as an ‘evolution of MDF’. It’s made from waste wood fibres, coloured throughout with non-toxic organic dyes, and bonded with a non-toxic resin. The Valchromat plant aims to eliminate any environmental impact - even the waste and bark resulting from the process is re-used to fuel the steam boiler.
We could talk for days about these exciting materials, but we will save that for another blog post!
We used Foresso as a splashback in our Pellbrook Road project
5 – Manufacturing processes
We take great care in our design and manufacturing processes to minimise waste - making the most efficient use of the materials that we have.
Everything we make gets drawn in 3D first. This is useful for many reasons, one of which is helping us to reduce waste. By thinking through and drawing a project in great detail before we make a single cut, it helps us to minimise errors when it comes to making - and so reducing waste material.
Most crucially, we are able to produce cut-lists through our CAD software which will work out the most efficient use of the materials as possible. This greatly minimises the amount of off-cuts that we are left with. And what do we do with our off-cuts? I’m glad you asked!
6 – Making use of our ‘waste’
We generate different kinds of waste here at Wunsch, and we do different things with each kind.
Sheet material off-cuts
We have off-cuts from sheet materials that we use to make kitchens, like Plywood or Valchromat. As we mentioned earlier, these are minimised by using cut-list software, but off-cuts are still inevitable with every project. Pieces that are large enough to be used again will go back into the stack for another day. Smaller pieces get put to one side for making jigs - a crucial and fun part of our process, that I’m sure we will write a blog post about one day soon! Smaller, unusable pieces end up in the bin, as they are composite materials that are not clean to burn. If anyone has ideas for a more eco-friendly way to reuse these small pieces, we are all ears!
Solid wood off-cuts
Any pieces of solid wood small enough to reuse get shared around to help keep our and our neighbours’ homes warm during the colder months. As it’s kiln dried for high-grade joinery use, it burns cleanly.
Sawdust
As you might imagine, we produce a lot of sawdust, which comes from very high quality wood. Thankfully, nice sawdust is in high demand! A number of local businesses are able to make use of the sawdust. A local goat farm uses the sawdust to keep the goats warm and comfortable during winter, and a mushroom farm a few miles down the road like to use our sawdust to help grow interesting varieties of mushrooms.
As you can see, there are so many ways in which we can think about and practice sustainability in kitchen and furniture design and manufacture. There is always more that we can do, and new processes and products being developed that help minimise or reuse waste. We would love to hear any ideas or thoughts you have on this topic, so please feel free to get in touch .