Every item of furniture in Daniel Santos’ Berlin apartment comes with a story. There’s the desk that took him deep into the city’s former Soviet suburbs, the bed frame he hauled with the help of five housemates, and the nearly century-old dresser he brought back to life with glue and nails.
Santos says it’s “crazy” to think the pale-yellow antique he bought from a grandson parting with his family’s heirlooms “has survived until now.”
“Actually a few days ago, I sent him pictures of it in my room, and he was happy to see that it was living on,” he said.
Daniel Santos’ yellow lamp is also pre-loved, like pretty much all his furnitureImage: Josh Axelrod/DW
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Santos is part of a younger generation of decor scavengers, increasingly aware of furniture’s massive carbon footprint and therefore happy to shop secondhand. They don’t want to buy things that will be dumped a little further down the line.
Globally, researchers estimate at least 51 million tons of furniture are consumed every year with more than 95% of it discarded. That high buy-to-landfill ratio is partially a consequence of “fast furniture,” a cousin of
“fast fashion” — cheap, mass-produced home decor designed for convenience rather than durability.
On the rise in recent years, fast furniture’s ever-changing styles encourage people to toss furnishings before the end of their natural lifecycle. One study found that British consumers redecorate their homes every one to five years. In a push to “to stay in style, they turn to inexpensive and disposable furniture that can easily be replaced when their decor changes,” the authors wrote.
And items are often not made to be recyclable. A single sofa might contain textiles, plastic-based foams, plywood, cardboard and metal springs — all fused with laminates, resin and glues — which makes them very hard to separate and repurpose.
In the United States alone, 12.1 million tons of furniture waste was generated in 2018 with less than 0.5% of it recycled. That’s an almost sixfold increase over 1960 levels.
The rise of fast furniture
Chicago furniture designer CoCo Ree Lemery says the explosion in fast furniture is partially driven by cheap new materials.
Much modern furniture is cheap, cheerful and hard to recycleImage: Sven Hoppe/dpa/picture alliance
IKEA’s ubiquitous Billy bookcase is a case in point. When it first appeared in the IKEA catalog in 1979, it was made with a wood veneer finish. Since then, it has been redesigned with contact paper, making it cheaper than the original but harder to repair. Today, the company claims to sell a new Billy bookcase every five seconds.
Lemery says the influence of fast-fashion brands on home decor design has been another key factor pushing the uptake of cheap furniture.
Spanish fast-fashion giant Zara launched its home division in 2003, followed by Swedish rival H&M in 2009. They both helped normalize quick-turn seasonal trends such as rustic wood tables for fall or velvet chairs for winter in home goods stores.
Buying trends shows a greater emphasis on cheap, trendy furniture, Lemery said. “So, a lot of designers and manufacturers and large companies are in fact following that data, despite it not being good for the long run.”
Forests under pressure
As demand for cheap furniture has increased, it’s placed pressure on the supply chain and resources.
IKEA is one of the world’s largest consumers of wood, using about 0.5% of the total amount harvested for industrial purposes each year, the company said.
Fast furniture requires a lot of resources, not least wood which is sometimes logged illegallyImage: Agent Green & Bruno Manser Fonds 2024
Environmental group Greenpeace has accused the company of felling ancient forests in areas of Romania’s Carpathian Mountains that it says should be protected for their high biodiversity value.
The furniture giant told DW it had reviewed the Greenpeace report and could confirm that “the wood used in IKEA products from these forests fully complies with applicable laws.” And with standards set by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) — a global nonprofit that certifies timber production.
“Wood from protected old-growth forests is strictly prohibited in our supply chain,” a spokesperson for the company said. “Nevertheless, we have asked FSC Romania to consider the potential need for further protection following our review.”
Gen Z’s secondhand surge
Flat-pack giants and fast-fashion retailers may be losing sway with first-time furniture buyers.
According to research from e-commerce comparison website Capital One Shopping, over a billion people visit the Facebook Marketplace digital classified service every month. An estimated 491 million buy something there. Meanwhile, a trend report from social media platform Pinterest recently said searches for “secondhand kitchens” have skyrocketed by 1,012% and “secondhand decor” by 283%, with Gen Z users making up half of the site’s base.
Deana McDonagh, professor of industrial design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says younger consumers are turning to secondhand shopping for a number of reasons: sustainability, frequent moves, tight budgets, limited transport, and also the emotional connection they form with an acquired piece.
“With this old furniture, these old chairs, you have to invest in refreshing it,” McDonagh said, which draws it into a person’s story.
Santos can relate to that, insisting he wouldn’t dream of dumping the dresser he fixed up.
Sustainability advocates say reuse is one of the clearest antidotes to fast furniture’s environmental toll.
“The more that you can source inside your bubble, the better off you’re making the world,” Lemery said.
Reuse, repair, recycle, rethink | Eco Africa
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Edited by: Tamsin Walker
