How does home or garden furniture damage the environment?
Firstly, in the impact made by obtaining or producing the materials to make the furniture.
For example, wood - demand for hard and tropical woods such as mahogany and teak has caused great swathes of rainforest to be cut-down.
Man has cut down more than half of the Worlds?rainforest over the last 2 centuries. To put this in context; at current rates we are losing more than 75,000 acres of tropical forest every day!
Consumption of wood has doubled in the last 35 years alone
Similarly plastic - requires fossil fuels (oil and gas) in its production which generate greenhouse gas emissions, and depletes this non-renewable resource.
Plastic production consumes 8% of worldwide oil production
The amount of plastic used in Western Europe is growing at 4% p.a.
Secondly, furniture manufacturing can produce a variety of damaging emissions including volatile organic compounds & particulate matter from wood coating operation, wood dust from woodworking, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, hydrogen cyanide and hydrogen chloride from combustion.
Since 1990, furniture manufacture in the U.K is governed by legislation which controls these emissions at sites above relevant thresholds. Similar legislation exists across Europe and the United States, but not necessarily for all manufacturers worldwide.