Environmentally Responsible, Sustainable Furniture

Unlike most sofas, loveseats and chairs, our furniture is eco-friendly: Extremely durable and also economical to maintain, therefore not going to the landfills and not causing carbon emissions and energy waste , which would result from the repeated replacing of typical furniture. It is also not bulky, in the way that requires large, energy-consuming living spaces. The frames of typical seating in stores these days are stapled. together (no exaggeration there; read the labels yourself, if information is available at the store). The typical sofas made currently sometimes start falling apart after a few years, or the cushions or suspensions cave in, or the fabric looks shabby; and they usually cost so much to re-upholster and/or repair that most people discard them instead.

Our customers, who normally place our eco-friendly furniture in the heavy-use areas of the home, call back after 6 to 20 years for their first set of replacement covers. They normally replace the cushion filling after 15 to 25 years, but some of our customers are just re-covering their original cushions after 25 or more years. Despite our ten-year warranty and excellent service beyond that, we almost never hear of structural problems. One family that bought their first replacement cushions after 24 years had boys growing up, plus dogs. Another couple with two children purchased their first replacement cushions after thirty years with our furniture, and she was delighted with how the easily-updated furniture looked as part of her new decor.

Among the primary actions recommended to protect our environment, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's website emphasizes the well-known phrase, "reduce, re-use and recycle," It's logical that "reduce" comes first (as in preventing waste and emissions before they become problems). To help achieve that reduction, the very first thing the EPA suggests is "purchasing durable, long-lasting goods.." Continuing, "...reduction also conserves resources and reduces pollution, including greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.". (Recycling often can't be done -- as is almost entirely the case with most sofas and chairs -- and even if feasible it consumes much energy and emits considerable CO2 when doing the collection, processing, re-manufacturing and re-shipping.) .

When you're considering purchasing a sofa that is stapled together, as most are these days, and/or one that can't be re-covered at a reasonable cost (that's the case with most), think not only about the long-term cost to your family but also about the costs to the environment.

Consider how much fossil fuel is consumed and greenhouse gas emitted when short-life furniture is manufactured and then shipped from the distant manufacturer to your home. Before that, there is the extracting, processing and shipping of the raw materials to the manufacturer, with much accompanying carbon emissions , After a relatively brief life, the discarded furniture is then shipped to the often remote dump. And this cycle is repeated many times over the decades for a typical family. . All of the above wastage of material resources and energy and carbon emission applies to relatively massive products in the case of sofas and chairs, resulting in massive waste and emissions. And the emissions resulting from shipping from a distant manufacturer are especially high for that large and increasing percentage of furniture that is made in Asia.

By comparison, purchasing furniture that can be kept in use indefinitely by means of replacement covers and cushions, and that's made in America, is doing a good deed for our world and for its future occupants.

According to www.climatecrisis.org , you "... can save 1200 pounds of carbon dioxide if you cut down your garbage by 10%." Of even greater significance than the end product in the landfills is the "trash behind" the product that the consumer buys: David de Rothschild points out that American industry puts out thirty times as much refuse as American individuals and families (Global Warming Survival Handbook, Rodale Press).

Other considerations:
(1) We use only water-based (low-VOC) wood finishes and glues, including a final two coats of water-based polyurethane, (Once cured, these finishes are also harder, more durable and much more resistant to water and other household liquids than the cheaper, polluting, solvent-based finishes normally used in furniture production.)
(2) All of our electricity is from renewable sources, coming to us as "Green Power", a product of Virginia Dominion Power Co. .
(3) The foam and fiber filling in almost all sofas is non-biodegradable and non-recyclable, so the usual pattern of sending short-lived sofas (the typical kind sold in stores) to the landfills just keeps adding to the growing heaps, with their often toxic drainage.
(4) The basic wood we use is oak, from North American forests, where it is plentiful, with growth consistently exceeding harvesting (data collected by U.S. Forest Service, quoted in Woodshop News, January 2009, p. 5). A large part of the solid oak that we use is FSC certified. To see the statement of Environmental Commitment by our hardwood lumber supplier, click here.
(5) The softwood plywood that we use for supplementary panels in our frames is "Plytanium" by Georgia-Pacific, which is APA rated, allowing only adhesives that are so low in emissions that they are exempt from formaldehyde regulations of U.S. HUD and the state of California. (At a surcharge, we can substitute plywood that has no formaldehyde added.)
(6) For packing, in addition to new cardboard we also use scrap cushioning foam and old, clean packing material, and boxes; we don't buy plastic peanuts.
(7) Our cushion filling does not contain PBDE's (polybrominated diphenyl ethers, a hazardous chemical sometimes used in foam cushioning).
(8) Our exposed-wood models use less fabric than typical furniture (in the new product and also when re-covering), reducing waste of resources and carbon emissions that result from the manufacture of fabrics. Some of our fabric suppliers are making major efforts towards environmental responsibility, including one of our most important suppliers, JF Fabrics; for more information on that, see www.joannefabrics.com/english/green_initiatives.asp .
(9) Latex foam cushion filling is an option on our furniture. (But it's an expensive option, and it would probably not last as well as the high-quality polyurethane foam that we use as our standard filling. As of mid-2008, latex foam filling would add about $800 to the price of a standard three-seat sofa.)
(10) We have a wide selection of natural-fiber fabrics, mainly of 100% cotton, or the customer can provide his/her own material. (But be aware that, as a rule, the synthetic fibers are more durable and cleanable than the natural fibers, with the exception of wool). We also have a moderate selection of fabrics that are made principally of recycled content.
(11) The polyurethane foam and polyester fiber used heavily in almost all sofas and chairs require large amounts of oil derivatives to produce, so our emphasis on furniture that won't need to be replaced for decades helps avoid waste of non-renewable resources.
(12) Not only is our furniture made in America, keeping carbon emissions from shipping to a minimum compared with those resulting from imports from China, but most of our materials also originate in North America. The major exceptions are screws and some of our fabrics, but those constitute only a relatively small proportion of the mass of our furniture.

The following sums up what normally happens when people buy ordinary sofas, loveseats and chairs:

Does the short life of a typical sofa justify use of non-renewable resources and energy, addition to global warming, increased pollution, and addition to the ever-growing landfills? It doesn't have to be that way.

Even our fully-upholstered Custom 05 model has an extra-durable hardwood frame and is relatively easy and inexpensive to re-cover.

In a high percentage of cases, furniture made of hardwood in the Far East uses wood that originally came from the Americas, wood that is shipped twice half-way around the world, burning fossil fuel and emitting greenhouse gases in the process, not to mention inevitable oil spills and other pollutants released. Pollutants include substantial numbers of harmful invasive species dumped into our waterways (New York Times, 9/04/07, p. A23), as well as the unusually polluting emissions from burning the cheap fuel used in big ships ("Ocean-going ships spew pollution around the world" (The Free-Lance Star, Fredericksburg, VA, Nov. 7, 2007). All of this in order to take advantage of low Asian labor costs. Buying furniture imported from China that includes plywood is also likely to bring into your home considerable formaldehyde (a probable carcinogen, according to the EPA, and also a cause of headaches, nausea, allergic reactions and possibly damage to the nervous system), exceeding by up to 3000 percent the off-gassing standards set for that chemical by the U.S. government for American manufacturers (Woodshop News, Soundings Publications, Essex, CT, July, 2007, p. 48). This chemical and its off-gassing will later accumulate in our landfills, after the furniture has lived its often short life.

When you express your thoughts to your legislators, we urge you to push for "closed loop production systems," which are designed to make sure that manufacturers bear the costs of disposal of products they have made. Some other advanced countries are already adopting such requirements (Harvard Business Review, July-August 2007, p. 179). We would be delighted with passage of such laws, since our costs of meeting such a requirement would be very small, whereas almost all of our competitors would have to increase their prices dramatically in order to bear the disposal costs of all the short-lived furniture they continually produce. Also, we encourage you to promote the adoption (as has been the case in 6000 U.S. communities already) of "pay-as-you-throw" policies for waste disposal. When companies and their customers start having to pay the real, full costs of disposal of each bulky product that is sold, sales of disposable furniture (i.e., most upholstered furniture on the market) would probably plummet.

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To go (or return) to the Comfy 1 home page and much more information on our various eco-friendly designs, quality features, sofas, sectional sofas, and prices (on individual product pages), click here.