The disposal of used or waste furniture has a bigger environmental impact than you make think.

The disposal of used or waste furniture has a bigger environmental impact than you make think.  Even when waste furniture is “recycled” - in the majority of cases this means burning the waste in incinerators to create electricity.

This method of disposal has benefits over landfill and is partly in response to the latest UK laws on disposing of Persistent Organic Pollutants or “POPs”.  These are a group of organic compounds that have toxic properties, persist in the environment, accumulate in food chains and pose a risk to human health and the environment. 

Unfortunately, in the past the furniture industry used fire retardant chemicals when making your sofa which included POPS.  So even current methods of “recycling” furniture create toxic by-products and C02.

Here are some scary facts:

• Only 17% of disposed furniture is recycled in the UK. 

• Just under a third of people (30%) have thrown away furniture, electrical items and homewares in good enough condition that they could have been re-used, sold or donated.

• Most waste collection services take your waste furniture to a commercial waste  transfer station which then sends the waste for incineration.

• It creates up to 1000x more CO2 to produce new furniture as opposed to refurbishing old.

• Recent investigations by the Waste & Resources Action Programme shows that, “The environmental benefits of re-using one tonne of sofas are the same as recycling one tonne of plastics.”

• Making a 3 piece suite has a similar carbon footprint to driving 2500 miles.

According to a British Heart Foundation Survey, the most likely reasons for binning unwanted items instead of recycling or donating were; not having the means to transport it (20%) wanting to get rid of things as quickly as possible (16%) and finding it easier to take it to the dump (9%).

That’s why at Waste Not our mission is to increase the amount of furniture that is re-purposed and saved rather than recycled.  And to make that process as easy as possible for you. We partner with charities because they have been re-purposing old furniture for years and are the best at it.

We know that this won’t be possible to re-use everything we collect, but even a modest improvement will make a significant difference to both the environment and good causes.