We are learning a lot about this approach to sustainability and finding it an incredible source of inspiration for how we do business and how we produce our furniture.
What is a circular economy?
For us, circular economy is all about the product life cycle, a cradle to cradle product life cycle that begins with the birth of new materials, design and manufacture, use, repair, rejuvenate, death and finally rebirth.
Raw Materials
Let us take the life of our furniture right back to the tree that was cut down in Latvia and turned into a beautiful sheet of pale birch plywood. Careful thoughts go into generating ideas for what that sheet can be turned into in the preliminary stages. More magic is conjured in the workshop and, voila, a beautiful piece of furniture.
Providing the best quality.
Our first plan of attack on sustainability is quality. We make items that ooze character in material, mode of construction and in terms of timeless aesthetics. Look at Ercol stuff, my house, amongst Koa’s finest, of course, has the odd Scandi style from that era... solid, functional and gorgeous to this day. Our work needs to be the modern-day Ercol. It needs to be strong, well-constructed yet adaptable. This type of furniture easily morphs as your taste changes. Moreover, it is easy to update by swapping doors or drawer fronts, adding in extra shelves and drawers in order to delay throwing the whole piece away and avoid death.
Prolonging Use
The furniture is used, drawers and doors are opened over and over again, surfaces are polished meticulously more than once, then the unthinkable happens. You start to look twice at what was once your pride and joy.
The first step for us is to think of how we can prolong the life of that furniture and prevent you from at worst taking it to the tip, or at best taking it to the charity shop. We ensure the sustainability of your most valued furniture pieces by:
Ensuring easy-maintenance
Our next strategy is to make our furniture so that it can be maintained easily. If something is damaged, it should be easy to fix for it to meet sustainability standards. With bespoke furniture, this might seem too tricky, but for us, not so. We are so invested in digital ways of making things. All we have to do is drag up a file of a drawing of that bespoke sideboard leg that was snapped, cut one out on our CNC router and send it out to slot straight in place, something not that easy with my Ercol dining chairs. The permanency of glue is the biggest hindering factor here. We are constantly researching joining methods and developing joints that create a solid, high-quality piece whilst allowing easy maintenance.
Fitted furniture can be troublesome when it comes to maintenance and devastating to your furniture when you need to access the space behind it in order to rewire electrical cables or access leaky water pipes. A key feature of our fitted furniture is to ensure access to the walls and floors behind our fitted furniture, staying true to achieving our goal for a circular economy by prolonging the life of the furniture by making maintenance easy.
Re-purposing and Futureproofing
We have reached the end, rung all the life out of that piece of furniture, swapped the doors, drawers, and legs many times over and it generated enough money for charity to be very proud. This is the next stage of the life cycle that we are investigating; how we can ensure a circular life cycle for all of our products, and our solution is not recycling? The obvious thing is to repurpose the materials in some way, but how to do that economically and sustainably is the challenge. The furniture could be chipped down, made into MDF that could then be made into something else, but what of it then at the end of that new lifecycle? Circular remember, it has got to keep going, somehow.
Do we even need to worry about the end, I mean we make our items from trees that come from managed forests, where new trees are planted to replace old ones that have been cut down? Of course, we do! We have to consider and reduce the consumption of all resources, no matter how green they might be. When it comes to sustainability, we have to keep doing better because there’s too much at stake.
We at Koa Design, have made it our priority to make sustainable furniture without compromising on our client's needs, quality, and aesthetic value.