Towards Zero Waste : An Environmental Life Cycle Analysis of New Furniture vs Participation in the Furniture Reuse Program
Creators: name: Gondaliya, Akash
name: Ong, Eimee
name: Wu, Julianna
name: Jepsen, Sarah
name: Saatchi, Seppi
Publisher: name: The University of British Columbia
Year: 2024

description: With the steady increase of furniture consumption and increase in the sector’s emission intensity, it is imperative to gain quantitative insight into the extent of these emissions and where they are rooted in the product’s life cycle. Identifying the environmental and economic viability of sustainable alternatives for this sector will facilitate the decision-making shift towards less emission intensive practices in the future and help reach UBC’s goal in achieving net-zero emissions by 2035. Therefore, this project aims to quantitatively identify the emission reduction potential of purchasing reused furniture compared to buying furniture new. More specifically, our assessment focuses on the unique scenario of UBC’s furniture reuse program to provide UBC decision-makers and community members with context specific data regarding the potential benefits of utilizing the program. Our assessment employs the methodology of a life cycle analysis to account for the different emission hotspots throughout the product’s life cycle and make a relative comparison between different grades (low and commercial) as well as different brands (IKEA and Wayfair) of tables against the reused alternative. The representative low-grade table and commercial-grade table for IKEA and Wayfair were selected based on cost (source: Ikea and Wayfair websites). The LCA methodology provides a holistic way of assessing product emissions allowing decision making from the perspective of the system as a whole. By focusing on a ten-yearspan of furniture use as a functional unit, our results account for both the impact of purchasing an individual table as well as the quantity of tables purchased over the time period based on assumed life span. Our methods include the collection of primary and secondary data on table production, packaging production, and transportation to develop an inventory for each product. The inventory data was then converted into data that could be imputed into the modeling software, openLCA, alongside the database ecoinvent_38 which was used to develop the product system for each table. By applying different reuse factors to the reused table product system, we were able to evaluate different scenarios of emission accountability on the second user. We assumed that only the commercial-grade tables (IKEA commercial-grade, and Wayfair commercialgrade) were good enough to be used for the Reuse program as those tables had long warranty and we compared the emission of buying those brand-new table versus reusing the table from the Furniture Reuse Program (IKEA reused, Wayfair reused). ‘IKEA reused’ refers to the IKEA commercial table diverted from landfill by the UBC reuse program, giving the table a second life instead. Similarly, ‘Wayfair reused’ refers to the commercial-grade Wayfair table recovered by UBC Furniture Reuse Program. The results of our analysis suggest that the lowest emitting to highest emitting tables were IKEA reused (provided by UBC reuse program), Wayfair reused (provided by UBC reuse program), IKEA commercial-grade, IKEA lowgrade, Wayfair commercial-grade, and lastly Wayfair low-grade over the 10-year span. These results suggest the viability of utilizing the furniture reuse program as a means of reducing UBC’s furniture emission footprint with 85-97% and 60-95% of emissions being avoided by purchasing the second-hand Wayfair (Wayfair reused) and IKEA (IKEA reused) tables respectively. Furthermore, it was determined that tables produced by IKEA brand contributed 61.89% (low cost) and 15.44% (commercial) lower in emissions when compared to their Wayfair counterparts. Assessing the lifecycle hotspots suggested that the major contributor to the low-grade IKEA table’s emissions were paper production followed by steel casting whereas Wayfair’s major contributors were determined as fiberboard production followed by packaging. Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”