What Lies Beneath
The upholstery process at the Coakley & Cox Workshop (images: courtesy of SCP, Another Country and Magis).
While growing up, I regularly visited a friend’s house whose parents owned a sofa I loved to eat. It was a mouldering old thing, sat fat and squat in the living room. The 1980s fabric had long since torn, leaving splits through which bulged a blubbery seam of foam. As a six-year-old, I used to rummage through those tears, winkling out curls of foam to pop in my mouth. It tasted very chemical, but was otherwise really quite good. A very pleasing mouthfeel.
If my friend’s parents ever noticed, then they kept quiet about it. It was, admittedly, a horrible sofa; perhaps they were secretly pleased that I was slowly disposing of it. Given enough time and sufficient lubricating orange squash, I could have probably saved them a trip to the dump. “Shall we watch another episode of Brum?” my friend would ask, fast-forwarding the tape. Oh yes, I’d say, fingers already back rootling around. At least one more.
My memories of these golden days came back to me in late 2020, when I was contacted by the designer Daniel Schofield. Schofield had just begun a research project looking at polyurethane (PU) foam upholstery in the furniture industry. Schofield had grown curious about PU foams, interviewing experts from across the field, as well as delving into the various material options available to designers working with upholstery and the processes by which upholstery may be created and recycled.
While personally I found the work somewhat derivative of my own studies from 25 years previously, I was prepared to accept that the greater orthodoxy of Schofield’s method (as far as I know, he hasn’t eaten any foam) may render the work of more immediate use to the design profession. After all, the internal structure of furniture often goes unremarked upon – it’s time more was done to bring it to light.
“I may have just been lucky to have suffered no aftereffects from having eaten my friend’s sofa, but it’s hard to say with any certainty.”
The bulk of contemporary upholstery is produced using polyurethane (PU) foams, which bring numerous advantages over more traditional upholstery materials such as animal hair, hessians, grasses and coir (coconut fibre). PU foams are simpler and lighter than many alternatives, as well as allowing manufacturers to cut them into precise forms or else gently roll them around a radius: much of the form-making of contemporary upholstered furniture design has been made possible through the emergence of these materials. There are, however, downsides. PU foams are produced using petrochemicals (a mixture of polyols and diisocyanates); do not biodegrade; and, given the combustibility of the material, are often treated with potentially toxic fire retardants in order to pass fire safety standards. As such, I may have just been lucky to have suffered no aftereffects from having eaten my friend’s sofa, but it’s hard to say with any certainty. It is often unclear (particularly in older furniture, produced under different regulations) as to what materials and chemicals are present in a given design. And, as a six-year-old, I wasn’t overly bothered to find out. I had Brum to watch, for goodness sake.
Despite these issues, PU foam is big business, with Europe (including Turkey and Russia), and Kazakhstan estimated to have produced 1.7m tonnes of flexible PU foams in 2018 alone. The material realities of this should be stark, particularly in terms of the impact upon sustainability targets. While PU foams can be largely recycled either chemically or mechanically, these processes are complicated by the composite nature of furniture. Before they can be processed, the foams in a furniture piece must be separated out – a difficult and expensive process given that they form a part of a whole that has been variously stitched, glued, and nailed together. At present, a significant proportion of end-of-life upholstered furniture is either landfilled or incinerated. Statistics vary from country to country, and part of the issue in tracking this clearly is the lack of well-defined systems at the end of a product’s lifespan. Who is responsible for recycling these products: consumers, their manufacturers, government? It is little surprise that many fall through the cracks and into landfill.
“Who is responsible for recycling these products: consumers, their manufacturers, government? It is little surprise that many fall through the cracks and into landfill.”
There are different strategies that may be taken in response to these issues to try and improve the situation. Some foam producers have sought to limit their use of non-renewable chemicals by adopting alternative raw materials, or else developing their recycling methods. Another approach is embodied by furniture brands such as Another Country and SCP, which have prioritised the use of natural upholsteries, designing their furniture around natural fibres and fillings including organic latex, coir and lambswool. Others, including the designer Stefan Diez with his Costume sofa for Italian brand Magis, have steered towards furniture projects that are rooted in design for disassembly, such that individual upholstery components can be easily separated out, recycled or replaced. Schofield’s research project seeks to examine the various advantages and disadvantages of all of these methods, mapping the current status of the industry and exploring possible routes forward that may not always be visible to those working within the field.
In this spirit, Schofield partnered with Disegno on a roundtable discussion that could bring together people from across design, manufacture and the foam industry to share their experiences and ideas for the future. The resulting discussion, an edited version of which follows below, throws light onto an area of furniture design that is essential to the discipline, but which remains little-discussed: hidden beneath so many layers of obscuring leather or textile. The discussion may provide no easy answers as to how design ought to treat upholstery moving forward, but it does offer substantial food for thought.
Daniel Schofield I’m a designer based in London and my work looks at simplicity, materiality and purpose. What led me down this rabbit hole of upholstery was my work with SCP and Another Country [two London-based furniture retailers, ed.], both of whom now work predominantly with natural upholstery materials. Through them, I was doing lots of research into foam, and replacing foam with natural materials, and I began looking at what is actually on the market, the problems that are involved, and the solutions available.
Tim Cox I’m the managing director of Coakley & Cox, an upholstery company based up in Norfolk that produces mostly one-offs as well as small batch production runs [Coakley & Cox produces for both SCP and Another Country, ed.]. Since 2013, we’ve been trying to move away from petrochemicals with our clients. So we’ve been using naturally sourced products – although we don’t necessarily call them sustainable – such as coconut fibre, wool, latex and feathers. A lot of the materials that we have are actually backed with nylon, so you can’t fully eradicate petrochemicals, but it’s a step in the right direction. Obviously, there are some customers that we work with, like Another Country, who have already gone down that route.
Stefan Diez I head up a design studio of about eight people in Munich. I would say that we have a fairly traditional studio, but we have come to specialise in product development. With most of the pieces that we’ve done in the last 10 to 15 years, we have focused quite a bit on process, which has given us a much deeper influence on how our products are made. When we were asked to do Costume, a sofa with Magis, me and my colleague Dominik Hammer took it as an opportunity to rethink the way that a sofa is constructed. Our goal was to design a sofa that is 100 per cent circular: Costume should consist of as few components as possible to keep it flexible and relevant to the user for a long time, and the cover should be removable for repair and cleaning. All the components should be separable by the user, so that each material can be returned to a material cycle in the true sense of a circular economy. However, we still use a small amount of polyurethane foam in our studio, because it has proven to have some advantages compared to other alternatives, including latex. And we hope for chemical recycling in the near future, which is being worked on right now.
Michel Baumgartner I work for EUROPUR, which is the European Association of Producers of Polyurethane Foam, so I have a vested interest in encouraging people to use foam. Our industry is working towards a circular economy linked to foam, with raw materials improvement, which is why I’m glad to join the discussion today.
Stefan Michel, you’ll know this better than me, but hasn’t the European Union begun, along with some other countries, an effort to circularise PU foam?
Michel That EU legislation is for all waste, not just furniture, and seeks to push society away from landfilling. It’s a problem faced by most European countries. A lot of furniture still ends up in landfills at the end of its life, just because it’s the easiest way for countries which don’t have a lot of money for waste management to get rid of stuff. EU legislation also prescribes that in a couple of years’ time – by 2030 – the incineration of waste for energy will only be allowed for things that cannot be recycled. So you will only be allowed to incinerate products that are too contaminated, too dirty, or for which there is no recycling option. The rest should be recycled. In the case of furniture: foam, textiles, wood – all these things need to be taken care of. So we are working on the challenge of foam recycling. Until now, most of the foam used in furniture follows the same route as the furniture itself, which means it goes to waste-to-energy plants in most of Europe.
“In Denmark, they heat and power their cities with waste, importing a lot of waste from the UK, for example. So they burn a lot of furniture. ”
Stefan And 60 per cent or so goes in landfill?
Michel That was true a couple of years ago, but we are probably at 40 per cent landfill now. That, of course, depends on the country. In Denmark, they heat and power their cities with waste, importing a lot of waste from the UK, for example. So they burn a lot of furniture. In Germany, Belgium, and the UK, there’s also a lot of incineration going on, but it’s not the direction the world needs to take – we have to find ways to recycle materials. And we are, as foam producers, looking at how you can handle foam from that point of view.
Stefan Do you know of a project called URBANREC?
Michel Yes, it’s an EU-funded project looking at recycling of what they call “bulk waste”, which is basically furniture and mattresses. Part of that project is looking into how best to chemically recycle foam, in which it’s really the first project of its kind. In the meantime, things are evolving quite quickly and we have chemical recycling plants being built right now in France, Holland, Spain, and Germany. And that’s only in the past five months.
Stefan Whether you look at chemical or mechanical recycling, it still makes sense to separate the waste and not have foam mixed in with other plastic waste. The more mixed waste is, the more expensive it is to recycle it because you have to separate, first mechanically, and then chemically. And of course that’s energy-intensive. So with Costume, what we tried in our design approach was to make every component separable and as clean as possible.
Catherine Aitken That is an important design consideration. I’m the design director of Another Country and most of the pieces that we make have component parts that are quite easily separated. In terms of thinking about the afterlife of a piece of furniture, it’s a complicated thing. One scenario is that the manufacturer or the company that’s selling a product ultimately takes responsibility for it at the end of its life, and takes it back for recycling. In saying this I’m very aware that when we put a product out there, it goes to a retail client, for example, and we don’t really know where it ends up at the end of its life five, ten or twenty years down the line. Everyone needs to know how to deal with the products they bring into their lives, and that’s a difficult thing. Then there’s scale. For example, Ikea is now selling secondhand furniture, taking things back for recycling, and so on. But for smaller manufacturers that’s not necessarily viable at this time. I guess it’s a question I always have when it comes to these topics. Even if something is made from fully recyclable materials and those elements can be separated, the global system necessary for recycling each element is not in place, or at least not always clear and easily accessible.
“Everyone needs to know how to deal with the products they bring into their lives, and that’s a difficult thing. ”
Stefan If you look at the amount of materials that Ikea uses in a year, it’s scary. The sheer number of products Ikea has to source materials for is astonishing, and realising that made me aware that it may not always be best to go for natural materials. They sell so many pillows and mattresses, for instance, that even if you could make them all from latex, it would lead to such an enormous amount of land use in monocultures that it cannot possibly be a sustainable solution.
Tim I contradict myself quite a lot in terms of the use of foams and sustainable materials, because you’re exactly right, Stefan. If all the manufacturers move over to using coconut fibre and latex, we’re going to destroy the entire globe’s rainforests to grow rubber trees and coconut farms. And that really is not sustainable. What is sustainable is potentially using fewer petrochemicals and trying to develop foams that use fewer TDIs [toluene diisocyanates are aromatic petrochemicals used in the production of PU foams, ed.], which I understand a couple of manufacturers are trying to do. Vitafoam [a large British foam producer, ed.], for example, is currently working to produce a range of foams called Origin that uses natural seed oils. This has less reliance on petrochemicals, and is therefore a step in the right direction to a truly sustainable foam filling.
Michel As with most materials, you also have certification schemes for foam. So if you want a mattress for €25 you can always find one. But if you are willing to pay a little bit more, you can buy a mattress made with certified materials, including foam, textiles, and the rest of it. So, like any product, it’s what you pay for.
Stefan I think what we have to do as designers, together with industry, is to write a set of rules that we all follow. There are no rules at present. Nobody tells us how cheaply we are allowed to produce our products. We need to create a sort of a minimum standard that has to get much higher in the next few years. If that means making the product a bit more expensive, then that’s okay. I think that’s fair – we know we have too much of everything.
“That’s where PU foams came along and revolutionised the industry, because suddenly you could create these amazing shapes with just a single layer of foam.”
Catherine With regards to the cost question, you also have to take into consideration the lifespan of something. This is something that sadly, at the moment, the average consumer is probably not considering. But if you buy a sofa and it’s going to last 25 years, even if you’re paying more at the beginning, in the end you’re paying far less. Obviously there’s plenty of people who do think like this, but not everyone.
Tim In terms of longevity, natural materials have been around a hell of a lot longer than PU foams. We’ve made horsehair-stuffed cushions since the 1800s, if not before that. And even coconut fibre has been used as stuffing historically – only the technique of how it is applied has changed. Traditionally, it’s hand-stuffed, so you roll up the pieces of coconut fibre or horse hair and you stitch it into a hessian bag. But you don’t have much comfort – it’ll be a rock-hard piece of furniture. That’s where PU foams came along and revolutionised the industry, because suddenly you could create these amazing shapes with just a single layer of foam.
Daniel I recently designed a sofa for SCP, but the design leant itself to being made of foam; we weren’t sure if they were going to be able to create the right feeling with natural upholstery alternatives.
Tim We’ve got some products we cannot convert to natural materials, because the natural materials don’t perform the way that PU foams do. One of my upholsters used to say, “Well, that’s why they invented foam!” Because you can do what you like with it. The latex and coconut fibre we use today is a mixture of coconut husk and latex blended together into 50mm sheets. It’s a little stiff, and kind of creases – you can’t roll that around a nice radius or anything like that. We’ve only been using natural materials for eight or nine years, so I don’t yet know what lifespan those materials are going to have in products. But because these materials have existed for centuries, I think it’s safe to assume they will last a long time. One of our very first sofas that we made in natural materials came back to be recovered only a couple of weeks ago, and the filling in it was as good as the day we delivered it. Over time, PU foams do crumble – the air bubbles within the foam burst. But then again, if you buy a cheap foam it’s more likely to do that, and if you buy a high-resilience foam, it’s less likely to. It can last 25 years, if not longer.
Daniel Is there a big price difference between natural upholstery and foam?
Tim Because of the recent price increase in foams, the difference is getting smaller. In the last year, we had six price increases for PU foam. And we literally had another one two weeks ago. I used to say that natural materials cost about 12 per cent more than foam, but I think it’s almost even now. My worry is that if more companies start using natural materials, the price is going to start going up on those because of demand.
Daniel Why has the price of foam risen so rapidly?
Michel Most of Europe was closed for business for a good part of 2020 and everybody anticipated that there would be a slowdown of the economy. When shops reopened, people started shopping like crazy, especially for furniture. So we have been faced with unprecedented demand while, at the same time, a lot of chemicals suppliers had scheduled maintenance on a number of plants. So we had fewer raw materials and more demand. In addition to that, in the autumn of last year we had a series of storms that struck the Gulf of Texas, forcing companies there to go into safe mode. Add to that the fact that we buy chemicals, colorants and additives from China, and there is a backlog of those things slowly making their way to Europe. Making foam is like making a cake. You mix a number of things and get a certain type of foam, and if you want to make another type of foam, you use other ingredients, some in relatively small quantities. But if your containers are stuck in China, you might just lack one additive, but it means you can’t make the foam you want. That is what happens. So yeah, there we have the recipe for a perfect distortion of supply chains.
“That’s why we have to find a balance to guarantee that people who invest in recycling technologies can find a sustainable economic model.”
Daniel If it stays at that price, does that make it more valuable for it to be mined as a raw material at the end of its life to then become part of a circular economy? One of the problems with foam, as I understand it, is that it’s such a cheap material that it’s almost not worth companies taking a lot of time and effort to get to it in older pieces – it’s really hard to get foam to recycle and reuse. In lots of upholstery it’s all glued, nailed and stitched together anyway, so in some cases it’s almost impossible to separate. I was wondering if the price went up, would that make it a more valuable commodity for a circular economy?
Michel I am not sure that it would work that way, but there can be an influence of foam prices on recyclates. Higher prices of virgin foam may encourage the use of foam from mechanical recycling. We see that nowadays with high foam prices: some manufacturers also use bonded foam [foam produced from the polyurethane scraps that result from the mechanical recycling process, ed.] in some products. As for chemical recycling, the economic model is more complex. Let’s say you recycle post-consumer foams from Europe into new chemical raw materials, and you have the resources to do that within Europe. Your cost structure will be relatively stable – you have incoming streams, and you have your output. Compare that to petrochemicals, where the prices fluctuate a lot. When the price of recyclates is lower than the price of petrochemicals, it will be very easy for you to sell recyclates on the market. If all of a sudden they are 30 per cent higher, because the price of oil-derived raw materials is extremely low, then you may lose a number of customers. That’s why we have to find a balance to guarantee that people who invest in recycling technologies can find a sustainable economic model.
Catherine At Another Country, we’ve chosen to go down the natural materials route because it has worked for us up until this point. But whether a manmade material is actually preferable, in terms of a circular economy, is a question we ask regularly. It’s not that we’ve completely ruled out ever working with foam, it’s just that at the minute it doesn’t feel like it offers the kind of solution that works for us and meets our customers’ expectations.
Tim From my point of view, if I knew that the foam in post-consumer sofas and chairs would be recycled each and every time, then that would potentially make me consider foams much more. But I don’t have a good understanding of how it is recycled. If I recycle my foams, they get collected and chipped. But I’m not allowed to mix foam from different suppliers, because one supplier won’t have a chain of custody in terms of all of the raw materials that have gone into another supplier’s foam. But if the chemicals could be recycled, I would consider that sustainable.
“Raw natural materials are sometimes much more precious than we tend to think. There’s relatively little on this planet that is really available.”
Stefan I think that raw natural materials are sometimes much more precious than we tend to think. There’s relatively little on this planet that is really available, and I think this is the great potential of artificial or manmade materials. We just have to make sure that they are recyclable, and that the recyling is integrated into already-existing processes.
Michel Chemical recycling of foam has existed for quite a few years now, but for production waste, rather than post-consumer waste. Within that context, it is relatively easy: you’ve just made the foam and cut it to shape, so you have leftover cutoffs that you can dissolve. You know exactly what’s in the foam because you just made it. With post-consumer foam, you get a mix of different types of foam of different ages, and sometimes mixed with other materials like latex. So researching that has taken a couple of years, which was actually the scope of the URBANREC project that Stefan mentioned. But it’s moved forward quite a lot. We have the first plant designed to deal with this going on stream in a couple of weeks in France. It’s on an industrial scale – not a pilot plant. And the Vita Group, which is behind Vitafoam, has committed for its French factories to buy recycled chemical raw materials from that French plant. So give them a couple of months, and you’ll be able to buy foam made out of recycled raw materials. There is also a recycling company linked to Ikea that is currently building a plant in the Netherlands. And Ikea is thinking of going 60, 80 or sometimes 100 per cent foam made with recycled chemicals in its mattresses.
Catherine What do you lose in terms of quality in that process of creating foams from recyled chemicals?
Stefan Nothing.
Michel You have to compromise on the colour, that’s the one thing. I don’t know why, but a lot of people insist on having white foams, which doesn’t make sense because you don’t see the foam when it’s in a piece of furniture. Foam made out of recycled foam can be yellowish. The other thing you will have to accept is that chances are it will not be made with 100 per cent recycled materials. Right now, there will always have to be some mix of virgin.
Daniel Is there any byproduct when foam is recycled?
Michel You get a small proportion of brownish slurry, a sort of thick paste. As mentioned, in the reactor you also have to mix a small amount of virgin material to keep everything liquid. So it’s not a zero waste process, but the waste is, I would say, marginal compared to the output.
Daniel The fact that you can’t know the precise chemical or material makeup of a product seems to be one of the biggest challenges for recycling.
“I’m not willing to wait for others to take action – for the European Union to create new laws. You would probably be waiting another 100 years for something to change that way.”
Michel Yes, but it is not something that can’t be overcome. The foams that come back today as postconsumer material were sometimes made 10, 15, 20 or 25 years ago. Chemical legislation may have evolved, meaning that some substances that were perfectly legal at the time cannot be in products anymore. So recyclers have to make sure that they don’t put so-called legacy substances on the market: they have to identify them and find a way to get them out of the supply chain. But we’ve been working on that and pending sufficient testing it is feasible.
Stefan What we are doing in our studio is trying to promote a very pragmatic approach. I’m not willing to wait for others to take action – for the European Union to create new laws. You would probably be waiting another 100 years for something to change that way. But what designers can do is to get really informed, look at the direction that EU legislation is moving in, understand the ways in which consumers are being more open, and try to improve our offers based on that. What we’re trying to do at the moment is making sure that we can separate the components of all our products. Then we make sure that these components can be replaced by the end consumer. I believe that when we come up with good examples, they are probably going to inspire others and even be improved upon.
Daniel How about something like certification? Are certification schemes at all helpful in building consumer confidence?
Stefan I don’t go for certificates at the moment because we would be unlikely to get certified. With Costume, for instance, there are parts that are not yet circular. The cover, for instance, is made from Kvadrat fabrics, which are currently very difficult to recycle. You can reuse them in needle felt or something like that, but you cannot make the same product out of them. So instead of not doing anything, we think okay, let’s make at least 80 per cent of the sofa better, and then continue working on a compostable cover. Maybe we can manage this in the next two or three years. With any communication we try to be 100 per cent transparent and honest. Because this industry is very vulnerable to greenwashing.
Tim Definitely.
Catherine Sometimes it is about doing what you can every step of the way. Because if you try to solve all of these problems in one go, it can hold you back from making any changes.
“ it will start to become commonplace that when you purchase a product or go into a shop and see an item of furniture, you will have more of a sense of what’s actually gone into it. ”
Daniel It seems there are lots of solutions, but for almost every solution there’s always a slight downside. For example the foam recycling Michel mentioned earlier and the small amount of waste and virgin material needed. There’s no clear answer yet, and the more you dig the more problems seem to arise. I think it’s just a case of always trying to take a step in the right direction and picking the lesser evil, in a sense. Like with most things, the trade-off is never going to be completely perfect, but if you’re not at least trying to make a change then it’s not good enough, is it?
Catherine Being transparent about that is really important, as Stefan said. We’ve looked at a lot of different things, like the Declare Label [a certification scheme for building materials, ed.] for example, and other forms of certification. They’re incredibly expensive and they’re almost unattainable for a lot of companies. But the core of this is about being transparent and explaining exactly what you’re using and where it’s coming from. I think it will start to become commonplace that when you purchase a product or go into a shop and see an item of furniture, you will have more of a sense of what’s actually gone into it. But whether there’s a way for that to happen through self-certification rather than always going through these larger organisations where you pay a lot of money for that process, I’m not sure.
Daniel Some of the brands and material suppliers I’ve been speaking to complain about certification because it’s often set up to fail for certain materials. For example, I was speaking to a guy from a company which makes a coconut fibre matting, who was trying to get the certification for his material to be classed as biodegradable. To do that, you have to put it on a tray with holes in it, and then leave it at room temperature with a certain amount of light – if enough of the material falls through the holes, it’s classified as biodegradable. But because coconut fibre is a strand material, it won’t really fall through – so it doesn’t get that certification. Certification schemes are often set up by companies to suit their own materials – it’s a big grey area, where I don’t think there’s a level playing field a lot of the time.
Tim It’s about understanding who the backers of those companies are, and what their vested interests are. And it’s very difficult to find out these things out – as you say, it’s not transparent and there aren’t enough hours in the day to research and investigate it. Yes, using coconut fibre might be natural, but what’s the carbon footprint of bringing it over from Sri Lanka or India? It’s not easy for us to understand where our materials come from, especially with upholstery. I know where the timber comes from in my frames; I know the steel in the springs comes from either India or China; the feathers are French feathers; most of the wool products we use are from Scotland and Cumbria. But when it comes to the upholstery, there’s lots of little bits in there that I just don’t know.
Introduction Oli Stratford
Images SCP, Another Country and Magis
This article was originally published in Disegno #29. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.