Popular ‘fast furniture’ could soon clog up landfills in US
Americans bought piles of furniture during the pandemic, with sales on desks, chairs and patio equipment jumping by more than $4 billion from 2019 to 2021, according to a market data company. And a lot of it won’t survive the decade.
Fast furniture, which is mass-produced and relatively inexpensive, is easy to obtain and then abandon.
Many of the Ikea beds and Wayfair desks bought during the COVID-19 lockdown were designed to last about five years, said Deana McDonagh, a professor of industrial design at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
“I relate to fast furniture like I do to fast food,” McDonagh said. “It’s empty of culture, and it’s not carrying any history with it.”
Ikea of Sweden said in a statement that “life span estimation may vary” for its furniture, and customers are encouraged to repair, resell or return products they can no longer use.
Meanwhile, Wayfair said through a spokesperson that “we sell an extensive range of furniture products across all styles and price points,” adding that some are meant to “last for generations as well as furniture that meets customer needs for affordability.”
Increasingly, renters and homeowners are opting for fast and cheap, or as Amber Dunford, style director at Overstock.com, defines it, “furniture where the human hand is missing.” And they don’t keep it long. Each year, Americans throw out more than 12 million tons of furniture, creating mountains of solid waste that have grown 450% since 1960, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Bits of tossed furniture can be recycled, but the vast majority ends up in landfills.
“It’s quite a big problem, both spatially and also because of the way a lot of fast furniture is made now, it’s not just wood and metal. The materials don’t biodegrade or break down,” said Ashlee Piper, a sustainability expert.
The e-commerce furniture market alone was worth more than $27 billion in 2021, and projected to reach more than $40 billion by 2030, according to a report from Next Move Strategy Consulting. Ikea is opening an average of 50 new locations per year; Amazon, the world’s largest retailer, now has two private-label furniture brands, the midcentury-modern Rivet and the more farmhouse-chic Stone & Beam.
For all of its flaws, fast furniture offers millions of homeowners the opportunity to live in a stylish home at an affordable price point. As young people contend with skyrocketing housing prices and economic anxiety, even those who would prefer to browse antique markets or shop for custom pieces simply don’t have the resources to do so.
Over the past decade, a number of sustainability-focused companies have entered the market in the hopes of presenting a solution.
Kaiyo, an online marketplace for pre-owned furniture, was founded in 2014 and says it has since kept more than 3.5 million pounds of furniture out of landfills. Those with furniture to unload can offer it to Kaiyo, and if the company accepts — Alpay Koralturk, the CEO, said the company purchases about half of the pieces offered to them — it will get picked up for free and the seller will get a check. Buyers can shop the online marketplace, and know that items shown online are always in stock.
Fernish, a rental furniture subscription service, allows customers to pay monthto-month for items from brands like Crate & Barrel, always with the option to buy outright.
The service says it has saved more than 1 million pounds of furniture from landfills.
“We recognize that furniture is generally an unrecyclable good,” said Michael Barlow, Fernish’s CEO. “The way to give it a second life is to put very quality product into circulation in the first place, and build a supply chain,” he said. “The demographic that we’re built for is people in their 20s and 30s.”