These days it is possible to get almost anything quickly and cheaply. The problem is, cheap doesn’t last. Ever heard the saying ‘Buy cheap, buy twice’?
There are many options to buy cheap furniture, including sofas. But how often do you see a cheap sofa fly tipped on the side of a road? It’s unlikely you’ll see a solidly built, quality sofa like a Multiyork reduced to such a disparaging end.
It takes 1000x more Co2 to make a new sofa than it does to repair an existing piece. It is estimated that for every 1 ton of sofas re-used, 1.5 tonnes of Co2 would be saved.
Government figures state that England sends more than 50% of our waste to a landfill. This is the equivalent of 62 million tonnes a year in the UK alone.
Every year thousands of sofas are discarded on our streets or thrown into landfills. The effect on our environment and wildlife is huge, and incredibly damaging.
In recent years, Wrap.org have been conducting annual surveys in order to understand the types and re-usability of UK waste.
WasteDataFlow (WDF) estimate that across the UK, 1,590,000 tonnes of bulky waste is sent to landfill annually. Around 42% of this waste consists of furniture, which equates to 670,000 tonnes of furniture disposed by householders in the UK annually. That’s the equivalent of around 4 million sofas per year.
Many people believe items that are thrown into landfill are no longer fit for use, yet findings by Wrap suggest that a significant amount of products are repairable or re-usable.
The Furniture Re-use Network (FRN) indicates that around 30% of bulky waste collected from households can be re-used.
Out of the 670,000 tonnes of furniture disposed of every year by British households, assuming 30% of this is re-usable this could stop an estimated 201 tonnes of waste going into landfill every year.
Sofa recovering! As tempting as it is to throw out old furniture if it’s worn, and no longer fits the décor in your house, there is a much more environmentally friendly alternative.
Recovering your sofa suite saves putting your furniture into landfill, the production of unnecessary greenhouse gasses and saves you time having to look for a new one that will fit.