a gentle act
of rebelly
Ethics
– This is not a romantic sales pitch. We don’t do what we do to be relevant. Sustainability for us, is not a formality. It is our bare essence since 2010, when we started our ethical adventure.
Pieter Van Tulder,
2050 Furniture designer
• We are part of nature, nature is not in function of us. Therefore, we don’t see nature as a commodity or as something that’s just there for us to use as we please.
• We don’t source wood from forests or timber plantations.
• Our only business with forests is to protect them.
• We don’t rely on any form of forestry. Neither “sustainable forestry” nor industrial thinning of eco systems.
• Instead, we try to find solutions for the structural waste problem.
• We use the forgotten and unloved resources that are considered waste, and we give them a new life cycle.
Design
Pieter Van Tulder’s design process starts from the pile of so-called waste. He intentionally designs with waste materials in mind, and aims to upcycle them, so they become useful and therefore valuable again. On this moment he works mainly with wood. Van Tulder doesn’t focus on one type of wood, but on the diversity of the waste wood available.
Not only form and function is crucial in Van Tulder’s design process, but also finding ways to use the diverse waste materials. The reusing aspect mainly steers the whole design process. If a shape is too demanding for this upcycling process, the design is adjusted, not the material.
Some techniques don’t work well on certain types of wood. For example, spruce and pine wood, that is found at large amounts in the Norwegian wood waste pile, doesn’t steam bend very well. Since furniture doesn’t exist out of only straight parts, Van Tulder still needs to find ways to achieve curves. At the same time, he has to make sure the production process is efficient, that all kinds of wood can be used, and that his production process doesn’t create too much waste.
His furniture is designed to be sent flat packed and is easily assembled and disassembled.
The dynamics in Van Tulder’s design and production process differ as well from a conventional process since he doesn’t allow himself to focus on only one type of wood.
– The furniture industry’s focus on only a few types of wood, for example ash and oak, is catastrophic. These trees are mainly removed from valuable ecosystems if they need to supply a substantial production, says Van Tulder.
Oak and ash are good for furniture making, but both living and decomposing oaks and ashes have their very important roles to play in valuable ecosystems as well. Knowing this, and that there are mountains of wood waste available, Van Tulder feels obligated to use wood from the waste pile.
– I see myself as someone giving impulses to the market. My aim is to make more producers rediscover waste and consider it useful. Now I design furniture from waste wood, since there is still a lot of massive wood in today’s waste pile. The future waste pile will look different, and then I will put my focus on designing with other materials.
– My design concept starts from a structural problem, not necessarily from a preconceived aesthetical need. I am a waste management dersigner.
Pieter Van Tulder,
2050 Furniture designer
Production
– We create a gentle work environment for people who need it and make them part of an extraordinary furniture production in a conventional market.
Pieter Van Tulder,
2050 Furniture designer
Our furniture is produced inclusively.
We include materials that are considered waste and turn them back into valuable resources.
We include people and we value those ones with more outspoken sensitivities as equal players.
We produce furniture locally. Instead of having a full in-house production, we choose to focus on decentralizing and use the infrastructure that is already present in our close surroundings.
Our cooperative production model invites local actors to take part in the process as partners and suppliers. The production model makes sure we can produce our furniture locally, in different small communities.
Although our production is decentralized, we have a short production chain. An agreement with the regional waste management company ensures a consistent flow of local waste material for our production.
This is how we can guarantee that all our furniture is made by locals in a locally existing infrastructure, in an upcycling process from locally reclaimed wood.
Process
– By dissecting furniture components into different layers, I can use smaller and thinner pieces of wood that normally don’t qualify for furniture production.
Pieter Van Tulder,
2050 Furniture designer
We make furniture from what are considered the least valuable pieces of wood in the waste stream. Thin, narrow pieces of any type of wood. Our “Sondre” chair is made from wood that is minimum 8,3 mm thick and 60 mm wide. The length of each individual piece doesn’t matter for the production.
We laminate different pieces of wood and incorporate joinery into the laminations. By gluing the laminations into deliberate shapes, we create the base product for our furniture that can go directly to the CNC-park.
Gluing deliberately enables us not only to use very small pieces, but as well to determine our own tolerance of waste in the CNC-production. Instead of cutting everything out of a big, laminated panel – like it is done for example in traditional kitchen production – and create a lot of waste material in irregular shapes and sizes, we can determine how much waste we allow for ourselves.
We consider the production to have two sections. A sensitive part, and a non-sensitive part.
First part is the recycling in the sheltered workplace. Here we allow both human and material complexity and sensitivities to play their role. This process takes longer than in a conventional furniture production. That is our unconditional investment in a kinder process.
This is compensated by the CNC-part of the production; a computerized, fast, straight forward production process that needs a start-up input, but carries on by itself during the biggest part of the production.
We prove that the efficiency of automatization can compensate for a kinder and complex process. We prove that with the right mindset, these two go hand in hand.
Hierarchy of reusing
– We must be very careful how we approach waste. We can make the waste problem bigger, or simply maintain a linear waste process, if we don’t carefully recognize the materials. If we use the same mentality for waste as for conventional resources, we just maintain the problem, since pollution is structural.
Pieter Van Tulder,
2050 Furniture designer
Material use always needs to come with a sense of care. Natural resources are limited. Not being careful with the amount we use, will have a negative impact on our climate and natural habitat. That is obvious.
With a few exceptions, we see pollution as a structural problem. By being more careful how much and where we use, we can significantly reduce our use of resources, which obviously will have a positive effect on our natural surroundings.
We see this on a macro-scale, but as well when we zoom in on certain areas – like waste management. Waste is not just waste.
If we take wood as an example, “waste wood” comes in many different kinds, sizes, and qualities. All these have a different structural value. It is important that the value is recognized and respected to have a recycling that’s as broad as possible, and not to create downcycling.
As a furniture designer working with waste material, I see a gigantic number of resources that are not valued as they should.
Imagine this:
I, as an ethical furniture maker, save a log building from a container or a fire. I could choose to cut those logs into thin planks and use them in my furniture production, accompanied by a beautiful story about how I reused something that would have gone to waste anyway.
If focus was only on reusing, this would not be a problem. But when we look at the structural aspect of recycling, it is obvious that sawing those big beams into planks or furniture parts is not a good idea. The beams would be much better off directly used in a building, due to their structural qualities. House builders need their structural wood, which is a certain cut from a tree.
We need a more inclusive recycling process. We must figure out what we really need and what we can use, and make sure not to devaluate specific materials.
If I would not be thoughtful and I would devaluate those beams, I would create a pathway to the forest for my colleagues, the house builders, which misses my ethical intention completely.
This is why I choose to design my furniture from waste wood that is considered structurally worthless. It is more than good enough for furniture.
It is important that certain materials’ life span is extended as much as possible, but that doesn’t go for all types of material. Obviously, chemicals and products contaminated with chemicals, need to be processed with care by specialists or in specialized facilities.
Environment
– We are fully aware that the climate crisis is not only a CO2 problem, that it is much bigger and much wider. But we find that storing carbon and protecting ecosystems is a good way for us to have a positive impact. Therefore, we prolong the life of wood and protect ecosystems.
Pieter Van Tulder,
2050 Furniture designer
Wood has a smaller ecological impact than many other materials, therefore we believe in the usage of wood in the daily life. To build a wooden house is still a better solution than pouring a concrete house, if you consider the ecological impact. But we must be more careful with what we take from nature and how and for how long we use the resources.
To focus on “sustainable wood cultures” seems a beautiful story at first sight. But we need to count in the knowledge that tree fields are man-made monocultures, and that thriving ecosystems probably were removed to have these monocultures planted. Science has proven that from a CO2 point of view, real, diverse forests are many times more efficient in absorbing CO2 than timber plantations.
We focus on making repairable furniture. The more repair instead of wasting, the better.
For obvious reasons we treat our wood as little as possible. We use a non-toxic one-component lacquer made from the safflower thistle only where it is necessary, like on the seat of a chair and the top of a table. By using a minimum of chemical products, we keep the wood as pure as possible, so it is cleaner and easier to decompose at the end of its life span.
We are slowly stepping away from wood treatment. Adding a lacquer or a chemical component to wood, gives the impression that furniture will live longer, but it also makes extending the life of the wood into a next cycle more complicated. Although we aim to have our furniture outlive its owners, we still think it’s wise not to add chemicals to a perfectly organic, biodegradable material and turn it into a piece of toxic waste.
We also don’t use paint. Our furniture has color from time to time, but that is because we find a lot of wood with paint leftovers in the waste stream. All these different colors give an eclectic look to our pieces and accentuate our focus on the diverse use of reclaimed material.
We still use glue, mainly a formaldehyde free polyvinyl acetate glue, as is enables a more efficient recycling. As you have read above about our recycling process, and the materials we want to use, it is very complicated to start applying mechanical joinery on these small pieces of wood. We use it where we can, but in a competitive market it is extremely difficult to set up a larger production based on only mechanical joinery. It is too labor intensive, and demands quite skilled and specialized labor, which is not so commonly available. We want to focus on local and social labor, which means the job needs to have a low threshold and be easily accessible.
All this is a very complex, nuanced matter. We are writing this to be transparent, and there is of course more to it. Feel free to get in touch if you have questions about this!
Our aim for the future is, as mentioned above, to develop a universal building block that can be used in all kinds of furniture in different life cycles. This comes with many challenges. We envision using glue to avoid using a lot of for example metal components to connect the building blocks. A reversible glue would be ideal. To our knowledge this doesn’t exist today.
We started working towards the idea of a building block and a reversible glue in the beginning of the design process of the Sondre stool in 2021.
Structural issues
– We need a new method to measure the impact of waste materials.
Pieter Van Tulder,
2050 Furniture designer
In a world where labeling is everything, our process is met with a severe handicap: We cannot measure our carbon footprint. There is no method to measure the impact of products made from materials from the waste stream.
For linear production processes with a defined starting point, the carbon footprint of a product is measured in a Life cycle analysis (LCA).
A LCA can measure the carbon footprint of a chair made from wood directly from a forest or a timber plantation. It maps the environmental impact of process the wood went through from the tree was cut till the planks were ready to use in the furniture factory.
When we use waste materials, we cannot determine where they came from or the impact they had in their previous life cycles.
This results in better LCA scores for furniture made from virgin resources, than for furniture made from wood from the waste stream.
Obviously, this is not correct.
Another structural obstacle we meet, is that there is no well-established system that makes wood from the waste stream easily accessible. There is already a very well-developed system for wood from forests or timber plantations. Big machinery can drive on steep hills and cut trees, that can be sold as dry planks in the shop two weeks later.
We need a structure where clean wood from the waste pile is as easily accessible as wood from the conventional structure. The biggest problem in waste wood is dirt, metal, and toxins. We must find ways to detect, recognize, remove, and extract it efficiently.
In many cases the wood and lumber are slightly re-dimensioned when it is cleaned. To come up with a new set of standard dimensions, especially developed for the end product of a waste stream, would be an interesting idea.
Due to the lack of a supply chain for waste wood, we have to make our own base product directly from the waste pile. We remove dirt and metal and re-dimension the waste wood before we can use it in our production. Our furniture process in other words includes a recycling/lumber process. In today’s market that is a disadvantage, and it needs to be solved with for example material banking. Material banking is an extension of the conventional waste management structure. In a material bank we can sell waste material for direct use, reintroduce atypical materials prepare waste materials to be sold as usable again.
Chemistry
– By extending the life of wood, and not cutting trees, my furniture becomes a long-term carbon storage place. The longer my furniture, or the components they are made of, live, the better.
Pieter Van Tulder,
2050 Furniture designer
Ecosystems, like forests, are valuable in removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Every tree stores carbon in its wood. The bigger the tree gets, the more carbon it stores. The moment the wood is burned or decomposed; the carbon is released back into the atmosphere as CO2. This can happen in a slow process – through decomposing –, or a faster process – through burning (biomass).
Within a thriving ecosystem, release of carbon from decomposing trees is not the biggest problem, since the CO2 is absorbed by other plants and trees in that system. When ecosystems are replaced with timber plantations, the ability to reabsorb big amounts of CO2 is significantly reduced.
Science has proven that a diverse ecosystem is much more efficient in absorbing CO2 than a monoculture of trees. Diversity seems to be key. Therefore, protecting living trees and ecosystems is a priority for us.
Knowing this, extending the life of wood is very important and seems like a good way to have a positive impact on the climate.
What we do is twofold: We extend the life of wood from the waste stream, so it keeps its carbon stored. By going to the waste pile, we also protect living trees, which are important allies against the CO2 problem.
On one hand we store carbon, on the other we maintain the absorption of CO2 done by living trees. The traditional fast furniture industry affects both these areas negatively.
Van Tulder is constantly developing ways that makes it easier to extend the life of his furniture. The Sondre chair is the first step in an exploration to create a general building block that can be used in every part of a piece of furniture. After one life cycle, the building block can be disassembled and used again in a new piece of furniture.
Circularity
From our ecological ethics, circularity is a given. Within an ecosystem, circularity and diversity are the main principals to keep the system going. Apply this to economics, and you have circular economics.
We are true suckers for the doughnut model developed by Kate Raworth, and we try to apply as much as possible.
The
green deal
2050 Furniture is ready for the future.
The European Green Deal states that all member states and their economies need to be carbon neutral by 2050 if we want to avoid a catastrophic collapse of the global ecosystem. We are ready.
This is, as Europeans, our promise for a future for the coming generations.
We have done the transition. If you need furniture, and you don’t want to claim the future, but still want a deliberate design, ethical and aesthetical, we come into your advantage.
Responsibility
We also have a responsibility as consumers to not expect furniture to be made for example from a flawless piece of first choice oak (knowing that that oak used to be a mother tree in a thriving ecosystem). Especially since recent studies have shown that a piece of furniture has an average life of ten years, we need to accept that furniture is made of possibly a composite material (that is good enough to last a hundred years if it would have to).
So called imperfections in wood don’t affect our “sitting or dining experience”. Comfort is more a matter of the design, not necessarily the material.
As mentioned before, we focus on repair and already have an eclectic mix of materials in our furniture. Imperfections in wood turn into texture, which can bring an interior soul and character.
– As a furniture designer, I have a responsibility towards our environment. I refuse to design furniture that lasts five years, something that is intentionally done by actors in today’s fast furniture market.
Pieter Van Tulder,
2050 Furniture designer