Fast food? Fast fashion? Fast furniture? It seems like all we want these days is speed, and that applies to our furniture too, especially in the pandemic era. But what about quality? What about long-lasting furniture, or even locally made furniture? Or, the deeper question, is fast furniture even really fast? Why is it taking three months for my sofa to show up? Let's dig into all these questions and more.
Apartment therapy defines fast furniture as furniture that's mass-produced, inexpensive, and designed to be quickly assembled and replaced. Fast furniture has long been an accessible and affordable option, synonymous with particle board bookshelves. But how does it work? Simple. Choose the item, pick it up, take it home, and put it together. But the way that some of these online-only companies operate is substantially different from the IKEA's, Targets, and Coals of the world. Online-only companies operate like clearinghouses, selling millions of products that they don't manufacture themselves. Instead, they use a dropshipping model, where you buy, say, a sofa from an online company, and then that company buys the sofa from one of their suppliers, who in turn actually mails it to you. And this model is profitable. According to just one company's annual report in 2018, it sold almost $7 billion worth of products, and that was before the pandemic.
Then, when lockdown started in 2020, and people started spending more and more time in their homes and had a new need for office equipment and other furniture with no ability to go to stores, well, fast furniture really took off. According to data cited in the New York Times, sales on desks, chairs, and patio equipment increased more than $4 billion from 2019 to 2021. But even as we're using more and more fast furniture, there are some concerns about the environmental impact of these easily replaceable and cheap items. Since the explosion in fast furniture's popularity during the pandemic, we're seeing more and more headlines like this. A lot of those sustainability concerns come down to the relatively short lifespan of most fast furniture, because while these pieces may be fast to arrive, they're often also fast to break.
Consider one of the most popular materials in all fast furniture, particle board. This material is made in sheets or boards out of compressed wood chips, cardboard, and often resin. It's essentially like scraps of wood glued together, so it's way cheaper than buying actual wood, like 2x4s or plywood, to build a dresser or a bookshelf. But it's also way weaker. It can't support as much weight and will often bend and buckle under heavy books or appliances or even just the weight of the top of the piece of furniture. It's also very susceptible to water damage. Even a little bit of water, like a spilled glass, can cause each individual wood chip and thus the whole piece to expand and warp and swell. There is lifting and this whole section rises up like this. And it's close to impossible to repair once it's damaged. But it's cheap, so most people don't mind and just buy a new one. But then what happens to the old one?
As the New York Times puts it, fast furniture is cheap, and Americans are throwing it in the trash. The Times reports that 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. But that old fast furniture doesn't have to go in the trash. First of all, there are ways to repair your cheaper particle board furniture. There's tons of resources online about how to repair it, ranging from using wood filler for smaller projects to cutting out whole chunks of water-damaged boards. So if you can't afford more expensive, durable furniture, there are absolutely ways to extend the life of your fast furniture. And if that doesn't work, there are actually a lot of recycling options, both for an individual and for big companies. Particle board can actually be turned into recycled paper, since it's made of wood. That's a larger-scale process that needs specialized equipment, so companies themselves would really need to spearhead such a movement. Individuals can also reuse particle board, a favorite for artists, especially multimedia artists who need a stronger painting surface than stretched canvas. There's also a move to use old particle board as converted wood flooring in homes. Or even more popular, as subflooring beneath your nice wood slats on top.
But recycling the actual materials is not the only way to make fast furniture greener. There's also a lot we can do to improve the sustainability of the manufacturing and shipping process. Because think about it, fast furniture is often mass-produced in factories around the world, which emit greenhouse gases, then shipped through carbon-emitting processes, including diesel-run container ships and gas-reliant trucks. By the time the item gets to you, it's likely been halfway around the world. This is borne out in the data. A March 2023 report from ShipItZero, which aims to reduce shipping emissions, found that in 2021, more than 1,600 ships imported more than 4.7 million containers and generated 3.5 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions. This is part of the answer to our earlier question. Why isn't fast furniture fast, or faster? Well, if you're ordering a cheap sofa made in a fast furniture factory in Asia, and it's being shipped to the U.S., bopping from warehouse to warehouse before it's loaded onto the final delivery truck and taken to your doorstep, it has quite a journey. And even if the sofas are delivered in bulk before they're ordered to a U.S.-based warehouse, it still has to be loaded onto a truck and often driven across the country.
By comparison, consider a locally built sofa, or a bookshelf or bed frame or desk, made by a carpenter, craftsman, or upholsterer in your own neighborhood. Now, if you commissioned a custom-made sofa or bookshelf, you'd likely end up paying significantly more. And with that slight cost premium, you could end up with a piece of furniture to pass down for generations. Because that's the thing. Our grandparents' furniture did last generations. A lot of folks have pieces like this. That ugly salmon pink sofa that somehow ends up in every living room. Or your grandparents' break-front china cabinet that now houses all your kids' Xbox games. At a minimum, companies should work on optimizing their supply chains to be more efficient and environmentally friendly.
So, like most things we've talked about together, there's nuance here. Sure, it'd be great if we could all afford locally made luxury furniture made of sustainable materials. But that's not always feasible. So, instead, both companies and individuals can take steps to reduce their own impact on the world's environment by reducing, reusing, and recycling, and by shifting commercial operations to prioritize even a slight reduction in fast furniture waste.