Last week we interviewed Simon Anund, Co-founder & Creative Director of the Swedish manufacturer Verk. Focused on sustainable solutions for furniture manufacturing, Verk looked at ways to produce everything locally. Simon elaborates on this, describing the benefits and challenges of furniture pieces that are truly Made in Sweden.
What inspired Verk to exclusively use Swedish raw materials and manufacture all its furniture in Sweden?
'When I present our philosophy, I often get questions like, is local production really better than having a more global mindset? And what's wrong with importing? So... I will try to elaborate and explain how local production can be key to a more sustainable way of producing.
Sweden has a very good energy mix in its national power grids. It is in countries such as the Nordics that our contemporary production should and could be situated. Unfortunately, money talks, it is still way cheaper with coal driven production. We understood quite soon that we needed numbers and figures to convince our customers, usually architects, that the things we argue are based on facts.
We hired the Swedish technical consultancy company Bengt Dahlgren to make an EPD (Environmental Product Declaration) to find out the differences in the fossil footprint when producing a simple wooden chair in Sweden compared to producing the exact same chair In Poland (Poland's energy mix consists of more than 80% fossil fuel). The chair produced in Sweden had 70% lower fossil impact than the chair produced in Poland. And this is mainly because of the energy-mix.
These numbers make a huge difference, especially when working with larger projects. And in the near future all producers will have to declare their fossil footprint in kg/CO2e. When that day comes, Verk will be in the top segment.
Moreover, after the war in Ukraine started it became even more obvious how extremely difficult it is to do a trustworthy LCA on imported goods. It became clear that the Finnish Birch we imported to Sweden wasn't Finnish at all, it was Russian. Same thing happened all around Europe with goods and materials. All of a sudden we learned that most of the hardwood used in the furniture industry was from countries such as Russia Belarus and Ukraine, not Germany, Poland or the Balkan.
If you have materials such as wood in your homeland, at least try to buy local. Because if you do, you know that the workers behind the materials and products got a decent salary and a social security system to fall back on. Related to the same subject is the depopulation of the Swedish countryside. It is quite sad to travel through small villages that used to flourish, that nowadays looks more like ghost towns. This is the result of all outsourcing and it will be very complicated to reverse.
Nowadays Sweden is one of the world's largest exporter of goods from the forest such timber pulp and paper. Over 70% of the timber goes directly to export. Most of what's left goes to the cellulose industry and only around 3% is left for all kinds of carpentry not more than around 1% ends up in furniture production. That means the almost all wood in furniture from Sweden is imported.
This large scale forestry has been questioned for a good while by researchers politicians and common men. People are angry and frustrated and look up on the massive deforestation as the end of what we once called a natural diverse forest. I will not defend this kind of behaviour, not at all but if you look at it in another angle, it takes a demand for Swedish hardwood to get diverse forests.
I find it quite problematic that it seems to be very few of the concerned actually realise that almost all wood used in so-called Swedish furniture, flooring, kitchens and so on is imported, the exceptions are very very few.
It's a fact that we will never see a mixed diverse forest until we have a demand of local hardwood. No farmer will ever be interested in planting and taking care of a mixed forest as long as they know that the hardwood goes directly to the paper industry after the first thinning.
If we as producers, architects and designers demand local hardwood we can together be an important part of a future change. We need more local hardwood, more sawmills and we need harder regulations and recommendations on a political level to ensure that development.
In challenging times, such as the present, how do you adapt to continue to uphold sustainable values amidst changing consumer behaviours and market conditions?
It has probably not escaped anyone's notice that the furniture industry has been affected by the current recession. A weak economy and high interest rates can create anxiety and difficulties, but it can also contribute to new innovation.
Our answer to these new challenging times has been to focus on the cost of our new pieces of furniture. It became very obvious that sustainability was no longer the key factor when the recession kicked in: all of a sudden we were back to square 1, it's all about the price....again.
As a furniture producer, the past year has been very constructive. We have created new conditions and have also been offered completely new approaches to furniture production that would most likely not have occurred if the economic situation had not changed so drastically.
We have always seen dialogue as one of the most important factors in achieving change. Dialogue has also been the starting point for this year's news from Verk. After being offered an insight into our subcontractors' stock and production conditions, we can for the first time present all-Swedish furniture where even the price is competitive, to say the least. We have drawn a product from a new type of angle: a design based on dimensions of oak and birch that lacked a specific area of use.
We are very proud to be able to present a sustainable cost-effective alternative, our new chair V.VP.03, with a minimal fossil footprint to an industry that seriously needs to start taking responsibility for what we leave behind.
More information:
Verk
Folkungagatan 146
116 30 Stockholm, Sweden
073-526 92 10
[email protected]
www.verk.se