During the summer months, there’s nothing better than sitting out on an Adirondack chair with a glass of wine or a nice frosty beer to take in the sights and sounds of the season. However, since this type of outdoor furniture is typically manufactured from wood, wood and more wood, it may bring a nice summer, cottagey feeling to your home in the city or the county; but it comes at the cost of the environment.

Loll Designs offers a solution with their line of outdoor furniture that is made from 100% post consumer recycled HDPE, a high-density polyethylene which is a plastic resin that is used in products and packaging such as milk jugs, detergent bottles, margarine tubs, and garbage containers. Loll Designs Adirondack chairs come in a variety of shapes, sizes and colors, and will look fantastic on any deck or front porch of a home or summer cottage. Plus, to get them there, the eco-friendly company uses carbon offset shipping through a partnership with Carbon Fund and packages the sustainable outdoor furniture in completely recycled and recyclable packaging. It doesn’t stop there either, they also produce their furniture locally in the United States, donate 1% of the proceed of their sales to a variety of environmental organizations, and they plant a tree for every harvesting day of the year! Keep reading →

Whether mattresses are typically made from goose down, or other synthetic foams and materials that take a toll on the environment with the manufacturing process or through the cultivation of the materials themselves; they generally don’t do any favors to the environment.  Of course, everyone wants a comfortable place to lie down at the end of a hard day, so purchasing a mattress should never be taken lightly, and if you don’t want to be kept awake at night as a result of choosing a mattress that’s anti-environmental, you might want to look at an alternative. Keep reading →

Cork isn’t just for topping wine bottles anymore; it’s becoming one of the trendiest materials in sustainable home furnishings because it’s a material with minimal environmental impact, it can withstand the tests of time, and it looks pretty cool too. After your next dinner party, or the next time you have one of your own secret drinking binges; save up your corks, you might just be inspired to create your own sustainable piece of furniture like the latest design by Iannone Design.

The Cork Media Console is a modern, minimalist design ready to house your flat screen TV and the rest of your home entertainment center. Made of cork which delivers the unique texture and look of the furniture, as well as bamboo plywood, you can focus on your green furniture and stare at it for hours on end while you fall into zombiedom in front of the TV every evening.

While some may hold the misconception that cork is a precious commodity that is on its way to extinction, it’s in fact one of the most sustainable materials that comes directly from nature. Cork can be extracted without killing the entire tree that it comes from, so within a 9 to 10 year period the tree is still trucking with a whole new outer layer grown back. Cork will also last longer than most other materials, so it needs little enhancement beyond the low-VOC water-based topcoat applied by Iannone to outlast your design tastes. Cork is watertight, easily recycled, as well as shock and fire resistant; it’s properties are so sustainable that it might hang around so long that you might just be finding ways to get rid of it!

Get your hands on the Cork Media Console, but now that you know all about the sustainability of cork, take a moment to appreciate all it has to offer next time you uncork your favorite bottle of wine.

Via: Nature Repurposed

There are two major problems that people encounter when they bring new furniture into their home. Sure it may look nice and really add something to the décor of the home, but it very rarely lasts as long as you might like it to, and even when it does, quite frankly, you might get tired of looking at it.

I do have some minor reservations about Swedish design company, Briklor’s promise to deliver furniture that “has an emotional and technical durability of 300” years. Ok fine, I’m sure the furniture will last, but if I live to be 300 and my furniture’s still around and kicking, I’m probably in desperate need of an overhaul of great interior decorating proportions for the sake of my sanity. That being said, the purpose of the sustainable furniture, isn’t necessarily that it will survive in one household for 300 years, but that it can be recycled and reused in a number of households while still abiding by modern home décor aesthetics so the 20th owner can appreciate the furniture as much as the 1st. Keep reading →