Competitiveness of the office furniture industry on the global market is strongly affected by an ever-increasing focus
on environmental performance of products. Hence, verifiable information of the environmental compliance of
products throughout their whole life cycle is demanded from stakeholders of the furniture industry, which needs to
be based on scientific proposition. This paper investigates how to support companies in designing environmentally
sustainable office furniture, considering all phases of the life cycle. It deals with the identification of the environmental
profile and main environmental impact potential of the office furniture product group aiming to develop an
instrument which orients towards sustainable design.
A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been conducted to evaluate the environmental profile of five different
office furniture product categories. Data drawn from publicly available Environmental Product Declarations have
been evaluated with the software programme SimaPro. Furthermore, a system to prioritise Life Cycle Design (LCD)
strategies for environmental sustainability has been adopted and a workshop for generating ideas for an LCD tool
related to the design of office furniture has been carried out.
An important factor is that the majority of environmental burdens is significantly linked to the pre-production
stage which implies that environmental impacts related to the furniture derive mostly from raw materials extraction
and its processing. The final outcome of the research is a handbook and a tool with product type specific guidelines
which assists in the product design process and addresses companies, i.e. engineers and designers.

Authors: Lena Plaschke, Carlo Arnaldo Vezzoli and Francesco Scullica