Austin corner sofa

It’s all in the detail

size	W273/200 x D103 x H94/47cm
assembly	Legs come off for easy delivery

Environmental Rating Guide

Our Environmental rating guide has three big aims:

To minimise any damaging effect on the environment contributed to by our business.

Transparency for customers - raising awareness of environmental and ethical issues in our everyday purchases.

To constantly put pressure on suppliers & improve furniture industry practices.

We assess three key aspects of the furniture process for most of our products and grade each area out of three stars.

Raw Materials

We look at the provenance of timber to ensure it’s legal and not endangered, see if it’s COC certified by the FSC or PEFC and where it is grown. We consider the ability for a product to be recycled or reused at the end of its life. For any non-sustainable elements (E.G. metal table extension mechanisms), we consider how many years likely usage the element will achieve.

Workshop practices

We visit our workshops to see first-hand how they are managed. We assess employment practices as defined by International Labour Organisation but also regional regulations (EU standards or equivalent area of developed regulation) and whether measures such as Zero waste facilities are in use. Most of our workshops are smaller family owned businesses where we can actively encourage ways of improving practices – like moving to water based glues/stains.

Furniture miles & packaging

We don’t use air freight. Most of our furniture is transported from Europe by road. We are embarking on a Carbon Balance programme for our transportation from the workshops to our customers’ homes through The World Land Trust’s land conservation scheme, which protects the world’s most biologically important and threatened habitats. Our packaging has to be robust to protect our products, but we are always looking for new ways to use recycled or recyclable products.

Noteworthy commitment

Finally we consider a final star for any extra, non-essential steps that our workshops take to limit their impact on the natural and social environment for no other reason than it’s the responsible thing to do. For example community and charitable work.

We developed our rating guide and now label every piece of wood furniture in our shops and online with an environmental grading tag. This is a voluntary project designed and operated by Adventures in Furniture Ltd. It is not independently assessed however it is our goal for it to grow into a nationally recognised, independently managed rating scheme. We look at three main categories (wood source, workshop practices and furniture miles) connected with the origins of our furniture and we allocate a star rating up to a maximum of 10 stars. We summarise this ‘rating’ on a label on each piece of furniture in our shop.

As we review and improve the rating system it gains in strength. We believe this information to be accurate and wherever possible we verify it with our own eyes.