The anatomy of a pure piece of furniture
‘Would you eat this chair?’ That’s the question we posed some of the designers, architects, and suppliers we work with in Sweden.
To understand why we would ask such a thing – and why they would consider saying ‘Yes’ – it’s worth understanding a bit more about the chair in question.
A pure piece of furniture
Meet Embrace – an award-winning family of chairs, designed as a versatile accompaniment to today’s working life. It has also been designed with the health of its users and the environment in mind.
At Kinnarps, we have a long tradition of using pure materials in our furnishings – leading us to carefully consider the choice of raw materials, how they affect us when we use them, and how easy it is to recycle our products and their parts at the end of their life.
With Embrace, we wanted to see how far we could push that long-held belief. How pure could we make a chair? Here is the result – the anatomy of a pure piece of furniture:
WOOD
Embrace is FSC® certified, which means all of the wood it uses comes from responsibly managed forests.
The wood is treated with a water based UV-lacquer with low quantities of potentially harmful organic compounds like hydrogen and carbon (which can be hazardous if swallowed or breathed).
FABRIC & PADDING
100% of the fabric for Embrace is free from flame retardants and azo dyes. Choose from fabrics which are either EU Ecolabel (environmentally friendly) or Oeka-Tex certified (tested for harmful substances).
The padding is free from flame retardants and also fulfils the requirements of Oeko-Tex.
PLASTIC
The plastic used for Embrace is free from PVC and flame retardants.
It is also free from potentially hazardous PFOS, Bisfenol A and phthalates.
METALS
20% of the metal used has already been recycled before we come to use it.
We use powder coating to treat the surface, meaning there’s no high emissions of volatile organic compounds.
RECYCLABILITY
What's more, Embrace is designed with replaceable parts that are easy to change, with different materials not casted together in a way that makes them hard to separate and recycle. In fact, Embrace is 100% recyclable – with 53% of materials either reusable or recyclable and the remaining 47% energy recoverable.
From every angle – both as a whole and in the make-up of its parts – Embrace has pursued the ideal of a pure piece of furniture. We’ve gone down this route as we firmly believe furniture needn’t be harmful to the environment or the people that use them.
Back to the question we posed at the beginning – ‘Would you eat this chair?' Surprising as it might sound, a number of those who know us well were up for the challenge. Here’s what happened…
