It is always difficult for an environmentally-conscious manager to be sure he is buying from a sustainable, ethical and morally-justifiable source—but a way of beginning to assess it in workplace furniture is by ‘product miles’.
The concept of product miles seeks to show how much energy goes into getting a product to the customer. The notion was first heard as ‘food miles’, coined by a university professor to warn how much energy was wasted in carting comestibles around the country, and it has now been adopted as a way of measuring the environmental impact of getting any product to market.
It is not seen as a complete answer, and is often misinterpreted. Even Defra warns that the same ‘food mile’ does not apply to a truck full of carrots and a pound of cheese in the back of a car.
And there are ludicrous anomalies—it is more energy-efficient to drive Spanish winter tomatoes here than to grow them in Britain inside heated greenhouses, and importing dairy products from New Zealand uses half the energy of producing them in the UK. Even their meat can be sent here four times as energy-efficiently as getting our own butcher’s shops and supermarkets.
| ”Carbon trading makes sense so long as ‘buy a tree and dump your guilt’ isn’t picked as an easy option..” Mark Bird Kinnarps |
In spite of this, some say that a product mile is the best yardstick we have. If this so, then in using it for office furniture, the buyer has to be wary of the equivalent puzzles to carrots, cheese, tomatoes and lamb.
Typically, says Hugh Paul at K+N Furniture, there are many ‘invisible’ miles.
“The miles from factory to user, called ‘miles out’, are only one part of the story. There are also ‘miles in’ of raw materials. Now, if we make all our own shelves and drawers, our ‘miles in’ are less than for a manufacturer who buys his fittings from China. In Frankfurt, we get our chipboard from southern Germany, local steel, local aluminium, and local plastics. This means that if we have a crisis, we have van miles, not a plane to China.”
Deliveries, or ‘miles out’, are not as simple as might appear, says Paul: “Our factories are in Germany, so products sold in the UK involve furniture miles—but a simple ‘how far’ is not enough, because we use special trucks to maximise capacity. And even so, our American colleagues will argue that their 40- foot container on a massive ship has less impact per mile than our truck crossing Europe.”
Measure up
Some customers are getting a little too enthusiastic about the simple counting of miles, confirms Jonathan Hindle, managing director of KI.
“Some architects and designers seem to view product miles as a panacea in the absence of any other touted measures. However, product miles are easily distorted, and that is why the government’s task force is now challenged with creating an internationally common set of criteria for measurements of carbon footprint.
| FM Quick Facts |
|
“We are keen to have clients understand that the whole issue of carbon footprint must be measured on a much wider premise. A ‘local factory’ delivery only accounts for a tiny fraction of the overall cradle-to-grave energy use—much larger elements of carbon footprint are in the sourcing of raw material, power energy sources in the factories, and waste management in the factories.”
It would be nice for the buyer to have a benchmark, and several current initiatives try to help. Their common problem is of manufacturers choosing the most ‘convenient’ figures.
“What miles count?” asks Marc Bird of Kinnarps. “If a British product is manufactured locally but was designed by an Australian who flew here for monthly pre-production design meetings, how does that rate?
“We suggest buyers follow the BIFM’s Sustainable FM Knowledge Transfer Project, which aims at creating a bestpractice guide, and to help distinguish between glib marketing gibberish and real, commendable claims.
“For example, it would be easy for a supplier to offset the carbon emissions released in the production of one range of seating and call it ‘the world’s most carbon-neutral chair’, while the rest of their production processes may be irresponsible. Evaluate the whole company.”
This is the aim of EMAS, the EU eco-management audit scheme, which advocates the reduction of road use as one of many criteria. In furniture, Interstuhl has adopted EMAS, and promotes the fact that it makes components on site, right down to mechanisms and castors with locally sourced materials. The staff also live within 5km of the factory, including senior management, one of whom has devised his own home to have zero impact on the environment and use no fossil fuels.
Star turns
The first move at rating individual pieces of furniture has not come from one of the big names—it is by Chest of Drawers, a London-based supplier. They invented a novel star-rating in which ‘legal’ timber (according to the Greenpeace Wood Guide) gets a star, and other certifications of sustainability get more. Product miles are included, and the customer can see the ratings for any single item.
“This is new territory, because the provenance of an item is so complex,” says the company’s Kim Corbett. “Even buying locally may be too simplistic an answer, because some European manufacturers purchase timber that is sent from western Europe to Asia for processing before being shipped back to the manufacturing plant
“So it is not straightforward. And certain buying attitudes can only be decided by the customers themselves—so we provide information to inform their opinion.”
The newest attempt of all is from the British Contract Furnishing Association (BCFA), which has produced a spreadsheet format in which manufacturers enter weights of all materials, travelling distances in and out, energy and fuel usage, materials recycled and materials sent to landfill, and so on.
This should produce a similar rating as on the ‘Carbon Label’, which was newly introduced by the Carbon Trust, and shows the number of grammes of CO2 and greenhouse gases used in the making, delivery and disposal of the product.
One of the first companies to promote that label was Walkers Crisps—however, it is said, the project was so detailed and expensive that to replicate it on every product would bankrupt the entire furniture trade.
Instead, says the BCFA’s Peter Smith, the buyer should decide how much detail is practical, and whether he can save his own energy by judging that a general assessment is good enough.
“We suggest common sense. If a delivery is on a ‘milk round’, don’t count every turn-off the truck driver makes… a straight line from the supplier is enough. And don’t position someone at your gate to note down whether it’s an 18cwt van or a 40-tonner!”
Where suppliers are unable to account in detail to the client for their energy emissions, a current tactic is to show their credentials in ‘offsetting’. Though this has aroused fierce debate (see box below).
“Carbon trading can make sense in the short term,” says Bird. “It does allow negative factors to be offset by genuine positives, so long as ‘buy a tree and dump your guilt’ is not picked as an easy option.
“Your supplier should first be able to show how they have vastly improved their own environmental performance… then, and only then, let them show you that they have looked to ‘offset’ what is really unavoidable.”
Ian Boughton is a freelance journalist
