One of the largest obstacles facing retailers is gaining the trust of its customers when selling sustainable products.  According to a 2008 PriceWaterhouseCoopers study, when asked whom consumers trust to make environmental claims, retailers ranked last with only 9% of consumers believing what retailers say.  Part of this mistrust has been built up over many years from retailers simply taking the word of manufacturers and displaying irrelevant and grossly misleading environmental claims on their shelves. 

One step retailers can take is to understand what the critical environmental impacts are from the furniture they sell.  This will give retailers more knowledge, expertise and credibility in selling sustainable furniture.   

I recently examined ten life cycle assessment and environmental product declarations for office chairs and found very similar trends among all of them.  For example, global warming is the largest environmental impact associated with these products.  What you also find is that the materials extracted, refined and used represent the largest contribution to the environmental impact.  The use of aluminum in office chairs often is a major contributor to global warming potential (GWP).  Thus, the best things manufacturers can often do are minimize material use, reduce the use of aluminum and other high GWP materials within the product and/or use recycled materials instead.  Another large impact is the disposal of the product.  Simply making the product, or most of its components, easily disassemble-able, upgradeable and recyclable instead of sending it to a landfill can greatly reduce the environmental impacts. 

Once you understand and identify what products are truly more sustainable, the next challenge is communicating with your customers.  Due to the lack of trust among consumers of both retailers and manufacturers, the use of third-parties to provide independent substantiation is one way to overcome this hurdle.  Independent, third-parties have the benefit of not only being objective, but also have the ability and expertise to test products and audit the manufacturers directly.  There are two traditional ways independent certifiers could help.  One is through validating the environmental claims that manufacturers are making.  For example, if a manufacturer is claiming their product uses a certain percentage of recycled materials or has low volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions, certifiers can audit and test these attributes to provide independent substantiation.  The other way is through a sustainability certification.   

Starting back in 2005, BIFMA began work on an open, consensus sustainability standard for office furniture.  The BIFMA E3 standard, published this year, includes three levels of environmental preferability by assessing four categories including materials, energy and atmosphere, human and ecosystem health, and social responsibility.  Selling furniture that is independently certified by a trusted third-party to the BIFMA E3 standard is perhaps the most credible way to communicate the sustainability performance of products to the market. 

As consumer awareness of green products increases, retailers will play a special role in educating customers on the products they sell.  Understanding the importance of sustainable furniture and knowing how to best communicate the environmental attributes of the products will be key to sustained business growth for all furniture retailers in the future. 

Joshua Saunders is the Global Service line manager for UL Environment Inc. (ULEI), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Underwriters Laboratories Inc. As part of his role, Joshua is the program owner overseeing environmental verification and certification services.