Another informative sustainable webinar yesterday

Written By Robin Wade

sustainable furnishings council greenleaders webinarUh oh.  I'm already behind on one of this year's few resolutions.  It's been over a week since my last blog post! 

Yesterday, again at 1pm was another very informative GreenLeaders class on sustainability, given by the Sustainable Furnishings Council.  This session was on "sourcing green products".  Wonderful information that buyers need to know about thoughtful purchasing of furniture products and various issues related to each.  A few of the topics were: 

Certified wood, plantation grown wood, rapid renewables, recycled content, VOC finishes, Bio cushioning, leather tanning as well as shipping and deforestation concerns and organic textiles.

It is quite interesting that in leather (very much like in purchasing wood) purchasing a locally sourced product resolves several of the primary issues/problems associated with it.  That is, with the BIG exception of the tanning process that's still a big concern.  Bottom line, if you are going to purchase leather, try to make it US leather, rather than the common (and cheap but with MASSIVE issues) Brazilian leather.

Robin Wade
Robin Wade Furniture is a celebration of nature—a melding of a forward thinking commitment to the environment and a quiet, harmonious design aesthetic. From his "slow studio" in North Alabama, award-winning wood artist Robin Wade designs and crafts one-of-a-kind handmade furniture. Years before a piece is ready to enter a client's home or a gallery, the process begins—naturally—with the tree. Sustainably harvested, each specimen of hardwood is flitch sawn into natural-edge wood slabs, debarked by hand with a draw knife, and stacked to dry, usually for years, before the final cure in the kiln. From here, Wade and his team use both hand and power tools to bring Wade's vision to life, and then finish each piece with a hand-rubbed oil blend. Each organic furniture creation by Robin Wade Furniture balances the raw, natural beauty of environmentally, locally sourced hardwoods with minimally invasive, clean lines—a juxtaposition Wade calls both rustic and modern. “I haven’t yet found a better artist than nature,” he says.
robinwadefurniture.com
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