Sustainability
The Important Mission
Verk is a Swedish furniture company with a clear focus on sustainability without compromising on comfort or design. We work exclusively with Swedish raw materials and produce all our furniture in Sweden.
Not only are we interested in creating furniture made from natural, sustainable materials, but we also demand that they be locally produced. Everything is traceable. The raw materials are Swedish. Every component of every piece comes from Sweden, and the factories are located within the country’s borders. When we market the collection as “Made in Sweden”, we want it to mean something.
Through our stance, we want to help strengthen and support the manufacturing industry that still exists in Sweden. We have the raw materials needed for furniture production – wood, steel, leather, wool, stone – but most are exported rather than used locally. Our goal is to inspire and inform about the importance of home-grown expertise and production through transparent communication, and to contribute to change.
Relentlessly pursuing better
We still have more work to do when it comes to sourcing Swedish materials. All our products are made exclusively from local materials – with the exception of two. We have yet to find any sewing thread produced in Sweden. There are no worsted spinning mills left, and the process to restart and develop such production is both complicated and expensive. We hope, in the near future, to be able to find ways of producing our own thread and fabrics, and to be part of the revitalisation of the Swedish textile industry in general. Our second quest is to find Swedish zips. Perhaps there’s a Swedish supplier of zips somewhere out there that we just haven’t come across yet? We’re always on the lookout for new collaborators and partners who share our vision that local production is key to a sustainable future.
Verk doesn’t just sell furniture but awareness too. A piece of furniture from Verk is always a sustainable product of top-notch design and minimal climate impact.
Verk in brief
- All wood used is Swedish
- The surface finishes contain only Swedish linseed oil or a blend of linseed oil and beeswax.
- All leather is ecologically tanned.
- Verk has teamed up with a precision mechanics company to develop a screw made of Swedish steel.
- Verk uses Swedish texel wool in all its upholstered furniture
- The needle felt used as an inner cushion is made of Swedish wool.
- The stone we use is limestone from Slite, Gotland.
- Our plaids are woven in Sweden from Swedish wool.
- All glass is manufactured without the use of toxic substances and blown in Sweden.
The era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived
-Antonio Gutteres
We have a huge responsibility, we the producers, architects and designers. Only together can we achieve a major difference. We have to be determined to create new boundaries and regulations for what we think is a sound and modern way of producing new interiors.
It is very easy to google energy mix to find out where we should and where we should not locate our production facilities. The source of energy used in production is crucial. A country run mainly by fossil fuel is not the right place for any kind of production. The Nordic countries have a very good energy mix in our national power grids. It is in countries such as the Nordics that our contemporary production could and should be situated.
We understood quite soon that we needed numbers and statistics to convince architects and buyers that the things we argue are based on facts.
We hired the Swedish technical consultancy company Bengt Dahlgren to make an Environmental Product Declaration, a so called EPD, to find out the differences in the fossil footprint when producing our V DE.03 chair in Sweden compered to producing the exact same chair In Poland.
We choose Poland because of the fact that many of our colleagues and competitors have outsourced their production to Poland and also because of the extreme energy mix. Poland’s energy mix consists of more than 80% fossil fuel.
We did not know if there would be much of a difference when we hired Bengt Dahlgren but the numbers we got was hard to neglect.
The chair produced in Sweden have 70% lower fossil impact then the chair produced in Poland. And this is mainly because of the energy-mix. These numbers make a huge difference especially when working with larger projects. As an example, if you are an architect responsible for furnishing a large auditorium with lets say 300 chairs you have a huge responsibility on your shoulders to fill that space with sustainable furniture.
The result shows that the climate impact for the chair V.DE.03 is 1.88 kgCO2e and 6.54 kgCO2e for the corresponding product manufactured in Poland.
This means that VERKs The chair has about 70% lower climate footprint than the Polish-made chair.
The main the reason for the increased climate footprint of the chair manufactured in Poland for the Swedish the market is the longer transport distances and fuel mix on the energy used in sawmills as well as in the production of the product.
The results show that even on a product with relatively small the impact on the climate can still be large for two equivalent products. Some assumptions have had to be made that may affect the result, in particular regarding the absolute the result (absolute climate impact). However, these assumptions are not considered to affect the the percentage difference in climate impact between the two products as the study has been designed to minimize differences between products.
EPD Prepared by: Charlotta Malmén
Reviewed by: Louise Holmstedt
Bengt Dahlgren Stockholm AB
2022-02-04