The furniture industry has a landfill problem. Here's what we can do about it

The furniture industry is quietly fuelling a waste crisis.

Every year, millions of sofas, chairs, and sideboards, many still perfectly usable, end up in landfills. Fast furniture, like fast fashion, lures us with low prices and instant gratification. But behind the flat-pack convenience lies a cost we can no longer ignore.

Mass-produced and flimsy, much of today’s furniture is built to fail, not to last. The result? A throwaway culture that leaves England with less than seven years of landfill capacity for non-hazardous waste. That’s not just unsustainable, it’s untenable.

When I founded Vinterior nearly a decade ago, I wasn’t setting out to solve a waste problem. My obsession was design: the thrill of discovering characterful, one-of-a-kind pieces that spark joy, not conformity. But as Vinterior grew, I saw something powerful. Customers weren’t just buying beauty. They were making radical choices. Every vintage purchase diverts materials from landfill and cuts carbon impact in one simple, thoughtful act.

And yet, here’s the uncomfortable truth: the entire global resale furniture market, worth around USD 34 billion in 2023 and projected to reach USD 56.7 billion by 2030 (Grand View Research), is still smaller than IKEA’s annual turnover alone - €45 billion in 2024 (FT). One company’s sales eclipsing an entire global industry shows the scale of the problem. For all the rhetoric about sustainability, resale remains a rounding error in the wider market. That imbalance cannot continue if we are serious about tackling waste.

Here’s the truth: progress doesn’t only come from industry. It begins at home, with each of us asking before we click buy new: would I choose pre-loved instead? The answer, more often than not, is yes. And every ‘yes’ chips away at a disposable culture.

Consumer tastes are shifting. People increasingly want individuality, conscience, and craft - not cookie-cutter conformity. But the pace is too slow. The last decade was defined by landfill filling up while craftsmanship gathered dust. The next decade must flip that script.

We don’t need to manufacture the future from scratch. The pieces already exist. What’s missing is the mindset: to stop defaulting to new and start seeing pre-loved as the smarter, more sustainable standard.

The industry is ready. The demand is growing. The only question is whether we have the courage to reclaim the past so we can actually save the future.

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Sandrine Zhang Ferron is the Founder of Vinterior.

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