Re-upholstery is not second life
Two different things get talked about as if they were one.
Re-upholstery is your own furniture, recovered. We collect what you already own, strip it, replace the fabric and the foam where it needs it, and return it. You keep the same chairs.
Second life is furniture someone else owned, refurbished and sold on. At Sky Studios Elstree, 3,507 items were reused or reworked that way. It is a different service, and one we also provide.
The distinction matters because the carbon arithmetic is different, and so is what an assessor will accept as evidence.
Two sets of figures
At UCL’s Chandler House, a refresh of 80 chairs compared a new chair at £160 against re-upholstery at £90. Across the set that saved £5,600. Carbon fell from roughly 30kg CO2e for a new chair to 9kg re-upholstered, saving 1.68 tonnes. 71% of the materials in each chair stayed in use. Nothing went to landfill and there was no waste cost.
On a task chair pilot for a film and television studio we are not able to name, the figures were stronger, because a task chair carries more embodied carbon to begin with. FIRA benchmarks the average at 72kg CO2e. Recovering one retained 92% of components, saved 92% of the carbon and cost 60% less than replacement. That is 66kg CO2e saved on a single chair.
At the Royal College of General Practitioners, re-upholstered chairs came in at £106 each against £600 to £700 to replace them.
When re-upholstery is not worth it
Re-upholstery is not always the answer, and quoting for it when it is not wastes everyone’s time.
A broken frame, a failed gas lift or a seized mechanism can each be replaced, but once two or three of those are needed the cost approaches a new chair and the argument goes away. Very cheap chairs are rarely worth recovering, because there is not enough chair to justify the labour. Mesh backs cannot be recovered, though the seat pad usually can.
You also need somewhere to sit in the meantime. We work in phases so a floor is never without chairs, and where that is not enough we may be able to provide loan chairs while yours are away. It takes planning, and on a tight programme replacement is sometimes simply faster. We will say so.
What it means for a Ska assessment
Ska Rating Offices Environmental 2.0 names FISP (S) certification as a compliance route in each of its furniture measures, and the criterion specifies the company manufacturing the product.
For new furniture we supply, the certificate that counts is the manufacturer’s, and part of our job is knowing which of them hold it. Where we remanufacture or re-upholster, we are the manufacturer. We have been FISP certified since 2008 and sit on the FISP steering panel.
The resource management measures also ask for at least half of the existing chairs to be reused directly or returned through a closed-loop scheme. Re-upholstery is the most straightforward way to meet that.
Start with an audit
Send us a photograph and a rough count and we will tell you whether it is worth doing. If it is not, we will say that too.
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Audited, recovered, returned
We audit what you have first, item by item, photographed, with a condition note against each. That tells you how many are worth recovering before anyone commits to a budget.
You pick fabric from the same ranges used on new furniture, so a recovered chair sits alongside a new one without looking like a compromise. At BRE we did exactly that: chairs re-upholstered, other items reworked, 240 pieces back into the scheme, £29,930 saved and 7.44 tonnes of CO2e avoided on a building that went on to achieve BREEAM Excellent.
Work happens off site in batches, or on site where the volume is small.
