We have teamed up with FIRA (the furniture industries association) to help all our manufacturing suppliers achieve our standards of environmental and social practise by promoting the use of FIRA’s Furniture Footprinter™.

The Footprinter™ is a revolutionary computer software tool developed to help companies within the furniture supply chain to reduce their carbon footprints. We realise that all our furniture manufacturing suppliers are at different levels in terms of assessing the carbon footprint of their individual products and our goal is to help the ones who are a few steps behind get up to speed. Far more sophisticated than a simple carbon calculator, the next generation carbon, ecological and accounting tool is geared towards the issues facing the furniture sector and calculates the footprints of specific products, projects, processes and whole organisations.

The Furniture Footprinter™ is a natural addition to FIRA’s strong environmental and business support portfolio, which includes the Furniture Industry Sustainability Programme (FISP), Club Green, lean processes, supply chain management, sustainable timber purchasing and environmental management (ISO 14001).

 
The Furniture Footprinter™ has been created using a model devised by Best Foot Forward, which has received the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in Sustainable Development and has worked on footprinting projects with organisations such as GlaxoSmithKline, the NHS, Virgin Trains to name just a few.

What does this mean? With an industry standard in place we have a benchmark to work from so that our clients can make informed choices with the confidence that the environmental aspects of those products have been thoroughly examined. “We are working towards having every product in our furniture directory carbon rated for a our next issue in 2012”