At its annual meeting held on June 27, FederlegnoArredo presented Re-Design, the EPR Furniture Consortium project, designed and developed together with companies by the federation to deal with the end-of-life of furniture products within the supply chain.

To support enterprises in the industry

The objective of the Consortium, which may be operational throughout the country, is to support furniture companies in the full transition to the circular economy. It is a collective system that enables companies in the sector to make themselves ready in the face of a possible future implementation by the legislature of EPR - Extended Producer Responsibility.

An ambitious goal

The Re-Design project was explained to associates and stakeholders at H-Farm in Roncade during a meeting entitled "Sustainable talks. An Innovative and Cutting-Edge Look at ESG Principles," which was also attended by Deputy Minister for the Environment and Energy Security, Vannia Gava.

"This is an ambitious project," explained FederlegnoArredo President Claudio Feltrin, “which presupposes an important paradigm shift according to which every manufacturer is called upon to pay for the environmental impacts for which it is responsible. We decided to take this on, and we can proudly say that we are working on the definition of the Statute of the Consortium, which will then have to be followed by the drafting of the Regulations. The presence of Deputy Environment Minister Vannia Gava, whom we thank for her availability, is crucial now, as it has been in recent months. At the Salone del Mobile she called this idea 'a positive example in terms of sustainability and producer responsibility with regard to waste management,' and on that same occasion she declared that the hope was that 'in June we would be able to present an EPR model for the furniture sector.' FederlegnoArredo has kept its promise.”

An experimental project for Made in Italy

"Italian companies know how to anticipate the market and catch up with the challenges to which we are called. FederlegnoArredo's project," the deputy minister said in his speech, "is an excellent example of this and will allow us to accelerate the sustainability goals of the entire sector and renew the strategies of the entire furniture supply chain, fully interpreting the concept of circular economy. We will now start an experimental project, with a program agreement, that can lay the foundations for a new EPR in a key sector for Made In Italy."

Toward a real and full circular economy

The Consortium will ensure the take-back, collection, recovery and recycling of waste furniture and other furniture products, as well as the reuse of furniture and other furniture products, accelerating the transition to the circular economy of an industry already strongly committed to this direction.

In fact, as Maria Porro, president of Assarredo, explained, "The goal is for extended producer responsibility to become a strategic opportunity that accompanies the transformation of the sector toward a real and full circular economy. An opportunity for renewal that Assarredo has decided to seize in the interest of the companies it represents, with an increasingly circular vision of the production model and with an approach that starts from the bottom."