No interior design catalogue can afford not to mention sustainability today. IKEA, Vitra, Hay, Muuto — every brand, from mass-market to premium, communicates on responsible materials efforts.
But between the ecological promise and the reality of production chains, the distance is sometimes considerable. It’s worth examining what’s real and what’s performative.
The materials that actually make a difference
Some “sustainable” materials have verifiable, measurable impacts.
Bamboo: its rapid growth (up to a meter per day for some species), mechanical strength, and carbon sequestration capacity make it a serious candidate for replacing wood in several applications. IKEA uses it in kitchen and bathroom collections.
Cork: 100% natural, harvested without felling the cork oak, biodegradable, with real thermal and acoustic insulating properties. It’s beginning to appear in wall and floor coverings beyond its traditional applications.
Recycled textiles: cushions, curtains, and rugs made from recycled plastic bottles have genuine environmental logic — they capture materials that would otherwise end up in nature or landfill.
What’s more debatable
“FSC-certified wood” is often presented as an absolute sustainability standard. It’s a useful certification — but it says nothing about transport distances, energy used in wood processing, or the actual lifespan of products made from it.
An IKEA piece in certified wood that gets thrown out after three years has a worse carbon footprint than an uncertified piece kept for 30 years. Materials sustainability is inseparable from usage sustainability.
Circular economy in design: where do we actually stand?
IKEA has announced ambitious circularity goals — second-hand furniture buyback, furniture rental, repair services. In practice, these programs exist but remain marginal compared to the volume of new furniture sold each year.
Circularity in interior design faces a structural obstacle: consumers often replace furniture because they change their tastes, not because their furniture is damaged. A perfectly functional piece discarded over a trend question is a problem that recycled materials don’t solve.
What’s genuinely changing
What’s concretely progressing is professional designers’ awareness. Architecture and design schools now systematically integrate life-cycle analysis into their curricula. A generation of designers trained to ask these questions at the conception stage is beginning to change brand practices.
Sustainable materials in design aren’t a passing trend. They’re the background constraint of an industry that will need to respond to increasingly demanding regulations on the environmental impact of products brought to market.