Panel discussion: Circular, bio-based, CO2 negative: the furniture production of the future!

A new generation of circular biomaterials is currently finding its way into the interior market. In this panel, representatives from Vepa, Plantics and carbonauten will discuss the complexity of bio-based materials and where the limits lie today and in the future.

Vepa is the world's first furniture manufacturer to launch a chair collection with a seat shell made from fiber residues from hemp processing. Both the fiber material and the binding agent are of 100% plant origin. The advantage of hemp is that it grows particularly quickly, does not require artificial fertilizers or pesticides, hardly needs any water and is grown in the Netherlands. 

In addition, hemp is very robust and absorbs CO2. As a result, the production of the chair has a negative CO2 footprint. This means that more CO2 is absorbed than emitted. To bind the hemp fibres, Plantics has provided the world's first 100% bio-based thermoset and optimized it for the manufacturing process at Vepa.

At the end of the product's life, the seat shell can be shredded and turned back into a chair without the addition of chemicals. Vepa is the first company in the world to achieve this without adding new raw materials. 

In order to use interior materials as CO2 storage on an even larger scale in the future, carbonauten has a carbonization technology that flexibly processes all types of woody biomass residues and converts CO2 into biocarbons. The biocarbons permanently physically bind up to 3.67 tons of CO2 equivalent per ton of biocarbon. The biocarbons are processed in the factories into a new category of materials, “NET Materials” (Negative Emission Technology), in order to make decarbonization economically attractive for industry.