Buy better. Buy less often. Our choices in who we partner with to bring our clients quality furniture helps us reach our sustainability goals of putting less in landfills. When you buy from Smithe, you are investing in quality furniture that will last longer than some of the options carried by other retailers. Avoid the frustrating cycle of rebuying the same lesser quality furniture multiple times by choosing Smithe. We proudly stand behind the quality of our furniture so we can keep your home filled and landfills empty!
From brands to partnerships and our own solutions, we wanted to share some of the ways we are staying sustainably conscious in honor of Earth Day.
The GreenGuard Certification Program is a third-party testing program for low emitting products and materials. It provides manufacturers the ability to find low emitting products suitable for indoor environments. California issued a law, removing over a decade-old requirement, that flame retardants must be included in the filling of upholstered furniture. We work with our manufactures to source quality furniture made with GreenGuard certified materials, including many of our Worry Free Fabric options.
Warehouse Styrofoam Blocks
Safe transport of furniture across oceans and across the country requires packaging materials like Styrofoam. Seeing the waste this would produce was not something we could accept. When trying to find a solution, we learned that Styrofoam is one of the most complex and challenging materials on earth to decompose. Because of this, we looked into recycling. We found out that you can melt Styrofoam down into blocks that are so much easier to handle, and it doesn’t take up much space, meaning fewer trips to the recycling center and less space taken up in landfills. It took us an entire year to fill a truck after switching to this new method of melting down our Styrofoam.
Chicago Furniture Bank is a nonprofit that collects donations of gently used furniture and household goods and distributes them to families and individuals transitioning into supportive housing. They help Chicagoans in need by providing complete furnishing packages that turn empty spaces into comfortable homes with their partner organizations. As a partner with the Chicago Furniture Bank, we provide the organization with 1-2 truckloads of gently used furniture every week to help those in need while keeping more furniture out of the landfills.
Watch Colleen Smithe’s interview with Chicago Furniture Bank Co-Founder Griffin Amdur Here
Our SmitheCraft line is producing furniture made without harmful chemicals in hopes of creating healthier homes. Materials in our product comply with national fire retardancy and industry guidelines, assuring our customers that our products are free of toxic chemicals. The factory works four ten-hour days a week to reduce energy use and their carbon footprint. 70% of construction components are sourced within 8 hours of our factory, and over half of our fabrics are domestically produced.
American Leather’s long-lasting durability of their frames is equaled by the timeless beauty of their furniture and their lifetime warranty on every frame. They are able to maximize usage of each hide and the quality of each finished piece of furniture by identifying flaws and eliminating them from their process. Made in Dallas, Texas, we’re proud to offer this USA-made custom leather upholstery.
Newport Cabinet is handcrafted from sustainably harvested maple, cherry, and ash solid woods in Ontario, Canada. Their team of about 200 craftspeople is made up of family spanning from multiple generations. Dedicated to the craft of building fine furniture in an environmentally sustainable way,
they display a broad assortment of styles from contemporary to traditional and everything in between. We have been proud to represent this manufacturer for many years because of their legacy of quality products.
Using sustainably harvested lumber from the Appalachian Forest, Gat Creek builds solid wood furniture to your exact specifications. An artisan creates each piece of furniture and personally signs and dates it before it is sent out. By making the most of the lumber they purchase, 90% of the heat for their facility is provided by wood scrap that would otherwise end up in the landfill.
They were the first to create outdoor furniture from plastic materials 30 years ago. Since then, their mission is to recover and transform ocean-bound and land-bound plastic into outdoor furniture durable enough to last for generations.
