08.22.24

Redefining Sustainable Seating with Breck

As global trends rapidly evolve and the relationship between workers and the office shifts, the importance of circular design principles becomes increasingly evident. To ensure a sustainable future, products must be designed to adapt to changing needs and minimize environmental impact. Circular design is essential to addressing today’s demands while ensuring opportunities for generations to come.

Haworth’s task chair, Breck, packs a compelling and enduring sustainability story into a simple and effective frame. It is supported by a smart price point and 5.5 billion data points of research.

Circular Design at the Core

At Haworth, circular design remains central to our product development. Driven by our values and a commitment to making the world better, our teams approach new product development with a mindset that extends beyond our business to our communities.

We have practiced this philosophy for years, prioritizing sustainable materials, product use extension, and responsible end-of-life product management. By focusing on simplicity and sustainability, Breck emerged as an answer to an often-confronted sustainability challenge—creating impactful products.

Sustainability as a Priority

Sustainable design and development of office furniture is nothing new to Haworth. Thanks to our well-established circular design process, Breck’s product team expertly balanced intuitive, simple design with advanced sustainability attributes.

Decades of seating research, intentional sustainable product design, and a commitment to delivering an exquisite seating experience culminated in Breck’s unique design. The chair is constructed with minimal parts, reducing its carbon footprint through lightweighting and using over 50% recycled content. This efficient design ships knocked-down, reducing shipping impacts and packaging materials, and the product is 94% recyclable at the end of its life.

Collaboration for a Sustainable Future

Breck’s impressive list of sustainability attributes was no accident—the team relied heavily on one another’s expertise to overcome obstacles typical to a project with these goals.

A history of prioritizing ergonomics in our products led to Breck’s patented GeoStretch back and weight-activated recline mechanism, which delivers effortless comfort packed in a simple design. This focus on ergonomics is paired with our tradition of sustainable design, which laid the groundwork for an exceptional sustainability story built on decades of circular design practice.

By working with existing material suppliers, the team ensured the product’s chemistry avoided harmful substances by meeting the requirements laid out in Haworth’s Banned Chemicals List, which has been in place since 2012. The product is free from PVC, phthalates, flame retardants, and heavy metals. A key tenet of circular design is ensuring the materials intended for multiple life cycles are safe and healthy, eliminating human health hazards, and reducing pollution as the product cycles through multiple uses.

Strong supplier relationships also enabled the team to achieve the recycled content and recyclability goal of over 50% without compromising aesthetics. This was accomplished by selecting materials with high recycled content and simplifying the number of parts in the chair. This approach demonstrates circular design principles and positively impacts the overall product carbon footprint by lightweighting and incorporating recycled materials.

A Story of Sustainability in Every Detail

Beyond sourcing common materials with high recycled content, Haworth’s commitment to sustainable design is evident in the details. For instance, our task chairs’ standard black casters are made from recycled fishing nets. This decision transforms a simple, often overlooked component into a significant part of Breck’s sustainability narrative by upcycling a material commonly found as pollution into a durable element of the chair.

Circular design requires consideration of more than just material composition; the entire product lifecycle must be considered. Breck’s knock-down construction means the chair arrives in 4 components: the base, the cylinder, the mechanism, and the seat. This design reduces shipping impacts and packaging materials, reducing the chair’s overall carbon footprint. By enabling 300% greater shipping and fuel efficiency, this design decision ensures that 3 times as many chairs can be packaged and shipped per truck.

Thinking beyond singular lifecycles, designing for circularity means designing for the multiple cycles the product may experience. Breck features a drawstring construction in the seating upholstery. By eliminating glues and permanent bonds, such as the traditional staple assembly, the seat of the product can easily be repaired, refurbished, and eventually recycled throughout multiple lifecycle phases. Extending the product use phase leverages the resources used to create a Breck chair multiple times.

Low Carbon Footprint, High Impact

All these sustainable design decisions culminate in Haworth’s lowest carbon footprint chair. Breck contributes just 55.6 kg CO2e over its lifetime—less than half the carbon footprint of a typical office task chair. This achievement demonstrates the holistic benefits of considering sustainability from the outset: Resources consumed throughout the product’s lifecycle are significantly minimized.

Breck has emerged as a leading sustainable product by integrating our circular design process and strict goals for simplicity and sustainability.

The sustainability elements that define Breck as an elegant and sustainable solution reflect the commitment of our engineers, designers, and sustainability experts. Their collective expertise has created a product that is innovative and true to Haworth’s values.

This article was originally posted on Haworth.com