Eco-Friendly Fitted Bedrooms
Sustainability and limiting our impact on the environment.
At Online Bedrooms, we recognize the impact that humans have on our planet, the ecosystems that live here and our environment as a whole. As a forward-thinking business, we are committed to ensuring that we minimize our environmental footprint wherever we can to allow for a more eco-friendly production of fitted wardrobes and other made to measure bedroom furniture… from the start of our supply chain to the finished product… from tree to your home.
Our state of the art factory in Nottinghamshire is where your fitted bedroom furniture will be built. All excess packaging and wood off-cuts from the production process are fed through our wood chipper and then diverted into our furnace, which in turn heats the factory and the offices which minimizes our reliance on fossil-fuel powered heating systems.
100% UK-sourced wood
Wood is fundamentally sustainable, being a natural resource and a renewable material, whilst also being fully recyclable at the end of it's life as an item of furniture.
UK-sourced wood wherever possible is important to us to minimise our reliance on imported materials. The wood that we use for the production of our cabinetry comes from Kielder Forest in Northumberland, the largest forest in England.
We all know that trees take years to grow, particularly spruce and pine and so brand new trees are planted all year round to ensure constant replenishment and sustainable supply for the future. Kielder Forest is managed by the Forestry Commission.
The supply chain is overseen by both the Forest Stewardship Council® and the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes (PEFC).
Our suppliers monitor compliance by what’s known as backwards integration. In essence, they are increasingly procuring wood through the use of their own forestry and wood-buying companies to avoid reliance on third parties.
This allows them to trace the origins of any wood that we use back to the standing tree.
Recycling. Reusing. Reloving.
For our chipboard, 40% of the wood used is recycled material, another 40% is byproduct and 20% is roundwood. The recycled wood primarily comes from waste wood from pallets, wood packaging materials and furniture which is processed by Timberpak in the UK. This recycled wood is then used in the production of chipboard, removing reliance on further tree felling.
We use MFC (Melamine-Faced Chipboard) for the production of our fitted bedroom furniture. This has a CO2/m2 of -13.3kg.
This is because more CO2 is absorbed into and stored within the wood during its growth than is emitted during both the production and transport stages.
In addition, the MFC we use consists of a massive 85% renewable resources. The material consists of industrial round-wood, sawmill by-products and recycled wood. The core board contains a mix of UF and UMF glues and the decorative surface layer is a combination of virgin cellulose paper and a melamine-formaldehyde resin which binds the paper to the wood.
Less than 1% of the material is a paraffine wax emulsion, which acts as a hydrophobing agent (improving its moisture resistance).
Keeping things to a minimum.
Production of timber at our supplier occurs at a number of different sawmills around Europe then transferred to nearby production plants with their own environmentally friendly methods. One site uses natural rainwater in the production process, which it's done since 2015.
These sawmills have a direct link to railway network, allowing for a more environmentally responsible method of transportation when compared to transport by road in diesel-emitting trucks. Use of the railways at these sawmills prevents over 5500 diesel-emitting truck journeys every single year.
The factory where we source our MFC has it's own biomass power plant, the energy from this allows them to avoid almost three quarters of a million tonnes of CO2 every year. The plant confirms to environment certifications to ISO 14001 standards and ISO 32800 wood origin standards.
Our packaging.
For packaging, we have our own on-site cardboard machine, ensuring that we only use exactly what we need to package and ship our furniture to your home. We’re constantly looking for new ways to reduce our packaging (which involves no single-use plastics other than small bags for screws) and we're committed to reducing our cardboard usage by over 75% by the end of 2022.
Together, we can build a more sustainable future and limit our individual impact on the planet.
