Circular office designer wants network of 3D printing grids in Europe that print and process furniture into new raw material using recycled material.
Circular office furniture supplier wants network of 3D printing grids in Europe that print and process furniture into new raw material using recycled material
3D printing is going to play a role in the circular economy, you can hear it everywhere. Wishful thinking? No, this reality is already closer than you might think. The NeverEnding Furniture line of office furniture from Triboo and Nedcam is both circular and contains 3D printed parts.
Do you want a new desk, chair or accessory? Then hand in your old furniture and you will receive the material price of your old furniture back from the manufacturer. Initiator Marc van der Heijden, CEO of Triboo, wants to make people think about sustainability. But at least as important, he thinks, is that the user enjoys Dutch design, produced in a sustainable way. The end user is the big winner, he predicts.
The Dutch company designs and produces circular office furniture and, together with Nedcam, is launching the NeverEnding Furniture line. This fits exactly into the concept of the circular economy. The furniture is made from waste. "Now the customer only gets invoices when he wants to get rid of his old furniture, such as for the disposal of waste. Soon, the buyer will be reimbursed for the increase in the value of the raw materials. We use them to make new office furniture," Marc van der Heijden explains. "The end user can spend this increase in value on new furniture. So he can spend more.
3D printing plays an important role in the concept of the NeverEnding Furniture line, which will be launched initially in the Netherlands and then in Scandinavian countries. The first products from the new line are plant pots in the shape of Dutch tulips and beans, two matching plant pots. In addition, Nedcam 3D prints frames for tables, lamps and chairs in Heerenveen on the CEAD printer at Nedcam. At the end of their life these parts are converted into raw materials for the 3D printer. Thermoplastics lend themselves very well to circular concepts because the properties of the material remain the same after recycling. "So we make a new base for a table again or 3D print a tulip vase, or vice versa," explains Marc van der Heijden, who, together with Martijn Vinke, forms Triboo's management board. However, there is another essential advantage to 3D printing for the circular concept: the use of materials can be kept to a minimum by using grid structures to add strength without the need for solid material. "We use waste, recyclate; and we need less material than with wood and steel because we look a lot to nature where strong structures with little material are abundant."
The other advantage of 3D printing that Triboo exploits are the freedom of design and the digital production process, which in time will make a distributed production model possible. The freedom of design gives Triboo's designers the opportunity to create exceptional designs. And because no moulds are needed for production, it is much easier to personalise the designs. The end user can turn the knobs themselves via the parametric models of the furniture. Marc van der Heijden: "Within a certain bandwidth, you can vary and we can make customer-specific products. With NeverEnding Furniture, we can bring back identity in the office environment, where everything is uniform due to mass production. Everything has to be made with moulds because it's cheap. Because we 3D print, we can think of and produce challenging shapes." Marc van de Heijden says this way of producing furniture is ultimately cheaper than the way it is currently made; at least if you do the honest cost calculation. Costs of furniture storage are eliminated because the stock is digitised. Only when furniture is actually sold is it produced. The profit lies mainly in the lower CO2 footprint because a lot of transport is eliminated and the raw materials cycle is closed. He sees it as a raw materials bank. "The problem of waste is sales. The Netherlands sold plastic waste to China and called it recycling. That is called simply selling waste and then returning it by boat in cheap products that break down quickly. When China stopped buying our plastic, a problem arose: the trade had nowhere to go. We have been working for five years to create sustainable sales and to allow valuable raw materials to circulate." That Triboo and Nedcam process the returned furniture into a new compound for the new furniture, distinguishes the Dutch company.
In time, Triboo also wants to use the digital production process that is 3D printing to set up local production centres. In the future, Marc van der Heijden doesn't want to drive trucks with furniture, but send 3D models digitally. That won't work from the start, because you need a certain scale. Enough has to be sent in to be able to make new products. "However, our goal is to build an infrastructure in which we send information to the print grids where the furniture will be printed." That, too, lowers the carbon footprint of the NeverEnding Furniture line. Initially, the furniture can only be handed in in the Netherlands and in Scandinavia, where Triboo has an office. 3D printing is done in Heerenveen.
Triboo wants to start a bigger movement with the NeverEnding Furniture line. Sharing production capacity, no more mass production of unsold products. "If we don't want to kill the planet, we have to look at production and consumption differently. The NeverEnding Furniture line makes you think. Do you have to buy so many useless products? Inferior mass products sold expensively with a marketing sauce? Cheap thinking costs us more than we realise."
The NeverEnding Furniture line is Dutch design and smart design at the same time. Recycling components into fully-fledged raw materials is only possible if you keep the material flow pure. That is why the designers strive to use as few different materials as possible. Glue is out of the question for this line of furniture. The design uses connections that work with friction instead of glue, screws or nails. This makes it easy to disassemble furniture. For the tabletop Triboo uses Greengridge, which is made of cellulose waste and thanks to its grid structure requires 18 kg less material than a comparable desktop (1.60 m by 0.6 m) made of chipboard. This saves 60% of CO2 emissions in production. The bases are printed in one piece and are used without further finishing. In principle, this is a mono material, but according to Menno Jansma of Nedcam, a material stream can practically consist of a mix of, for example, ASA and PETG. He says that finishing is possible if the customer insists, and Nedcam has experience in milling or sanding a printed surface for a smoother finish.
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