A new entry to the eco-friendly furnishings market offers a collection of furniture and home accessories that comes with a bold set of standards. By focusing on turning trash into treasure, Pentatonic aims to demonstrate a better way forward for home furnishings than the standard of using virgin materials to create relatively short-lived products. We already have enough glass, plastic, and metals on the surface of the planet to make what is needed, although mostly in the form of “the world’s most abundant and dangerous resource – human trash.” Pentatonic is tapping in to this waste stream for feedstock for its products, which are intended to be truly “circular” in nature, by virtue of being made from 100% recycled materials, being fully recyclable, and coming with a lifetime buy-back guarantee.
For some perspective on just one aspect of the waste issue, it’s estimated that globally, about 480 billion plastic bottles were purchased last year, and that figure is rising, with some projections saying that by 2021, we may be buying more than 580 billion plastic bottles per year, and only a fraction of that is being recycled. A staggering 8.3 billions of tons of plastic has been manufactured since the ’50s, with most of it ending up in landfills of the oceans, which is said to be “smothering ecosystems in plastic.” Another common waste item from our era of affluenza is electronics, or e-waste, which can yield valuable metals and glass that don’t require mining or extensive processing to reclaim, but which often end up getting literally trashed instead of recycled.
According to Pentatonic co-founders Jamie Hall and Johann Boedecker, the company aims to disrupt the furniture industry not only through its use of 100% post-consumer waste to craft its products “without compromising an inch on design, performance, or function,” but also by incorporating automotive manufacturing technology to build it. This is said to enable a scalable production process that also enables ‘localization’ by sourcing feedstock from near the production facility instead of from across the world.
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