Efficient Logistics for Circular Furniture Flows

Abstract

Introducing the concept of circular economy into the furniture industry could help the industry to reduce the waste and environmental impact by recapturing the remaining value of products at the end of lifecycle. The concept of circular economy has been successfully introduced and implemented in other industries like the car industry and the chemical industry. However, the furniture industry is currently still linear focused and is lacking the transition towards a circular economy. One of the reasons for this might be that furniture is generally spoken big and heavy, thus hard to handle and represents a relatively low rest value, this makes the industry hard to transform. Another reason for the lack in the shift towards a circular economy might be a lack of experiences in the industry. As mentioned the nature of furniture makes it hard to handle and transport the items, in order to cope with this an efficient management of logistics is very fundamental to enable furniture companies to move towards the circular economy. In this paper, a general overview of the major constraints and opportunities for the transition towards a circular economy in the Swedish furniture industry will be provided. The goal of the authors from writing this thesis is to study the current situation of the Swedish furniture manufacturers, identify what problems they might face in moving towards the circular economy and propose solutions for the most proper way of dealing with the expected obstacles. The main focus of this paper will be on the logistic problems in remanufacturing, refurbishing and reselling furniture; this includes issues such as warehousing, analysis of centralized and decentralized distribution networks and forward as well as reverse logistics.