As an environmentally conscious person you do, of course, wonder if your old furniture can be recycled. A lot of furniture can be recycled, while other items cannot be recycled at all. On top of this, your furniture might not even be worth it to recycle. Doing the removal and bringing it to a recycling center seems to be a popular choice. After all, you can earn some money with it. However, don’t expect to get rich. The easiest furniture removal for recycling is an expert service. Find one in your area if you click here.
Which Furniture Can be Recycled?
Whenever you’re about to consider furniture removal, you will certainly take a good look at the items. However, for recycling, you need to take a closer look at it. It’s not sufficient to only look at the general condition of your old furniture.
Recycling old furniture will depend on the item and the materials your furniture is made of, for example, you can’t recycle 100% of a mattress but roughly 90% can be, so knowing this is important when recycling or disposing of unwanted items. Recyclable Materials
Just look at what you can put into your recycling bin and you already have a shortlist of recyclable materials. To give you a better overview, the following materials are easy to recycle:
- Wood
- Cardboard
- Metal
- Glass
- Leather
Technically, one could also add plastic. Recycling plastic requires special procedures that aren’t offered at each recycling center. Therefore, plastic is usually considered hard to recycle. But that’s mostly because of the lack of specialized facilities. Your recycling center may not take plastic from furniture removal.
Next, there’s also upholstery as you can find it in sofas, couches, and mattresses. It is possible to recycle foam, but only if it’s made of polyurethane foam. The foam needs to be separated from the fabric or leather first during a difficult procedure. Hence, upholstery is considered a difficult material to recycle.
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Materials You Cannot Recycle
Nowadays furniture is mostly made of wood chipboards and veneer. It certainly keeps down the manufacturing costs. Moreover, it’s one way of recycling wood. But with these chipboards, the recycling of wood comes to its end stage. Those cannot be recycled since they are made with glues. You cannot recycle glue, unfortunately, or at least not the one they use for wood chipboards.
The same goes for veneer as it’s a compound of several artificial materials. Just looking at the materials that were used for your furniture will tell you a lot about manufacturing companies. They may claim to focus on sustainable materials and the environment. But if they use materials that you cannot recycle, their environmental consciousness only affects their marketing campaign.
While wood generally is recyclable, you may not be able to recycle your old wooden furniture. That’s because of the paint or varnish. Paints, as well as varnish, keep wood from breaking down. When incinerated, the paints can cause toxic fumes. If you’re doing furniture removal, you will need to check if your wooden furniture is painted or in any other way treated.
Most Furniture Aren’t Recyclable
We have to be rather honest with ourselves here and realize that furniture isn’t easily recyclable. They last for years to come - at least, that’s what proper wood furniture was back in the day. Then someone found cheaper production methods for furniture so that anyone could afford it.
The downside of cheap furniture isn’t only that you can usually not recycle it. If you wanted to sell it in the process of furniture removal, you’ll hardly get anything for it. Even though you can often neither recycle wooden furniture, you could at least sell it for a good price. Or you could do something else with it, like upcycling.
Consider Upcycling
Before you decide on furniture removal, think about what else you could make of it. Sometimes, it’s already sufficient to apply a new coat of paint. Attach a couple of new handles to old cabinets and drawers.
Think outside of the box and give your old furniture a completely different use. You could turn a chest of drawers into a wine bar, for example. There’re tons of creative ideas on what to do with old furniture throughout the www.
Moreover, you can at least change the fabric on your chairs. It might be a bit more difficult with sofas. A throw is usually the easiest option.
Let the Professionals Deal With it For You
You should know that recycling centers usually limit the amount of what you can drop off. Yet alone with that thought in the back of your mind, you may realize, recycling is probably not worth the effort. You also have to dismantle each item you’d like to recycle for furniture removal. The only material that’d be worth it to recycle is metal. Drop it off at your nearest scrap yard and get some money for it. But you have to take it there, they don’t do collections.
Before you end up with a migraine, you may want to opt for professional removal. They don’t only relieve you from heavy lifting, but they also take care of recycling. Furniture removal services know better which materials exactly are worth it to recycle. However, before they put any items from furniture removal forward to recycling, they donate them.
Parting Words On Furniture Recycling
Of course, you could handle the whole operation yourself. To do so, you will have to give several calls to organize everything. Once you find a destination for your old furniture, you often have to drop it off personally. You’ll need a large enough vehicle for that and they may ultimately reject your furniture. Charities also are a possibility but have a certain set of rules as to what they take and the condition furniture must be in. A furniture removal service takes away all those worries from you.
So, carefully do your research and prepare for the easiest removal of your life. All you have to do is follow the ideas above and have a field day recycling that old couch of yours.
