Sustainable (furniture) E-Commerce - how is that supposed to work?
It's no secret: almost a quarter of global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions are generated in the transport industry alone. The trend is increasingly towards buying clothes, food and even furniture online, which not only increases transport emissions, but also packaging waste. Per capita, every German now consumes around 38.5 kilograms of plastic waste annually. (Not so funny) Fun Fact: That's pretty much the weight of our all-time bestseller filing cabinet 'Der Lange'!
When Moritz and I founded mokebo in 2018 in our late 20s, it was clear to us from the start: furniture E-Commerce is the future, but it should be as sustainable and resource-friendly as possible. That's why we built up mokebo right from the start by working together with European trading partners to be able to guarantee short delivery routes without intermediate storage and thus save on emissions. Since our founding, we have shipped our furniture via DHL's GoGreen program, through which we were able to neutralize 5.3 tonnes of CO₂ in 2019 alone.
Since then, we have launched many other initiatives and projects to make mokebo and the furniture trade a little more sustainable. One of these is the remarketing of returns: our partner malindo accepts our returns and remarkets them as B-goods so that they do not have to be disposed of. In addition, our manufacturers are already launching their own initiatives to make their businesses more sustainable; for example, one of our German partnersaktuell is currently working on more sustainable outer packaging without the use of plastic and uses renewable energy from photovoltaic systems to manufacture our furniture.
In addition to making returns, shipping and the manufacturing of our furniture more sustainable, we are now looking to make our furniture itself more and more "green". You can read about all our sustainability efforts in the link in the comments. That's why we launched our recycled beanbag line at the beginning of the year. All our beanbags are now also available in a sustainable version, made from a fabric made from 100% recycled PET bottles. Depending on the model, we give up to 100 plastic bottles a new life, which would take about 450 years to "rot" into microplastic in nature. Other projects are already being planned: a recycled seat ball, recycled cushion covers and much more.
How do you implement more sustainable structures in your company and how important is this topic for you?