Furniture Renewal and Alternative New Circular Efficiency Strategies through Creative Approaches

forthcoming

FRANCESCA aims to provide crucial support to the EU furniture industry as it moves towards greater circularity. The project's primary objective is to pioneer innovative circular solutions for furniture, encompassing the whole funiture life cycle, including pre-use (from design to delivery), use (maintain, reuse, repair), and post-use (refurbish, repurpose, re-manufacture, re-distribute, and recycle). FRANCESCA will develop and use enabling supporting solutions that address key design, materials, and business model challenges. Concretely, the project develops, tests and disseminates a circular furniture design decision support tool, bridging circular principles with market-based instruments (environmental certifications and standards); it investigates, scopes, and tests alternative biobased materials to accelerate closed-loop strategies by implementing a dedicated industrial symbiosis platform; it designs, prototypes and implements a set of complementary circular business models; develops circular ecosystem management guidance and integrate circular value creation mechanisms enabled by Digital Product Passports. These enabling tools feed a set of three Circular Demonstrators, each focusing on a key circular strategy (design, material innovation, and service business model). Sustainability assessements and environmental technology validation of the novel solutions demonstrate their sustainability potential at scale. Finally, learnings from the project are cristallised in a capacity building toolkit for life-long learning strategies and a set of policy recommendations that are disseminated at EU level. The pragmatic, holistic and hand-on approach, steered by sectoral needs (manufacturers, retailers, CSOs) and supported by a complementary set of design, materials, business and sustainablity experts breaks down the systemic barriers to circular transition and reduces the circularity gap faced by the sector, thus creating long lasting sustainable impact.