FRANCESCA - Innovative circular solutions for the furniture industry

The objective of FRANCESCA is pioneering innovative circular solutions for furniture, spanning not only the stages from the pre-use phase of the furniture product (from design to delivery), but also those included in the use (maintain, reuse, repair) and post-use (refurbish, repurpose, re-manufacture, re-distribute and recycle), targeting those key cycles to make furniture more circular.

These circular solutions are deployed through the development and use of enabling supporting solutions addressing key design, materials and business models challenges.Three industrial demonstrators will be deployed with these three challenges in mind, which shall implement and validate the project's proposed solutions in realistic industrial environment:

Demo 1 - Business models: Service-based models will extend the life of furniture through reuse, refurbishment and resale, supporting environmental, social and economic value in a circular furniture ecosystem.

Demo  2 - Circular materials: Focused on material innovation, this demonstrator will test renewable and recycled solutions to improve resource efficiency and support closed furniture production loops.

Demo 3 - Circular designs: Circular design strategies such as modularity and design for disassembly can extend the life of products and embed circularity from the earliest stages of development.

The role of RISE in the project will be to assess the performance and impact of the innovations developed from a safety, environmental and social perspective within the project. The work will be carried out according to the Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) framework. SSbD combines chemical safety with systems analysis methods such as life cycle assessment to support the innovation process.