About 10 million tons of furniture were landfilled in 2018, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the disposal rate is likely higher today as furniture waste has been on the rise for as long as EPA has tracked it. The pattern is driven largely by several trends: 1) manufacture of “fast furniture,”— cheap products not intended to last long; 2) a preference, especially among many millennials, to move frequently and not want to haul their furniture; and 3) businesses’ tendency also to rapidly replace furniture.

Facts and Figures about Materials, Waste and Recycling

Furniture and furnishings include items such as sofas, tables, chairs and mattresses. EPA used data on sales of furniture and furnishings from the Department of Commerce for this analysis.

To measure the generation of furniture and furnishings, EPA counted products at the end-of-life (after primary use and reuse by secondary owners). Generation of furniture and furnishings in MSW was 12.1 million tons in 2018 (4.1 percent of total MSW), up from 2.2 million tons in 1960. Wood was the largest material category in furniture, and ferrous metals was the second largest category. Plastics, glass, textiles and other materials were also found in furniture. Although the recovery of wood, textiles and metals may be occurring, no measurable data source was accessible, with the exception of mattresses.

A significant proportion (19.5 percent) of furniture and furnishings was combusted for energy recovery in 2018, but the majority of this product sector was landfilled (80.1 percent).

The data in the table below are from 1960 to 2018, relating to the total number of tons of furniture and furnishings generated, recycled, composted, combusted with energy recovery and landfilled.

1960-2018 Data on Furniture and Furnishings in MSW by Weight (in thousands of U.S. tons)