A method to estimate the total VOC emission of furniture products

Abstract

Abstract In the last decade, the environmental sustainability has become an important issue that drives more and more the consumer decisions. Consequently, industrial companies are called to meet the growing demand for more sustainable products. Especially in the furniture sector, customers pay serious attention to the emissions that negatively affect human health and so they request products with low volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emissions. This represents a big challenge because it requires the strictly control of each component provided by all the supply chain actors through expensive laboratory tests. For this aim, the present paper proposes a method to estimate the total VOCs emissions of furniture products starting from the characteristics of all semi-finished products (e.g., geometric features, product composition, process information and functionality) and through the definition of an appropriate impact scale based on historical data. It allows making the supply chain (SC) more sustainable, limiting costly chamber tests.