Greenwash This! - Elemente Magazine interviews Len Laycock

January 9, 2009

In a recent Upholstery Arts ad, next to a juicy photo of a condo-size, lime-green chaise sectional, CEO Len Laycock penned an open letter to his clients. "Terrible things that ought to be unthinkable have become normal," wrote Laycock. "In the furniture industry, ‘normal’ practices have resulted in chemical fire retardants from polyurethane foam contaminating your breast milk, toxic heavy metals from textiles in your blood, and a chemical stew of toxic volatile organic compounds from lumber, glue, stains and padding, off-gassing into your lungs."

While indicting the furniture industry for ecological malpractice, Laycock also took a swipe at the BC government for snuffing legislation that would require labeling of toxic compounds in consumer products. “Industry conceals information about toxins in the products you buy. Instead of removing toxins, their cynical game is to ‘greenwash’ everything dirty… It’s time for new standards. Let’s bring 70 years of unregulated chemical experiments on humans to an end.”

Not your usual ad for a designer of club chairs and camelback sofas. This could be written off as hysteria, or savvy marketing by a designer seeking to differentiate his wares. But Laycock is no greenwasher: UA is a world leader in cradle-to-cradle design. If you choose not to return your aging couch to UA to be fully recycled, you could chop it up and put in your garden. This is beautiful furniture you can eat.

That’s a pretty intense ad.

Yeah. We’re trying to draw out the differences, because there’s a big educational process going on here.

You mean for customers?

In their busy lives, generally people never think about the safety of their sofa. You’re not going around thinking, ‘Is my sofa safe, will it biodegrade, will my children get cancer or leukemia from it?’ They’re not going around thinking that. But I am. I’ve thought about it very deeply.

Why? How did that happen?

It started in the late nineties, reading about global warming— when it wasn’t a headline issue, before An Inconvenient Truth and everything— and I would think, ‘Is this as bad as it seems?’ The next day I’d open the paper and read an article debunking it. I wanted to know the truth, get at the nub of the matter. So I just started reading. I buried myself in ecological topics. I read about peak oil theory, greenhouse gases, I even went back and read Silent Spring.

Wow. The classics.

Yeah, I just started reading, and one book became another. Cradle to Cradle by McDonough and Bromguard, Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce, that was a major one. Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia. And I started to make connections with various organizations—the Pembina Institute, David Suzuki Foundation, Ecotrust, World Wildlife Federation. And I started to question myself.

Trying to reconcile what you were learning with your business.

For one thing, I was using polyurethane foam. This is an oil product. There are issues of conflict and politics with oil, as well as health issues. I started looking at all that. And I went to my suppliers in the business; I’d talk to the VP of a foam company on the phone and say, ‘Could you give me a list of the chemicals in the product I’m buying? You know, I’d like to know. Just to put my mind at rest.’

And the most amazing thing happened: I got radicalized. Because the people I had known for years and spent annually hundreds of thousands of dollars with, they wouldn’t answer my questions. They were all still friendly—‘Sure Len, let me get back to you on that.’ A week later I’d get a call from a sales rep saying ‘Well, Len, you know, they just don’t want to put that stuff on letterhead.’ And I’m saying, ‘You’re kidding me! Is it really that bad?’

You started to look behind the curtain.

I got into it and I realized, this is really bad shit. And it’s not on anybody’s radar. So then I’m checking everything, lumber, foams, dyes, textiles. I get really knowledgeable. But the thing is, I’m not doing anything about it.

Then one Sunday in 2005, beautiful early spring day, I decide to wash my car. My son, Eli, who was 10 at the time, he’s hanging around not helping me. And he looks really glum. A sunny, gorgeous day and he’s unhappy, so I ask if something’s wrong. ‘No.’ OK. I go back to washing. Ten minutes later he’s still dark, and I sit down beside him. When I ask him what’s going on, he says, “If I tell you, will you promise not to laugh?’ I say I won’t laugh. He says, ‘I’m afraid the world is going to end.’

I’m actually getting upset talking about it. It just cut me. Because I knew exactly what he was talking about. He’s reading all this stuff in school, all the awful ecological news, global warming, all that, he watches TV, he hears about it. And there are millions of kids just like him.

Sounds like a pivotal moment.

It was a flashback for me to the Cold War, hide under your desk, build a bomb shelter. And just I thought, what the hell are we doing? I reassured him, and he went on with his life. But I didn’t. I went to bed that night and I couldn’t get to sleep. A kid growing up with that thought in his mind... it’s a theft of hope for the future, from the generation coming up, the people we have the greatest promise in. They need the excitement and enthusiasm to do great things in their lives. I thought, ‘This can’t be. This can’t be left to stand.’

And because I’d done all that research, the moment it became deeply personal I was prepared. I came in on Monday to work and that was when it started.

You reworked your product from the inside out, right? How did you do it?

My concept was I would start at the dead center of the product and come all the way out. Which isn’t what other people in furniture have done— they’ve started superficially, with the covers, and said ‘Oh look, we have hemp covers!’ But they’ve covered a toxic stew underneath. If you read Cradle to Cradle, there’s a chapter in there called something like, ‘Why Being Better isn’t Good Enough.’ Being better isn’t enough because everything’s on the line.

I announced to my suppliers that we’re going green and we’re not f*cking around. We really mean it. I’d call my textile people and say, we’re not there yet, but we’re greening from the inside out. Soon I’m not going to buy the same things from you, on the basis of conscience, and I’m going to need a replacement. And that’s the process we’ve been going through. We’ve gotten pretty far on it, but I don’t actually think the road has an end.

So these couches here that we’re sitting on are green to the core?

If you sit on this particular sofa, with the sole exception of that zipper, it’s 100% biodegradable.

That’s pretty impressive right there.

The frame is FSC lumber with no formaledehyde in it, forested with no clearcuts. Coming out through the product, you hit the padding. We can’t buy polyurethane, we can’t use it-- because what did we find? That the primary chemical compound in polyurethane is toluene diisocyanate, which gives lab mice cancer, and cancer to women in particular in three different countries—Sweden, Britain and the US— who work in the slab foam industry where this stuff gets cut. That’s how dangerous that dust is. It’s a neurotoxic chemical; it wont biodegrade; it’s based on oil; it has many layers of problems. So we started looking at alternatives. We looked at soy foam, and on first pass, we got excited. Hey, that sounds good, soy. Well that’s one of the biggest bogus stories of all time, but that’s another story.

This is all part of the mid-20th century plastics boom of the ‘50s through the ‘70s. We had Tupperware, we had plastics that bullets can’t pass through. All that that science comes along—science will improve the world, science will make things better! That was the ethos of the time, and some of it was true. But now we see it taken to the point where we see the danger of it all.

With health issues, cancer, and all that.

We didn’t really bank on the carcinogen aspects of it... You go back in the 19th century, it was not the case that 40-50% of Canadians were likely to get cancer in their lifetimes. That’s the case now, but it wasn’t in 1850. Cancer was a disease that was known, but it was rare. So you have this cancer boom along with the plastics boom, you hear about young people getting cancer—these are some of the consequences that are coming home to roost. We’ve realized we have a finite world system and you can’t just inject toxic chemicals into it.

So if this isn’t plastic, what am I sitting on?

We went back to natural latex foam. Most people don’t know about it. It was introduced in the 1920s, but got overrun by the worldwide petro-chemical boom. Oil was cheap, and polyurethane foam exploded. With polyurethane you can make more precise variations of foams, oh-so-mathematically precise.... with the natural method, there are more limitations. Finally we sourced it, got the densities all figured out, great. There was only one problem: latex burns like a marshmallow at a campfire.

Which means you needed fire retardants.

Yeah, you know about the problems with PBDEs, chemical flame retardants, showing up in breast milk. We weren’t going to soil our natural product with that stuff. We looked under every stone on the beach, and eventually we found out that graphite, a naturally occurring rock, the same stuff you find in a pencil, acts as a fire suppressant. So we ground up graphite and mixed it into the latex.

Then for the wrapping under the fabric, we didn’t want to use virgin polyester, which is the industry standard, another oil-based product. So we went for wool. Wool is a natural fire retardant: if we lit a bunch of it, it would snuff itself out in front of your eyes. We use wool in our fabrics. And the dyes, we have EcoFlower certification that designates the dyes free of heavy metals like antimony, all those substances that lead to cancer.

So it’s an edible couch.

Maybe you wouldn’t want to eat it, but it’s non-toxic.

And as you said, this couch is fully biodegradable. We could just go leave it in a field, and--

There would be no harm done. In a cradle-to-cradle sense, with the wool and all that, it can go in a fully natural bio-nutrient loop. Everything we’ve used in the product can do that. It doesn’t mimic nature, it is nature. It goes right back into the earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

We also use recycled polyester, as in that couch over there. Our policy is no new crude oil, but if its in the world, our policy is to use it. If you can’t have a bionutrient loop, you make a technical loop that mimics it. So that sofa there is biodegradable, save and except for the zipper and the cover. You can take the cover off at the end of its life, and we can send the fabric back to the mill and make it into a new textile. So that oil-based polyester never has to end up in a landfill.

I can bring the couch back to you guys when it’s worn out?

We’ll repurpose the sofa. You get 5% cash back, or give you 15% credit to a new one, hopefully building you in as a lifetime customer. Depending on the condition, twenty years later it could be upholstered, reissued and sold as vintage. Or it could be literally returned to the earth. Except for the zipper.

Bringing in these new materials, rather than being a burden in terms of design, was it an inspiration?

Yes, definitely. The discipline of limiting yourself ends up opening you up. Green design, the essence of green engineering is, don’t go against nature— accept the limitations, the beautiful limitations nature brings.

By: Tyee Bridge
Images: Joel Puliatti

Re-printed with permission from elemente magazine.
Click here to view the original article, Issue #11.