Less than 7% of Europe's commercial furniture gets a second life. The fix is digital infrastructure across three layers: data, role, and market.
This post is adapted from a keynote I gave at Loop Forum 2026 on the Innovation Stage. The full video is above. If you'd rather read than watch, the argument is below
A story about Maja
Six months ago, a project manager at a mid-sized Danish company was handed a new project. Let's call her Maja. The project was an office move. Maja had never managed an office move before. She didn't know much about furniture. She didn't know that the most popular office chair in Europe costs over a thousand euros new. Honestly, I didn't either when I started this company.
Here is how the project plays out.
In month one, she signs a lease on the new space. In months two through four, she works with architects and designers planning the layout. New furniture has long lead times, so the order has to be placed in month three or four. Three months before the actual move.
In month five, Maja walks the old office for the first time with the project hat on. She looks around and thinks two things. Why couldn't we have reused any of this? And what am I supposed to do with it now? The answer to the first question is that nobody asked. The answer to the second question is that there is not much time to figure it out. The dealer is already loading trucks somewhere.
In month six, the movers arrive. Most of the old furniture is gone within a week. A lot of it goes to landfill.
Maja is not bad at her job. She is good at her job. The workflow she sits inside is the problem. The architect specifies the new space. The dealer fills it. The mover clears the old. Three actors, three contracts, three timelines. The new furniture decision locks months before anyone audits the old. The system is designed so that reuse cannot even be asked as a question.
Meanwhile, the same company has an office in Berlin ordering the same desks from the same dealer the same week Copenhagen is throwing them out. Nobody connects the two. It is nobody's job to.
That is the real story. And it is not a furniture story. It is a network story.
How big is this problem
The European furniture market is roughly 110 billion euros of new purchases every year. That is the headline number. It is not the interesting one.
The interesting number is the installed base. Over a hundred million people work in commercial spaces across Europe, each surrounded by thousands of euros of furniture. Add hospitals, schools, hotels, restaurants, retail, and public buildings. The total installed base of commercial furniture in Europe is in the hundreds of billions of euros, possibly approaching half a trillion at original purchase prices. Several times what gets bought new each year is already sitting in buildings.
That pool is constantly turning over. Office leases in Europe now average under twelve months. Hospitals refurbish on five-year cycles. Hotels redo rooms. Schools cycle through furniture. Retail rebrands constantly. Every change creates a furniture decision.
Of all that furniture, less than seven percent gets a second life. Eighty to ninety percent goes to landfill or incineration.
That number is not surprising because nobody wants used furniture. People want it. Architects increasingly ask for it. Procurement teams with sustainability targets will buy used if the process is easy. Even the same company often wants what another part of itself is throwing out.
The problem is that buyers exist only in a soft sense. The moment any friction appears, wrong volume, wrong condition, wrong timeline, they default to new. Used markets cannot yet promise them the two things they need. Trust that the item is what it claims to be, and trust that there is enough of it. Without those, willing buyers buy new instead.
The pool exists. The buyers exist in principle. They cannot find each other, and even when they do, the trust is not there.
This is not a waste problem. It is a network problem.
Three layers of digital infrastructure are missing
Networks like this do not get pushed into existence by regulation alone. They get built. And in commercial furniture today, three layers of digital infrastructure are missing.
The first layer is data. There is no digital identity for most commercial furniture in Europe. You cannot run a network on inventory you cannot see.
The second layer is the role. Even if perfect data existed, no one inside most companies is positioned to use it. IT has an asset manager. Fleet has a fleet manager. Furniture has nobody.
The third layer is the market. Even when the data is used and someone owns the decision, the secondary market today does not have the discipline of a primary market. Pricing is gut-based. Demand is local. Volume cannot scale on that foundation.
Each layer only matters if the one above it is solved. And each layer needs a different solver.
Layer one: data lives in three phases
If you are going to run a network on top of commercial furniture, you need to know what is in the pool. What each item is, what condition it is in, what it is worth. That sounds obvious. It is almost entirely missing.
The data lives in three phases.
Birth. Who made it, what is in it, when, where, at what CO2 cost. That data lives with the manufacturer. ESPR is forcing it into existence for products made after 2027. Think of it as a birth certificate.
First life. How the item was used, serviced, repaired, configured. That data lives with the buyer. A few large enterprises capture it. Almost nobody keeps it connected to the item.
Second life and beyond. What the item is worth now, to whom, where it goes next. That data lives with operators like us. Most of it does not exist yet at the scale a circular economy needs.
A Digital Product Passport is a birth certificate. That is it. Even if every piece of furniture sold in Europe tomorrow had a perfect DPP, that only solves phase one. The two phases that determine whether something actually gets reused are still mostly missing.
Regulation will not fix this on its own. It can mandate a birth certificate. It cannot mandate that someone keeps a service record for ten years and hands it to the next owner.
Layer two: the role most companies do not have
Imagine the data problem is solved. Every piece of commercial furniture in Europe has a perfect digital record. In most companies, almost nothing would change.
That is because in the asset categories where asset management works, there is a cascade of decisions every time something stops being used.
- Reuse it internally. Move it to another team or location.
- Sell it externally. Recover value.
- Donate it. Useful life with no resale value, real ESG impact.
- Dispose. Only as a last resort.
IT runs this cascade for laptops. Fleet managers run it for cars. They run it because someone owns the asset class and that person's job is to make the cascade work.
Furniture skips to step four. Not because steps one through three do not make sense. They obviously do. But executing them requires data and a person to use it, and most companies have neither for furniture. So the mover comes, takes everything, and disposal becomes the only path with a working process.
This is what happened to Maja. Nobody in her workflow had "what about the existing furniture" on their card. By the time she could ask, the new furniture was already on its way.
When the buy side does treat furniture as an asset, the model works. Aalborg Kommune, a Danish municipality, publishes a procurement rubric that weights lifetime, service, reuse, refurbishment, and recycling. Almost a third of every procurement decision turns on whether the item can be kept in service longer. That is not regulation. It is a choice, by a public buyer, with a replicable framework. It works because someone inside the organisation owns the question.
Layer three: the market needs primary market discipline
Even with perfect data and a working internal cascade, items the company cannot reuse internally still have to go somewhere. The secondary market. And the secondary market today does not have the discipline to absorb them at scale.
Primary markets have spent a hundred years building this discipline. They price across geographies. They sense demand globally. They know what something is worth in Hamburg versus Copenhagen versus London, in February versus October. They have data, and they have institutions standing behind the data.
Secondary markets have almost none of this at scale. We price by gut. We move goods by relationship. We discover demand by accident.
This is where most reuse operators get stuck. They look at a customer's office and ask one question. What can I sell in my local market? Whatever does not fit local taste or season gets left behind. The local buyer sets the ceiling on absorbable supply. The rest goes to landfill, not because it has no value, but because nobody bothered to find out where in the world it has value.
We do it the other way around. Take in as much as we can. Find the demand globally. Worthless in Copenhagen, valuable to a buyer in Italy. Slow-moving in Northern Europe, fast-moving somewhere else. Globalisation built the linear economy. The circular one will need it just as much.
The thing most often missed about market discipline is that it is not only for sellers. It is what gives buyers the confidence to spec used in the first place. Real-time pricing tells the architect their used chair is fairly priced. Institutional standing tells the hotel chain they can rely on a hundred matched headboards arriving on schedule. Five-year auditability tells the procurement team they can defend the decision later.
The market layer, when it matures, gives buyers two things they do not have today. Trust in quality and trust in volume. Without those, even willing buyers default to new. With them, demand activates at scale.
It is a build problem, not a belief problem.
Three layers, three solvers
Three layers. Three solvers. Three different speeds.
Data is being built by regulation. ESPR is doing real work for phase one. The regulatory floor is going up.
The role is built by procurement reform inside customers. Aalborg shows the shape. The work is replicating that across European public and private buyers. This is a five-to-ten year arc and the slowest-moving layer, because organisations do not change job design quickly.
The market is built by operators. Us. A handful of others. Building pricing knowledge, cross-border logistics, and the buyer networks that turn supply into recovered value at scale.
Nobody can own all three. Regulators do not operate. Procurement teams do not run secondary markets. Operators cannot legislate. What the system needs is for the three solvers to know they are working on the same problem and to build interfaces between their layers.
Maja is a real person
I started this piece with a story about Maja. The version I described, where the mover takes everything and most of it ends up in landfill, is not what happened.
What actually happened is that Maja called us in month two, before the new furniture order was locked in. We registered her entire office. About a hundred people, a couple thousand pieces of furniture, hundreds of thousands of euros of original purchase value.
Then we worked through the cascade with her and her stakeholders. The architects, the designers, the real estate team. What to keep, what to sell, what was valuable, what was not.
She kept fifty percent of what she had. She sold forty percent on the secondary market, which offset a meaningful share of the moving project cost. The remaining ten percent went to her Berlin office, where the desks had been about to be ordered new from the same dealer.
She did not have to become a furniture expert. She had the data because we registered it. She had the role, augmented by us walking her through the cascade. And she had a market that could absorb what her company could not reuse.
But we are one company in one country. There are thousands of Majas across Europe right now who do not have anyone to call.
What we do at Circular Furniture, and what we want to build
At Circular Furniture, we help companies get visibility of what they own. We walk them through the decision-making process of what to keep, what to reuse, and what to sell. And we run the market underneath, the cross-border buyer network that allows businesses to buy and sell used commercial furniture at scale.
That works, customer by customer. Our customers reuse more, offset cost, and recover real value from what they used to throw away.
But solving this one customer at a time is not the same as solving it for the market. We do not want to own the layers. We want to help build the connections between them.
Most furniture goes to landfill not because nobody wants it. It goes because the network that would let the people who have it find the people who want it, with the trust to actually transact at scale, does not exist yet.
That sentence describes commercial furniture. It also describes electronics, apparel, building materials, and a dozen other categories where the same three-layer problem repeats.
If you work in a category facing the same shape, we should talk. The infrastructure question is bigger than any single category. We would rather solve it once, together, than ten times alone.
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