Market challenges: 

• More people are renting then buying properties
• Single-person households are increasing
• Growth of millennial consumer buying furniture
• Steady increase of new furniture sales
• Online retailing and higher competition

Furniture industry: 

In order to respond to the increased demand for new furniture, the furniture industry is facing the challenge to stay competitive and still sell at lower prices, affordable for the consumers. This as a consequence leads to a higher demand for wood material, imported from the resourceful South American, African and Asian regions.  

Intensive logging:

In order to supply wood material to the furniture manufactories in short periods at low price, huge areas of mature forests in South America, Africa and Southern Asia are being destroyed through intensive, to a big extend non-sustainable, reportedly illegal logging, which is one of the secondary cause for the deforestation. 

Deforestation:

Although logging is not the primary cause for deforestation, it takes a solid secondary part in the process.

Loss of biodiversity:

In general the deforestation and the logging in particular have a devastating impact on the environment. It impacts negatively in a first place the climate change, through the increased emissions of carbon being not absorbed and secondary it leads to loss of biodiversity, essential for the ecosystem services and human well being. Beside this the allegedly widespread illegal logging in the rainforest regions of the planet has a negative impact on the furniture industry economy as well, dumping prices and negatively affecting legitimate wood producers.