BE OPEN BLOG

In a world drowning in waste and craving authenticity, furniture design is stepping up with fresh, sustainable solutions that rethink how we use wood — from ancient techniques to cutting-edge tech. These new approaches don’t just recycle materials; they rewrite the story of what eco-friendly wooden furniture can be. 

London-based designer Roc H Biel turns what’s left behind—namely beech wood dust—into something unforgettable. His sculptural furniture series, Dust Order, breathes new life into workshop remnants by fusing classical elegance with futuristic form. Inspired by Corinthian columns, these modular desks and monolithic chairs transform architectural grandeur into lightweight, dreamlike silhouettes. Crafted from compacted sawdust and 3D-printed composites, each piece exists in a curious in-between: both ancient and digital, heavy and weightless, hyperreal and tactile.

The collection plays with visual paradoxes, particularly in how it balances form and function. At a glance, the granular textures mimic stone or sand-casting, but in reality, the materials are surprisingly light and agile. The desk, built from bonded beech dust and magnesium, morphs effortlessly between furniture types—stool, bench, side table, dining setup—channeling the modular logic of classical design in a refreshingly modern way. Strategic voids and geometric transitions (from circle to octagon to square) add rhythm and transparency, allowing light to animate each piece like a sculpture in motion.

What sets Dust Order apart isn’t just its aesthetic poetry, but its radical material intelligence. By upcycling beech wood dust—a material typically discarded as worthless—Roc H Biel challenges the traditional hierarchies of craft and resource use. The compacting process transforms fine particulate waste into solid, sculptural forms without the need for virgin timber, adhesives, or heavy industrial treatments. Paired with 3D printing technology and a magnesium-bonded composite, the collection bridges artisanal techniques with advanced manufacturing, minimizing both material waste and energy use. It’s a vision of circular design where even the most overlooked byproducts become building blocks for the future.

In the meantime, New York–based studio Earth to People brings us back to the origins of making. Their debut collection, Salvage and Sap, revives one of the oldest human technologies—natural adhesives—to craft objects that are as elemental as they are radical. Hand-built from centuries-old wind-felled cedar and salvaged aluminum, each monolithic chair, lamp, and sconce tells a story of reverence—for material, process, and planet. By using tree sap instead of synthetic glues, the studio bridges ancient knowledge with urgent ecological consciousness.

The pieces feel almost ceremonial in their construction. A chair made from three massive blocks of 400-year-old cedar is hand-planed into quiet monumentality, joined not with screws or chemical resin, but with cedar dowels and purified pine sap. The sap is harvested with care—tapped only where trees have naturally exuded an excess, then heated and filtered into a golden, workable adhesive. This approach transforms waste into utility and healing into connection. Elsewhere, cedar bark becomes cordage, wrapping a pleated lampshade made from the same tree’s shingles. It’s not just design—it’s ecosystem-level storytelling, embedded into every surface.

Earth to People sources their cedar exclusively from wind-felled trees in British Columbia, avoiding live cutting entirely. Each log is air-dried to preserve its integrity and reduce energy use, and GPS tracking ensures full material transparency from forest to form. Even the aluminum, reclaimed from local depots, is shaped in homage to ancient metalworking traditions.

While Dust Order explores poetic material contradiction and Salvage and Sap revives ancestral craft, Disrupt.Design Lab’s WoodenWood project — born from academic research at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology — pushes toward a system-wide rethinking of how we design with — and for — wood.

What sets WoodenWood apart is its hybrid process: combining traditional woodworking for structural support with robotic 3D printing of an all-natural, biodegradable wood paste. This paste — made from sawdust and cellulose-based binders — is printed in a pattern that mimics woven rattan, creating a new kind of wood textile. A material often dismissed as industrial waste becomes both surface and structure. Uniquely, the wood frame acts as the mold for the printing process, eliminating the need for secondary tooling and avoiding excess waste.

The solid, hand-crafted base provides the foundation, while the 3D-printed sawdust forms the woven seat and backrest. By uniting two stages of wood’s lifecycle — raw timber and post-industrial residue — WoodenWood embodies a circular design approach that moves wood closer to a truly zero-waste future.