| 17,817 |
|---|
| loose boards shipped as repair and replacement stock |
Circularity is usually described in terms of what a product is made from. The more useful measure is what happens when it breaks. A bench built as one sealed object is landfill the day a slat splits. A bench built from stock-profile boards on a frame is a repair order.
The 17,817 boards in our records are that repair order, a thousand times over. They went out in ones and fives and twenties, to parks departments replacing a vandalised slat, to contractors matching a bench installed a decade earlier, to a strata fixing a lounger. The frame stayed in the ground. The bench kept its place.
Why this works
Two design decisions, made a long time ago. The lumber is a stock profile, the same two by four and two by six that go into every product, cut to length. And the same profiles have been in the catalogue continuously, which is the part most manufacturers cannot say. A replacement board for a 2019 bench is the board we are shipping today.
The environmental accounting is simple. One board replaced is one bench not manufactured, not shipped, not installed, and one old bench not hauled away. We do not have a carbon figure for that and we are not going to invent one. The count is enough.
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