Creating furniture from locally sourced wood has allowed Sebastian Cox to make his company and his employees carbon negative, the British designer claims.
Last year, Cox stored 100 tonnes of carbon dioxide in timber products such as furniture, kitchens and treehouses, he calculates. Now, he's on track to "smash" this record in 2021.
"As a company, we emit far less than 100 tonnes," Cox told Dezeen. "So we are already carbon negative by some long stretch, to the point that we're taking responsibility for our staff's carbon footprint, too."
Cox takes a holistic approach to design, taking time to understand his raw materials in a way that is both philosophical and scientific. In an opinion column for Dezeen published as part of our carbon revolution series, he imagined how a tree would view climate change.
"The lorry that comes with the wood also takes our sawdust away," Cox explained. "The drying of the wood is carbon neutral because we're drying it with a waste product. We are obviously releasing that waste as carbon but it's not from a fossil source."
The remaining emissions can largely be traced back to the energy needed to power the workshop itself.
Currently, this comes from non-renewable sources via the energy grid as Cox's studio is part of the larger Thames Side Studios industrial estate, where the landlord claims tariffs can't be changed for individual tenants.
Cox uses "very low energy machinery"
But ac...