Furniture given new lease of life 'saves ten tonnes' from landfill

A group of upcyclers in Perthshire say they’ve managed to stop ten tonnes of furniture from going to landfill by giving the items a new lease of life.

Tayside Upcycle and Craft Centre, situated just outside Perth, have been repainting tables and chairs and selling them to new homes.

While the team have plenty of furniture donated to them, they hope people will instead be inspired to upcycle items themselves.

Alfie Lannetta, from Tayside Upcycling and Craft Centre, said: “We have turned round over ten tons of furniture that’s actually been donated to us, has been worked on by our team of artisans and then sold and gone on to a new home.

“Unfortunately we’ve got about ten or 12 tonnes of furniture that we’ve got in storage and that’s a cost that we’ve got to bear, we’ve got to pay for that storage.

“The idea is to turn it around as quick as we can, so hopefully our girls and guys are going to be busy and turn round a lot more furniture.”

The centre offers advice to budding upcyclers and sells materials to help them give furniture a new lease of life.

“The fact that we’ve got a lovely upcycling centre here, it’s full of lots of nice pieces of furniture as well as hopefully trying to sell some, it’s there to inspire people as well,” Alfie added.

“Hopefully somebody will come in, they might see a nice unit and think ‘I’ve got one of them in the garage’ or ‘I’ve one in the spare room’, and what we’ll do as an organisation is we’ll give them all the advice, all the help and not only that, we retail all the materials so they can go away and do their own project and hopefully save that piece of furniture.”

Sarah Peterson, who is lead artist at the shop, wants people to stay away from fast fashion trends and instead make their furniture last.

She said: “Most of the people that come in are bringing me pieces that have been in their family for many, many years so it holds some sentimental value.

“It’s maybe for instance a chair that they’ve had for about 50 to 60 years and it might have been their grandfather’s, they can’t use it just now because maybe the foam’s all gone and it’s maybe it’s a bit squishy and doesn’t look very nice.

“If I can take all that away and redo it, then they’ve got a piece of furniture that means something to them and will last for years and years to come.”