With each piece of residential furniture produced, Altra Furniture makes a case for sustainable manufacturing.

It has been slightly more than one year since the Wright City, MO-based company first introduced RTA furniture and casegoods made with the patented SmartPanel material. The eco-friendly SmartPanel is made from 100 percent recycled and reused materials: 70 percent post-production offal and 30 percent sawdust. The company does not use any virgin growth material in the SmartPanel product.

“Altra SmartPanel has been in development for some time,” says a spokesman for the company. “Our goal was to create a substrate with an ecological advantage over traditional materials. At the same time, we wanted our customers to pay little or no premium for SmartPanel. Too often, green innovations fail because they do not meet the consumer’s value ideals.”

Altra’s RTA furniture is sold through a network of retail stores and big box chains. “Customers have been excited about the prospects of using Altra SmartPanel in our furniture designs,” the spokesman says. “We introduced several product series at High Point for the home theater, storage, and office areas.”

Sustainable Manufacturing
Current plans call for Altra Furniture to launch new SmartPanel products on a regular basis. “Fortunately, Dorel, our parent company has one of the largest overseas development staffs in the industry. This allows our designers to create fresh ideas to explore on a continual basis.”
Manufacturing of the SmartPanel furniture is done at a facility in China. Based on the positive response the company has received by consumers, plans are already underway to begin production at a second plant in China, to meet future growth needs.

Among the products Altra Furniture offers are these three-, four- and five-shelf Nassau Bookcases, available in Espresso and Natural finishes.

According to Altra Furniture, the construction of the SmartPanel enables it to be machined similar to standard particleboard and MDF. At the factory, a variety of machining operations are employed, including: panel sizing, veneer pressing, CNC routing and machining, edgebanding, etc. Among the surface capabilities available are laminating, veneering and finishing.

In addition to using water-based finishing materials, as part of its environmental stewardship message — and as a member of the Sustainable Furnishings Council — Altra Furniture has minimized the amount of un-recyclable content and materials from unsustainable sources in its products and also has taken steps to minimize carbon and other harmful emissions. “Altra SmartPanel customers expect a strong ecological construction story, of course. Therefore using a fast-growth veneer, like bamboo, coupled with simple water-based finishes would be an ideal development choice, as an example,” the spokesman says.

Altra Furniture adds SmartPanel products are made to P1 California standards for organic gas emission. “We are working on the future P2 standard SmartPanel for eventual introduction.”

To learn more about Altra Furniture and SmartPanel, visit AltraFurniture.com.