Evaluation and research of sustainable design criteria in the furniture industry

In recent years, effects such as global warming and climate change have been affecting the whole world. Increasing of urbanization, population, consumption habits and unconscious consumption of natural resources drag environmental problems to an irreversible point. For this reason, the furniture sector, which has a dynamic and competitive structure within the production sector, has made an effort to further increase the environmental sustainability and cyclicality of its products. In this thesis, it is aimed to evaluate the concept of sustainability and sustainable design criteria in the furniture industry. An online survey was used to determine whether they pay attention to environmental design criteria in their designs and the awareness of the designers in the furniture sector about sustainability, which has a large share in the production sector in our country. According to the results of the survey, it has been observed that the participants have a high command of environmental concepts such as sustainability and product life cycle and hey have sufficient sustainable design understanding to provide important criteria for the fulfillment of sustainable design requirements. But, it has been determined that there are many factors that limit the designers for sustainable product design. The most important of these constraints are as follows; companies do not prioritize sustainable design and not making the necessary investments, consumers do not determine the concept of sustainable design, economic constraints, the scarcity of environmentally friendly materials. In this process, companies face serious challenges in achieving and developing high environmental sustainability standards.