Cooloo makes a fist against fast furniture: 'Just spray a new coat on it'

The Dutch landfill is bulging with worn-out couches, chairs and tables. Every year we throw away 247 million kilos of furniture in the Netherlands, and in Europe this amounts to 11 billion kilos. And that while many of these items could have had a second life. The Limburg company Cooloo has a solution for this: "Let a piece of furniture remain a piece of furniture. Just spray a new layer over it."

Cooloo (you say Koeloe) uses leftover materials like leather, cork and foam to refurbish old furniture. No new fabrics, no complicated upholstery, but a strong coating of waste that you spray right over an old sofa or chair. "And it works" says commercial director Ricco Fiorito. "We save up to 94 percent CO2 compared to buying new furniture." Even design classics get a second life at Cooloo. "We have taken chairs by Verner Panton in hand. New look, same shape. And you can choose coatings from olive pits or jeans scraps, for example."

Cooloo was born out of a frustration with the traditional upholstery process, which is rather cumbersome and especially very polluting. The founder, Leo Schraven, worked for years as director of Leolux Furniture Factory and there he saw up close how complicated the production process was. With a lot of handwork, various types of materials and a large amount of waste. Upholstering is also hard work. And there is also the dependence on raw materials from faraway countries, which makes production vulnerable and relatively expensive.

How can you produce furniture locally, with materials that are simply available, he wondered? In 2013, experimentation began for Schraven. The idea was as simple as it was radical: make furniture from foam, finished with a coating based on waste streams. No more dozens of steps, just a few clever operations. That thought formed the basis for the model Cooloo now runs on. By processing residual materials such as leather, cork or textile scraps into sprayable coatings, a sustainable finish is created that gives old furniture a new look. This skips traditional upholstering and extends the life of products. Renovating furniture has suddenly become a whole lot simpler.