Triangle experts invite you (and your couch) to the circular economy
By Caitlin Wheeler
Dan McKenzie was an upcycler before upcycling was a thing. Circularity was a side effect of his family’s business—a business McKenzie couldn’t avoid. “Growing up in the antiques world was like growing up in the Mafia,” he jokes. “You were part of it whether you liked it or not.” Luckily, McKenzie loved it. He spent his childhood memorizing wood types and learning to identify design styles. By the time he was 13, seasoned collectors were approaching him at estate previews, asking for the age or make of a piece. “It was a thrill,” he says. So was traveling the country with his mother, appraising antiques for an Antiques Roadshow–style show.
McKenzie embraced the industry, focusing his early career on restoring antiques to their original elegant form. In 2001, as the antique market started falling and the era of disposable furniture was on the rise, he founded Finish Pros—partly to preserve beautiful classics, but also to champion well-made but less glamorous pieces. “A lot of contemporary furniture is made to fail,” he says. “When it’s designed to be shipped flat and assembled, it doesn’t have traditional joinery, which means you’re really sacrificing lifespan.” In contrast, there are plenty of brands with solid construction that are perfect candidates for upcycling.
At Finish Pros, McKenzie’s work has been transformative rather than purely restorative. Clients love the opportunity to customize fabrics and finishes, he says, though his designers try to steer people away from “super trendy colors or patterns.” Some ask to change the structural look of a piece to modernize it, getting rid of details like extra swoops or scrollwork. One client wanted to straighten the signature curved back on a Duncan Phyfe 1940s mahogany handcarved sofa, while another client asked to lacquer over a high-end Henkel Harris dining set with “true heirloom quality.” McKenzie says the results were gorgeous and fresh-looking, though he secretly prefers to restore a piece to its original look. “I’m just an antique purist,” he laughs.
Most cities and towns in Wake County offer bulk item pickup—either for free or at a small charge—and while it might seem like magic when that giant saggy couch or that outdated leather recliner disappears from the curb, those pieces end up—very unmagically—in a landfill. By reusing and upcycling furniture, individuals can take some of the eco-burden from municipalities, and this circulation can be more effective and less costly than recycling programs.
McKenzie came face to face with the actual cost of recycling several years ago, while working on a hospital project that involved stripping and reupholstering more than 40 recliners. The client was delighted, but McKenzie was startled by the discarded rolls of vinyl, piled into an enormous pyramid. “I had never seen the waste piled up in one place like that,” says McKenzie. “I was thunderstruck.” He knew that between that mountain of vinyl and the old foam padding they’d removed, he’d have to order a second dumpster, and he couldn’t stand the thought.
Determined to dispose of the materials in an eco-friendly way, McKenzie learned that it wasn’t as simple as dumping the vinyl in a blue recycling bin. Health care facilities require tough fabrics that are especially durable, easy to disinfect and can be treated with antimicrobial coatings, and while this helps prevent the spread of disease, it also makes the textiles tricky to recycle. Tricky but not impossible, and McKenzie tried various options—including driving hundreds of miles to a facility that “melts” vinyl at extreme temperatures, and spending thousands of dollars to have materials shredded and compressed.
For McKenzie and Finish Pros, the obsession with recycling snowballed after the “vinyl pyramid” incident. They began aggressively recycling scrap foam, vinyl and fabric. They even got a giant magnet to collect discarded staples from the work room floor at the end of every day. “By the end of a two-day period, we can fill a whole milk jug with staples,” says McKenzie. “Instead of going to the landfill, that’s eight pounds of metal headed for recycling.”
There is a fundamental tension at the core of textile design. Home-use fabrics don’t need to meet the impenetrable standards required for health care sites, but they are meant to withstand kids’ dirty hands, cats’ claws, dogs’ shedding, wine spills and chocolate smears. At the same time, how do these ultra-durable textiles fit in a closed-loop business model? The point of furniture textiles is to withstand, and the point of recycling is to tear apart and reuse.
McKenzie’s deep dive into textile recycling led him to the Wilson College of Textiles at North Carolina State University, one of the few textile colleges in the country. While the college doesn’t offer recycling services, McKenzie found experts eager to solve the same puzzles he grapples with.
Everyone at the Wilson College of Textiles is multitalented and multidisciplinary. “You have to be,” says Professor Karen Leonas, who has a PhD in textile chemistry, physics and polymer engineering, and now focuses on sustainability. “This industry is constantly changing,” she says, “and you have to be forward-thinking and able to move deftly between art, design and science.”
From a technical perspective, Leonas says recycling textiles depends on fiber content, and determining a textile’s fiber content requires near-infrared technology. “If I know what it is, I can shred it, break it into monomers and then repolymerize and reuse it,” Leonas explains. She adds that a simple cotton versus a blended fabric can’t be recycled the same way, and that for upholstery, it’s most eco-friendly to avoid mixed-material fabric.
Leonas studies the development and recycling of sustainable materials at the Wilson College of Textiles and she brings her interdisciplinary thinking to Wilson’s sustainability committee, where she interacts with like-minded colleague Professor Janie Woodbridge. A textile designer with a background in fine art and over a decade of textile industry experience, Woodbridge approaches technical sustainable design with a focus on visual appeal.
“I love that there’s always a puzzle to solve,” says Woodbridge, who is fresh off of winning one of N.C. State’s Outstanding Teacher Awards. “We always design from within a box, whether that’s a hospital waiting room or a public lobby or a high-performance material for sports.” For Woodbridge, the center of any puzzle is figuring out how to make fabric durable and sustainable, but also visually interesting.
A talented artist, Woodbridge likes to start her projects with a “hands on” approach, sitting down at a loom and weaving original designs in the most ancient way. “Textile design is such a primitive thing,” she says, “but I think mixing in the engineering, chemistry and CAD side is paving the way for a more sustainable future.”
While Woodbridge works to make beautiful, sustainable fabrics, and Leonas works in the lab to make and break the perfect fabric, both professors see the need to think like an economist to incentivize people not to toss furniture into the dump. “We need to work together to extend the life of a product,” says Leonas. “We want to help people learn how to use the recyclable market for furniture: to donate, to resell, or to reupholster and reuse.”
Woodbridge offers some practical tips: “Choose furniture that leans more traditional than fashion-forward; something that won’t be noticeably outdated within a year or two. Instead, rely on pops of color, like pillows or throws. Strive to be conscientious about not cycling quickly through big items.”
Perhaps professors at the Wilson College of Textiles are getting their message out, as McKenzie sees one encouraging trend over the past few years: the age of his clients. “We’re seeing a lot more young people,” he says. “These are savvy consumers who find well-built older furniture on Facebook Marketplace or at garage sales, and come to us to have it customized.” McKenzie hopes this shows the younger generation’s commitment to the environment and their recognition that reuse is key to a circular economy.
