Is Rattan Furniture Eco-Friendly?

Rattan garden furniture is perhaps the most popular decorative item for gardens, patios and outdoor areas across the western world. The material’s sturdy, weather-resistant nature and low maintenance requirements, make it a perennial favourite among home-owners; as a result, both natural and synthetic rattan garden furniture are common sights in homes the world over.

However, as the popularity of rattan garden furniture grows, so too do questions surrounding it. Home-owners naturally find themselves curious about several aspects regarding this material, such as its build quality, the manufacturing process, or even whether this material is ‘green.’

Indeed, one particular question has become more and more common among home-owners in recent years: is rattan furniture eco-friendly? In a day and age where natural resources become more depleted with each passing day, and every effort is valuable in ensuring the environment is not actively damaged, it comes as no surprise that home-owners might want to know whether their favourite type of outdoor furniture is sustainable in this regard.

So, is rattan furniture eco-friendly? In a nutshell, yes. Both the natural and synthetic variants of the material are sustainable from an environmental standpoint, and the lines below go into more detail about why.

Synthetic Rattan Furniture

Synthetic materials are usually regarded with suspicion when it comes to environmental sustainability, even when, as with rattan furniture, this is one of the main selling points employed by manufacturers and retailers.

However, rattan garden furniture is one of the few instances where claims about a synthetic material being entirely eco-friendly and environmentally sound are entirely accurate and easy to demonstrate. Most synthetic rattan items are made from materials especially devised and treated to ensure they do not harm the environment, namely by releasing toxins onto the air or soil immediately surrounding the item. As such, home-owners thinking of buying these items need not worry that the synthetic polymers at their root will unwittingly harm the environment; every synthetic rattan garden furniture item available on the market is guaranteed to be entirely eco-friendly and environmentally safe.

Natural Rattan Furniture

Even more than with synthetic rattan, the question of whether or not rattan furniture is eco-friendly seems to arise about items made from the actual material extracted from palm trees. Any natural material will always bring about doubts as to whether or not using it may be harming the environment, and in the case of rattan, this is no different.

The good news is, as far as naturally sourced materials are concerned, rattan is one of the safest from an environmental standpoint. While the palm tree the material is derived from is geographically limited in location, rattan itself is easily renewable, and the impact its sourcing has in the environment can be considered negligible.

In fact, rather than harm the environment, rattan can be considered to benefit it, insofar as it is used as a replacement for wood wicker in many furniture items. This, in turn, helps preserve forests, as it reduces the need to source wood from trees, preventing deforestation and logging. Furthermore, this plant is often grown in floodplains, thereby facilitating the appearance of animal populations in said areas and making use of soil which would, otherwise, go unused. Finally, rattan harvesting and sourcing helps provide jobs for inhabitants of the areas of the world the material is commonly found at, thus helping maintain a sustainable economy.

It is clear, then, that when it comes to the sustainability of natural rattan garden furniture, home-owners have even less cause for concern than they would with items made from the synthetic variant.

Is Rattan Furniture Eco-Friendly?

As has hopefully become apparent in the previous few paragraphs, the answer to the question ‘is rattan furniture eco-friendly?’ can only be a definite ‘yes.’ Environmental soundness is only one more trait to add to the ever-expanding list of reasons which make rattan garden furniture such a favourite among western home-owners.