No way. Not as long as population growth is a thing. A lot of people shopping at IKEA are buying furniture for the first time. Imagine if we switched to all hardwood furniture. People would still need to buy as much furniture for the next 20-40 years or so at least, but now those furniture will have a huge environmental impact. Maybe you reduce the long-term impact, but probably not for 50 years at least.
Making things out of cheap and low-impact particle boards, cardboard cores, etc, is probably the most realistic way of reducing the environmental impact. It maximises the use of the wood, you can make it out of fast growing wood, and you minimise use of materials. If you reuse more of the wood fibers through recycling, it'd be even better.
I feel like this whole "we should use long-lasting re-usable furniture" thing is more about upper middle class people wanting to feel good about buying expensive furniture or spending the time to find and refurbish old furniture. There's nothing wrong with it, but it doesn't scale.
Not only that, it being made out of particleboard doesn't necessarily make it disposable. My parents have a set of Pax wardrobes that they've had for 20 years (give or take?), and they're perfectly functional, and with some small amount of TLC (a small tin of paint) could even be classed as pretty!
I question that. Population growth is not that fast, and I can easily see how the amount of replaced furniture is bigger than the amount of furniture bought for the first time.
Manufacturing is done by machines but maintenance and repair are generally carried out by humans.
Agree that hostile design or just lack of attention are also huge issues.
If you want to fix furniture, you need space and tools, so you need bigger houses (or the ability to move the furniture to a community spot) and tools. Tools will generally be made of metal, and needs factories to make these tools. Some of the parts are available freely: I'm guessing not all are.
Manufacturing will need to be different as well if your pieces aren't designed to be repaired in such a way: Who knows if this would be more environmentally friendly.
Not to mention that it is a skill, so a repair might not even repair it but break it further - but now we've made the tools and things on top of the furniture (that didn't even use up scraps of wood, but caused them).
They last decades, and can be used to repair tens of thousands of items.
To suggest that their environmental impact is higher than that of equivalent favtory equipment needed to produce furniture is delusional.
You are simply reducing manufacturing of one type of furniture with another (that doesn't use the scraps in production) and very much increasing a lot of other manufacturing and increasing the space people need to have available to do these things.
Edit: I'll mention that many folks are simply going to buy the cheapest tools to fix stuff: A decent drill isn't cheap, but a cheap drill might get you by if you only use it lightly and occasionally. If people are using them more, I suspect more will be thrown away. At least the furniture is using some renewable products: Drills aren't made of wood and pressure and glues.
Western society has become full of contradiction...
Consumerism is environmentalism,
War is peace
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is strength
(Throwing it away also includes giving it to the thrift store.)
This is never going to fly with regular folks, though. We could probably reduce pollution a ton if people started patching their clothes, but that's never going to happen either.
checks notes
Clothes?
I don't see how using it is bad.
The low prices at Ikea and others definitely encourage over-consumption - buying a new table instead of restoring an old one for example
Personally I don't necessarily subscribe to this argument, I think that we can focus on bigger sources of pollution/waste than transporting flatpack lumber, but I can see the argument