With deep roots in the furniture manufacturing sector, start-up Cooloo is making impressive inroads into the vibrant Dutch circular-economy scene with its innovative, waste-consuming leather upholstery.

Leather’s inclusion in circular-economy initiatives is gaining traction if the first Limburg Circular Innovation Awards in the Netherlands are anything to go by. Two of the five finalists in the competition were users of leather and strong supporters of leather’s circular-economy credentials.

This competition is a joint initiative that employers’ organisation LWV, the Limburg provincial government, Rabobank and regional development agency LIOF have worked on together.

In contention

Shoe company Emma Safety Footwear was in the running with products such as its Amazone work boot. The laces are made from recycled PET and the leather in the boot comes from a Leather Working Group-certified tannery that converts cuttings and shavings into compost. The product comes with a material passport, which guarantees that Emma will take it back at the product’s end-of-life for recycling. The shoe brand introduced its first range of circular safety shoes in 2018, outlining its vision of “an endless loop” for the materials it uses.

Also in contention was furniture company Cooloo, which uses leftover material from a variety of sources, including leather, with Ecco Leather prominent among its list of suppliers, to make sofas and chairs. Other materials it uses to complement the leather include old wine corks and stones from fruit. Cooloo says it makes its products to last, but also to be easy to repair and refurbish. In the build-up to the awards, its commercial and circular director, Ricco Fiorito, said he found the throwaway economy, fast fashion and plastic waste reprehensible. “Something has to change,” he insisted.

At the final in mid-February, the five contenders made their pitches to a panel of judges and Cooloo emerged as the winner, receiving the main prize of €3,000. On accepting the award, Ricco Fiorito said the recognition and the support of the regional authorities in Limburg were welcome, but he pointed out that the prize was reward for work that Cooloo has been carrying out for a number of years now.

Deep roots

Cooloo’s own history dates back to 2013, although its roots in furniture manufacturing in the Netherlands are deeper. Founder, Leo Schraven, who has a mechanical and chemical background, had spent 22 years at the Leolux Furniture Group in Venlo before leaving there in 2006 to set up his own coatings company, Leolac. He ran Leolac until the launch of Cooloo. At first the new company operated as a consultancy, specialising in advising furniture producers about coatings. It brought in Ricco Fiorito, a mechanical engineer who had completed a Masters Degree in innovation sciences at the Technical University in Eindhoven, in 2016. By 2018, it had developed a method for using its coatings expertise to secure investors, establish a production facility, hire workers and start making furniture products of its own. This has been Cooloo’s focus ever since, although it is now also interested in licensing its technology to allow manufacturers in other parts of the world to use it, too. It has recently embarked on an exercise to secure second-round investors and build a new, bigger, better factory on home soil.

Spray concept

During his time at Leolux, Leo Schraven began working on the concept of spraying upholstery leather onto furniture instead of upholstering in the classic way. Ricco Fiorito says of his colleague: “It was already his dream to spray leather, applying it in a seamless coat and abolishing inefficiencies such as stitching, which is hard on people and hard on the material. But he was general manager there and had too little time and too many other things to take care of to focus on this development.” This concept has come to life now at Cooloo, where the spray-coating idea is in use to create hard-wearing, repairable furniture products. So confident is the company of its products’ repairability that it leases as well as sells furniture to customers. This works well for chairs and sofas that people can use in gardens, at pool-sides or on rooftops during warmer weather.  Cooloo takes the products back for respraying and reconditioning after months of wear and tear, saving customers from having to worry about where and how to store the seats during the winter. If space allows, leaving the chairs out is also an option; they are robust enough.

Inroads into waste

The idea of spraying upholstery onto furniture came before there was much talk, even in the Netherlands, of the circular economy. Mr Schraven encountered discarded, unwanted material everywhere in the furniture industry and sought from the outset to cut down on waste and make the sector more sustainable. After meeting and partnering with Mr Fiorito, he became convinced that Cooloo could do more than reduce the volume of waste that furniture producers were creating in their own production cycles. Consuming waste from other industries as raw material for the furniture was a further step forward and took the idea more fully into the circular-economy world.

“The concept of this technology was there already and we matched it to current times,” Mr Fiorito explains. “There is so much waste material lying around everywhere.” The company has developed its own machines for grinding some of this waste up, with leather one of the materials that is working particularly well. Future possibilities also include denim and other textiles. Ricco Fiorito believes leather manufacturers should invest in the technology to enable them to find a good use for their own shavings and offcuts. The sprayable leather coating they could then create would work well in seating for automotive or aviation and for accessories as well as in furniture, he thinks.

Another idea for the future is to be able to keep different colours of waste material separate and then grind up only red, only green and so on. Mr Fiorito explains that, for the moment, Cooloo simply has to take what it is given by tanneries and other suppliers and the upholstery materials it is able to develop from them turn out either grey or beige in colour.

In a bind

Key to the whole system is that Cooloo has developed its own water-based and volatile organic compound-free binder, which it can spray onto objects of any shape or size. Then, with another of its machines, it can apply ground-up fibres from waste onto the binder and build the coating up layer by layer. It has sanding techniques, too, that allow it to achieve a range of looks, feels and finishes. Cooloo likes its furniture products to have “a little bit of roughness” so that customers can feel texture, but Martindale tests produced samples in which a new, smooth leather layer emerged after sufficient  rubbing. “Many of the fats and the oils are still present,” Ricco Fiorito explains. “And the more you use it, the more beautiful it becomes. The leather fibres do not soak into the binder; they stay on top so it still feels like leather, and with time, you can achieve some nice, open, nubuck effects.”

Use everything

His conviction is that anything that helps us make the best possible use of everything we have is good. If people continue to eat meat, hides will continue to accumulate and we have an obligation to use them. “We need to use everything we can find in this finite world,” he says. “We are not in a position to be able to reject materials. Our technology can help companies in the leather industry make their production more sustainable and we want to get these innovations out there as fast as possible for people to use. Then you can have impact.”

Discussions about potential projects in India are already under way. “There is a lot of leather production there and a lot of waste,” Mr Fiorito says. “Companies there should put their own leather waste to good use instead of throwing it away. For example, they would be able to use our technology to upgrade the appearance of leather from lower-end hides.” Specific details he can share relate to a trial that Netherlands-based campaign group Solidaridad wants to set up in the leather cluster in Kolkata. Cooloo will transport one of its machines and the binder it has developed to the Indian city and then use the leather waste that local manufacturers produce to create coatings. Representatives of other Indian leather clusters and from Tata International are reportedly keen to see the results of this trial and may emulate Kolkata’s example.

“If this works in India, we’ll try to do the same in Africa and Latin America,” he explains. “We have already proved that the technology works. We have furniture made using this method that has stayed outside for three or four years already. We know it works here in the Netherlands and want to see if it will work in other parts of the world too.”

Meanwhile, back home, future circular economy competitions await. Winning in Limburg has paved the way for Cooloo to be one of ten finalists in a similar competition at national level in the spring. This builds on earlier achievements, including the Good Industrial Design award that the company picked up during Dutch Design Week 2020 for a chair called Ameba that North Brabant-based designer Hugo de Ruiter created in partnership with Cooloo. Competition success so far indicates to Mr Fiorito that people are now ready for new, circular ideas. He recalls the early days of visiting furniture exhibitions to display Cooloo products and seeing people react with incomprehension on learning that the company had sprayed leather and cork waste onto a sofa. Things have changed now, he says.

Cooloo’s coatings spray onto objects of any shape or size, making it possible for the company to create durable, repairable furniture products like the Landscapes sofa.
Credit: Cooloo

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