Once a niche, now the norm
Material transparency becomes the global ticket
Bob King was clearly having a good day when he sat down at Chris Williamson's microphone on 16 May. Modern Wisdom — beyond its core audience in the fitness and self-optimisation milieu, one of the higher-reach English-language long-form podcasts — had invited the founder and CEO of Humanscale, and King didn't need to be asked twice. One hour and seven minutes. The episode title: The Health Crisis Of Office Jobs.
King talked about more or less everything. About slipped discs and the question of whether bad posture is a discipline or a design problem. About the perpetually recycled thesis that sitting is the new smoking. About saddle stools, screen time, sunlight versus blue light. About the anecdote of whether the Freedom Chair was really named after Obama. About the question of whether men and women need different desk setups. A solid selection from the standard repertoire that fills episodes in the health & wellness segment.
But between minutes 55:25 and 01:05:53, King did finally turn to a topic that matters to the European workplace furniture industry far more than any seating recommendation: off-gassing. The question of what actually escapes from office furniture over the long term — formaldehyde, volatile organic compounds, plasticisers — while employees sit next to it for eight hours a day. And the question of how a manufacturer is supposed to prove what is in there in the first place.
This is where the episode becomes relevant. Because at this point, two very different answers to the same question meet — an American one and a European one.
The American answer: the label
Anyone in North America certifying an office building under LEED or, more ambitiously, under the Living Building Challenge, will struggle to avoid a small paper document: the Declare label. Introduced in 2012 by the International Living Future Institute in Seattle, by now used by several hundred manufacturers, it functions like a nutrition label for building products. Ingredients above 100 ppm are declared, complemented by information on origin and end-of-life options. Alongside it exists the technically similar but commercially broader HPD — Health Product Declaration, run by the eponymous Collaborative since 2012, with well over 11,000 declarations from around 800 manufacturers.
King doesn't mention either system by name in the podcast. But he has substantially shaped their logic. Humanscale, founded in New York in 1983, today with around 1,500 employees and an estimated four to five percent share of the American workplace furniture segment, was among the first furniture manufacturers to systematically roll out Declare and Health Product Declarations across large parts of its product range. In 2018, around sixty percent of all Declare labels published worldwide came from the company — King himself spoke of eighty percent on the podcast, a charming overstatement.
The lead has since narrowed. The 2024 MMQB Sustainability Scorecard, which measures the transparency performance of the twelve leading North American furniture manufacturers, still places Humanscale at the top with a 20.71 percent share of all industry HPDs, closely followed by Steelcase at 15.38 percent. Other established names lag far behind: MillerKnoll, the merger of Herman Miller and Knoll, comes in at 1.18 percent. What these figures show is not merely a confirmation of King's pioneering role. They also show that voluntary transparency has, by now, arrived in the industry.
That applies all the more since BIFMA, the American furniture trade association, adopted the new version of its LEVEL e3-2024 standard in April 2025. The key change: LEVEL now incorporates, among other elements, the Red List of the Living Building Challenge and the Restricted Substances List from the Cradle-to-Cradle system. For major US corporate projects, LEVEL can increasingly become the de facto entry ticket. Step by step, what began as a voluntary marketing edge is turning into a procurement standard.
The European answer: the regulation
In Europe, the same question — what's inside, what comes out — has taken a different route. It has been answered not via the market and architects' specifications, but via Brussels. And at a pace that will visibly change the European furniture trade over the coming years.
On 6 August 2026, the new REACH limit for formaldehyde emissions from furniture and wood-based panels takes effect: 0.062 mg/m³ indoor air. Testing takes place under defined chamber conditions; in practice, methods such as EN 717-1 and EN 16516 play a central role. Anyone placing products on the European single market from that date must meet this limit — not merely as a claim, but as a measurement. A few weeks earlier, by 19 July 2026, the EU must also have set up the registry for the Digital Product Passport. Furniture is not part of the first binding DPP wave. It does, however, sit in the ESPR work plan for 2025 to 2030; a delegated act for furniture is expected for 2028. Actual application obligations will depend on that act and the transition periods that follow.
The most striking thing about this development is what preceded it — namely twelve years of almost nothing, or at least nothing unified. Europe did have a whole range of voluntary transparency instruments: Blauer Engel, EU Ecolabel, FEMB Level, Eurofins Indoor Air Comfort, EMICODE, the Nordic Swan in the north. But none of them grew into a unified ingredients label that architects and clients would routinely have demanded. The systems remained fragmented, sectoral, regional. The market didn't solve the problem. So now the regulation is solving it.
The convergence
What brings the American and European lines together is the global procurement departments of a few very large companies. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Salesforce plan their office spaces worldwide according to comparable sustainability requirements. Anyone setting up a subsidiary in Munich, Dublin or Milan often arrives with the procurement logic from Mountain View, Cupertino, Redmond or San Francisco. Until now, that logic encountered in Europe a furniture supply pointing to Indoor Air Comfort seals or Greenguard certificates — technically close enough to Declare to function, but not identical.
With the Digital Product Passport, that gap is likely to close gradually. European furniture will, in future, have to carry a machine-readable dataset that can include information on materials, origin, repairability, recyclability and further sustainability parameters. Probably not in the same language, not in the same data format, not with identical thresholds. But structurally comparable. Any European manufacturer who, in the medium term, still wants to sell without robust, machine-readable material declarations will come under pressure not only in the European compliance race. They will also lose touch with those major clients who have long been shifting their procurement between the two worlds.
Bob King didn't mention any of this in his podcast. He talked about saddle stools and the question of whether men and women need different desks. But between minute 55 and minute 65, he described a business model that has long been a competitive advantage in the US — and that is, step by step, becoming the entry ticket in Europe.
Bob King was clearly having a good day when he sat down at Chris Williamson's microphone on 16 May. Modern Wisdom — beyond its core audience in the fitness and self-optimisation milieu, one of the higher-reach English-language long-form podcasts — had invited the founder and CEO of Humanscale, and King didn't need to be asked twice. One hour and seven minutes. The episode title: The Health Crisis Of Office Jobs.
King talked about more or less everything. About slipped discs and the question of whether bad posture is a discipline or a design problem. About the perpetually recycled thesis that sitting is the new smoking. About saddle stools, screen time, sunlight versus blue light. About the anecdote of whether the Freedom Chair was really named after Obama. About the question of whether men and women need different desk setups. A solid selection from the standard repertoire that fills episodes in the health & wellness segment.
But between minutes 55:25 and 01:05:53, King did finally turn to a topic that matters to the European workplace furniture industry far more than any seating recommendation: off-gassing. The question of what actually escapes from office furniture over the long term — formaldehyde, volatile organic compounds, plasticisers — while employees sit next to it for eight hours a day. And the question of how a manufacturer is supposed to prove what is in there in the first place.
This is where the episode becomes relevant. Because at this point, two very different answers to the same question meet — an American one and a European one.
The American answer: the label
Anyone in North America certifying an office building under LEED or, more ambitiously, under the Living Building Challenge, will struggle to avoid a small paper document: the Declare label. Introduced in 2012 by the International Living Future Institute in Seattle, by now used by several hundred manufacturers, it functions like a nutrition label for building products. Ingredients above 100 ppm are declared, complemented by information on origin and end-of-life options. Alongside it exists the technically similar but commercially broader HPD — Health Product Declaration, run by the eponymous Collaborative since 2012, with well over 11,000 declarations from around 800 manufacturers.
King doesn't mention either system by name in the podcast. But he has substantially shaped their logic. Humanscale, founded in New York in 1983, today with around 1,500 employees and an estimated four to five percent share of the American workplace furniture segment, was among the first furniture manufacturers to systematically roll out Declare and Health Product Declarations across large parts of its product range. In 2018, around sixty percent of all Declare labels published worldwide came from the company — King himself spoke of eighty percent on the podcast, a charming overstatement.
The lead has since narrowed. The 2024 MMQB Sustainability Scorecard, which measures the transparency performance of the twelve leading North American furniture manufacturers, still places Humanscale at the top with a 20.71 percent share of all industry HPDs, closely followed by Steelcase at 15.38 percent. Other established names lag far behind: MillerKnoll, the merger of Herman Miller and Knoll, comes in at 1.18 percent. What these figures show is not merely a confirmation of King's pioneering role. They also show that voluntary transparency has, by now, arrived in the industry.
That applies all the more since BIFMA, the American furniture trade association, adopted the new version of its LEVEL e3-2024 standard in April 2025. The key change: LEVEL now incorporates, among other elements, the Red List of the Living Building Challenge and the Restricted Substances List from the Cradle-to-Cradle system. For major US corporate projects, LEVEL can increasingly become the de facto entry ticket. Step by step, what began as a voluntary marketing edge is turning into a procurement standard.
The European answer: the regulation
In Europe, the same question — what's inside, what comes out — has taken a different route. It has been answered not via the market and architects' specifications, but via Brussels. And at a pace that will visibly change the European furniture trade over the coming years.
On 6 August 2026, the new REACH limit for formaldehyde emissions from furniture and wood-based panels takes effect: 0.062 mg/m³ indoor air. Testing takes place under defined chamber conditions; in practice, methods such as EN 717-1 and EN 16516 play a central role. Anyone placing products on the European single market from that date must meet this limit — not merely as a claim, but as a measurement. A few weeks earlier, by 19 July 2026, the EU must also have set up the registry for the Digital Product Passport. Furniture is not part of the first binding DPP wave. It does, however, sit in the ESPR work plan for 2025 to 2030; a delegated act for furniture is expected for 2028. Actual application obligations will depend on that act and the transition periods that follow.
The most striking thing about this development is what preceded it — namely twelve years of almost nothing, or at least nothing unified. Europe did have a whole range of voluntary transparency instruments: Blauer Engel, EU Ecolabel, FEMB Level, Eurofins Indoor Air Comfort, EMICODE, the Nordic Swan in the north. But none of them grew into a unified ingredients label that architects and clients would routinely have demanded. The systems remained fragmented, sectoral, regional. The market didn't solve the problem. So now the regulation is solving it.
The convergence
What brings the American and European lines together is the global procurement departments of a few very large companies. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Salesforce plan their office spaces worldwide according to comparable sustainability requirements. Anyone setting up a subsidiary in Munich, Dublin or Milan often arrives with the procurement logic from Mountain View, Cupertino, Redmond or San Francisco. Until now, that logic encountered in Europe a furniture supply pointing to Indoor Air Comfort seals or Greenguard certificates — technically close enough to Declare to function, but not identical.
With the Digital Product Passport, that gap is likely to close gradually. European furniture will, in future, have to carry a machine-readable dataset that can include information on materials, origin, repairability, recyclability and further sustainability parameters. Probably not in the same language, not in the same data format, not with identical thresholds. But structurally comparable. Any European manufacturer who, in the medium term, still wants to sell without robust, machine-readable material declarations will come under pressure not only in the European compliance race. They will also lose touch with those major clients who have long been shifting their procurement between the two worlds.
Bob King didn't mention any of this in his podcast. He talked about saddle stools and the question of whether men and women need different desks. But between minute 55 and minute 65, he described a business model that has long been a competitive advantage in the US — and that is, step by step, becoming the entry ticket in Europe.