POLYWOOD Furniture — Made in America Since 1990

It started in a garage in Indiana in 1990, with a stubborn idea: that the plastic piling up in landfills could become something worth building your porch around. POLYWOOD was the first furniture company to manufacture outdoor furniture from recycled plastic lumber, and more than thirty years later that founding conviction still runs through every board they cut. The furniture that comes out the other end isn't a sustainability concession — it's furniture that outlasts teak, ignores winters, and never once asks you to come outside with a can of stain.

What Goes Into the Lumber

Every POLYWOOD piece starts with post-consumer HDPE — high-density polyethylene recovered from milk jugs, detergent bottles, shampoo containers, and household cleaners. The company processes an average of 400,000 of these containers every single day at its U.S. manufacturing facilities in Indiana and North Carolina, converting them into genuine POLYWOOD lumber through a five-step recycling process that captures and reprocesses 99% of its own production scrap. The supply chain runs in a loop by design: furniture that eventually reaches the end of its useful life gets recovered and remanufactured rather than landfilled, because HDPE is infinitely recyclable.

What separates POLYWOOD lumber from generic recycled plastic is the engineering layered on top of that raw material. Microcell™ construction makes the board moisture-impermeable at a structural level — water does not soak in, which means swelling, warping, and rot are simply not on the table. GenuineGrain™ finishing gives the surface the textural warmth of real wood without replicating the part where wood weathers, grays, and splits. Solidcore™ construction means the piece is consistent HDPE from surface to center — not a wood core with a plastic skin stretched over it. That consistency matters most in pieces built for sustained load and long-term exposure: deep seating frames that hold their shape through years of daily use, and outdoor dining sets asked to perform in coastal heat and salt air without corroding or degrading. And because the color runs through the lumber rather than sitting on top of it as paint, none of POLYWOOD's twelve-plus fade-resistant finishes are going anywhere.

What You Never Have to Do to It

People who've spent years maintaining teak or white oak tend to approach POLYWOOD with a certain skepticism, then a certain relief. The furniture is engineered to stay outside through a Minnesota winter and a Phoenix summer and come back looking the same in spring. It does not splinter, crack, chip, peel, or rot. It contains no chemical preservatives — unlike pressure-treated wood lumber, which leaches treatment compounds into soil and water over time — so it's as appropriate for a kitchen garden as it is for a pool deck. When something spills on it, the intervention is soap and water. That's the whole list.

POLYWOOD backs all of this with a 20-year lumber warranty covering defects in materials and workmanship — one of the longest structural guarantees in the outdoor furniture industry, commercial or residential. Most solid wood alternatives don't offer a fraction of that coverage.

• No sanding, staining, painting, oiling, or sealing — ever.
• No seasonal storage or protective covers required.
• Resists mold, mildew, salt spray, and UV degradation.
• Color is fade-resistant and runs through the material — it won't chip or peel like a painted finish.
• Safe around children, pets, and edible gardens — no toxic preservatives in the lumber.
• 20-year warranty against defects in materials and workmanship.

The Recycling Operation Behind the Brand

POLYWOOD's sustainability story is specific in a way that most brand sustainability stories aren't. The recycling process runs entirely in-house: containers are shredded, washed, ground into flakes, float-separated for contaminants, and extruded into HDPE pellets before becoming lumber. Scrap from the production floor goes back into that same cycle rather than to waste. The company has also built partnerships beyond its own facility — including direct container collection programs with Midwest Costco locations — to keep a continuous stream of post-consumer plastic out of landfills and oceans. For every employee on their roster, POLYWOOD plants a tree through a standing partnership with the National Forest Foundation.

The company's CEO, Doug Rassi, put it plainly: "Sustainable design goes beyond the what. It must integrate the how and the where to drive meaningful change." For a furniture manufacturer, running your own recycling center and building circular material flows is exactly that integration in practice.

POLYWOOD at Patio Productions

Our POLYWOOD selection covers the brand's full range of furniture forms. The Adirondack chair is where most people start — POLYWOOD makes it in classic, curveback, and modern profiles across all twelve-plus colors, and it remains the clearest expression of what recycled lumber can do when you stop apologizing for it and just build something beautiful. For covered porches and slower afternoons, the rocking chairs and gliders carry the same indestructible material into a more unhurried silhouette. The bench collection is broader than most people expect — garden path widths, pool deck profiles, deep-seat configurations — and all of it can stay out through whatever the season brings.

For full outdoor room builds, POLYWOOD's deep seating pairs HDPE frames with Sunbrella-grade cushions — both frame and fabric rated for permanent outdoor exposure, no need to haul cushions inside when the weather turns. The dining lineup runs standard, counter, and bar heights, and holds up particularly well in coastal and poolside settings where other materials would quietly lose the fight to salt air over a few seasons.

Patio Productions is ICFA-certified and has carried POLYWOOD for years across our San Diego showroom and online. Our team works with the full collection firsthand — reach out if you want help matching a color to an existing space, sizing a dining set, or figuring out which POLYWOOD collection holds up best for your particular climate and sun exposure.