The email query came not from you, dear reader, but from a staffer at the Mothership: "Grist is moving offices this spring, and we're looking into environmentally friendly office furniture," it read. "I've been tasked with researching some companies, and it was suggested you might be able to identify good places to look into. Any thoughts?"
Any thoughts, indeed.
A Grist staffer hard at work.
Photo: iStockphoto.
Buying eco-friendly desks, chairs, cabinets, space dividers, and other furniture is getting easier. With government agencies, universities, and corporations specifying greener products, furniture makers have been fairly quick to put environmental options on the table. Both large and smaller companies offer furniture made from sustainably harvested woods and recycled, bio-based, or nontoxic materials, and made with glues, paints, foams, and other ingredients that don't give off noxious odors.
Why bother with green furniture? What environmental harm could office furniture possibly cause?
Not much while you're sitting there, yakking it up on the phone. But furniture making has traditionally been a problematic source of emissions. And in this eco-conscious world, there is growing consideration given to what happens to furniture after it fulfills its useful life. In recent years, the major makers of office furniture have undertaken big changes. You should too.
Spit and Polish
Consider air pollution. Traditional manufacturing processes create emissions of volatile organic compounds from glues, stains, and finishes. VOCs are a major contributor to indoor air pollution and outdoor smog. Greener solutions include powder-based finishing coats, which not only are VOC-free, but require less energy and create less waste. About 95 percent of powder ends up on the product, compared to only about 60 percent of paint in traditional wet-spray processes.
And then there's wood. With increased pressure to reduce the use of hardwoods from poorly managed forests, companies have had to scrutinize their suppliers' sources, sometimes even tinkering with their most cherished product designs. Several years ago, Herman Miller shook up the industry by announcing that some of its top-of-the-line furniture, including its classic Eames lounge chair, would switch from rosewood and Honduran mahogany to walnut and cherry. (For a recent anniversary edition of the chair, the company used Forest Stewardship Council-certified rosewood.)
At the Knoll Group, another wood-sourcing leader, designers have committed to identifying wood producers "with the best overall forestry practices," according to a company spokesperson. Knoll works to verify lumber companies' sustainable practices and seeks out reclaimed lumber. For example, it has used red birch obtained from logs that sank in Midwestern rivers and lakes during turn-of-the-century lumbering operations.
Recycled materials, once shunned as second rate, are becoming much more common as well. Steelcase uses a growing amount of recycled content in its steel and particle-board products. Knoll uses material made from recycled soda bottles in some chairs. Guilford of Maine, a leading supplier of fabrics to the office-furniture industry, also offers a line of upholstery fabrics made from recycled soda bottles.
Thinking beyond the factory floor, leading-edge companies are also designing for disassembly -- that is, making furniture that can be easily taken apart and fixed or recycled. Over the past few years, for instance, Herman Miller has adapted a "protocol for sustainability" that includes a rating tool for new products, a materials database, and disassembly guidelines and training procedures.
The idea, says Scott Charon, commodity manager in new product development at Herman Miller, began with customers' growing questions about green attributes. "We wanted to develop a tool to bring products to market that customers are asking for," he says. "This is an area where we wanted to be a leader." Charon noted that some larger customers are now putting environmental considerations ahead of cost.
Don't Table the Issue
So how do you choose green furniture? It helps to have some specifications of what you want -- and don't want. For example, the Denver office of the U.S. EPA is moving to a new green building this year, and developed a set of environmental standards for the shift. Among other things, furniture must meet the certification standards of Greenguard, a nonprofit that evaluates products' effects on indoor air quality.
In addition, EPA is requiring that work-surface substrate (the base material beneath the laminated finish on desks and tables) be made from non-wood agricultural fiber, that wood used elsewhere be FSC-certified, and that laminated surfaces be adhered using water-based or bio-based glues. The specs also call for non-toxic dyes, fabric finishes made with recycled PET plastic, and recycled material in tiles and panels.
If new isn't for you, consider the refurbished route. Increasingly, companies are using refurbished desks, chairs, and space dividers, and a whole industry has grown up around providing these things. With good reason: each year, U.S. companies buy about 3 million desks, 16.5 million chairs, 4.5 million tables, and 11 million file cabinets. Experts estimate that about half this amount is thrown away annually; according to one estimate, that's enough to furnish all the offices in Boston.
Open Plan Systems, a "re-manufacturer" based in Richmond, Va., is a typical example of this trend. To offer lower-cost, recycled workstations, the company cleans and repaints metal, replaces fabric, and recycles used materials. Open Plan uses low-VOC coatings, fabrics made from recycled plastics, and other environmentally friendly processes.
Today's technology can work magic on furniture, turning ugly ducklings into -- well, if not beautiful swans, at least birds of another feather. With a bit of paint, new fabric, and some adjustments, it is possible to remodel an entire office using its original furnishings.
It's the environmental way: everything old is new again.
A Leg to Stand On
The state of California offers a useful list of green furniture specifications. The U.S. General Services Administration -- aka the federal government's landlord -- publishes a vendor list of green furniture companies and a database of related products and services. TerraChoice, the Canadian eco-rating organization, provides an office furniture guide. And GreenBiz features a report titled "Recycled Office Furniture: Good for the Environment, Good for Business."
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Comments
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a1celt Posted 1:58 pm
02 Mar 2006
By the time people began felling trees for large structures, they would already have learned how to shape smaller pieces of wood into the tools needed to perform the task, and that there would be many
uses for the smaller pieces of timber after the large trunk was cut to size. Little would be wasted, it would be logical to think a craftsperson would have much preferred to use a piece of already worked timber, than to labour at hewing some great tree, the toil could have been done many years before, probably by his father, or even earlier ancestors.
Reclaiming and recycling had begun. Much earlier than even this, the ancients had shown it is in our nature to re-use anything useful. The first broken spear could have become the stick used to dig and poke out the honey from a tree hive. Humankind would have been looking after the environment long before we today, would credit them.
Along with the basic needs of everyday objects, came the desire, when time allowed, to decorate objects into more elaborate and artistic creations, using not only shape and form, but the carving of ornate designs. Mostly these articles would have been commissioned by high nobles of great wealth and power, but sometimes, just sometimes, they would be born from the sheer artistic joy of its creator.
Trade routes opened, and often payment was made in jewels, gold, silver or some other precious commodity, hand crafted by artisans into decorative jewellery often of a religious or sacred nature. We would probably be right to assume these craft pieces could only be made during times of civil peace and prosperity. There would certainly be more pressing need to build catapults and to make bows, rather than to merrily chisel away at a floral pattern on the city gates of ancient Troy, with Helens bloodthirsty Spartan army sailing across the Aegean.
During more harmonious times, artisans allowed their thoughts and deeds to flourish way past the necessary forms of everyday items. Still the craftsperson reclaimed broken pieces of timber and reworked that old beam of oak into maybe a bench and table, a chest for the family winter bedding could be needed, and when the table finally fell apart after much repair work over the generations, his grandson may fashion a few shelves in the family kitchen, and maybe even add some ornate carvings to his design. Smaller parts of the old table could eventually become the handles on the tools that carved the spoon, which stirred the soup. Humankind was literally carving out a future!
Forest materials, outlasted only by stone and the more precious metals, remained the most versatile of mediums, and saw no equal until the advent of plastic.
Today, glass, alloys, earthenware, and a multitude of plastics may well have replaced wood as the most used elements in the craft world, partly because our desire for the beauty of natural wood torments our conscience. Not allowing ourselves to buy a piece of new `chopped tree' is a sacrifice many of us have endured. The image of the giant chainsaw slicing swiftly through a thousand year old mahogany tree, while the orang utan flees terrified to the next tree, only to forlornly await the next scream from the saw, strikes deep into our most primitive psyche. We opt instead to re-cover, paint or re-paint, we add screws, nails, bolts, dowels, fillers, clamps, and glue for repairs, in short we re-cycle, sometimes. The option to buy new is always with us, and difficult to resist. The option to buy old can be strong as well, how many of us would consider antiques as recycled, re-used, or reclaimed. Buying antiques can add a new twist to the three R's. If the best we can do is reduce, then reclaim and reuse should, and does rightfully so, come before re-cycle, as re-cycling processes often require large amounts of electricity, further polluting the air, not to mention water used in cleaning, which may well become polluted itself. And so the spiral is endless.
When we look at the alternatives to wood, we find that none of them are perfect. Glass and pottery items break easily, and are discarded, though lucky we are indeed that some of these treasures have survived the maelstrom of history. Metals finally succumb to wear, fatigue or rust, and though much is gathered by our local, long established scrap merchants, and then re-cycled, again much is tossed aside. As for the plastic multitude, some made to last forever, unless they are re-cycled, would we do better to further clog our landfill space with this sea of waste? Or should we follow the past example of burning it? We know the disastrous consequences of that bottom option. The landfills grow ever more ominous.
So, back to wood. We can't do a lot better than look around, find a few pieces of old wood and make something new, of stout design, maybe even elaborately decorated with carving work, that we may expect to pass on to our grandchildren. Some may even agree this is the Rolls Royce of the R's Adding "Reclaim" before "Reduce, Reuse and Re-cycle" will surely work for many people, adding that extra R, surely works for forests.
Written by: Mark Anthony Vivian, Celtic Viking Furniture
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bendictpaul Posted 9:44 pm
03 Mar 2006
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jenanne Posted 6:33 pm
14 Nov 2008
Some manufacturers will only continue to make green furniture if the demand in the market is high enough. Once most homeowners will start to realize the benefits of these environment friendly furniture and accepting them, several manufacturers will start to make them since that is where the demand lies.
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