Reupholstered furniture at the Envirotech Office Systems showroom. Nearly new furnishing is becoming more available, as many companies downsize office space because of hybrid work.Wallace Immen
To furnish its new office in downtown Toronto, it seemed logical for sustainability rating company EcoVadis Canada to look for remanufactured, preowned furniture rather than buying new.
“We’re in the sustainability business and our staff agreed they don’t want to see all new furniture when there is a more sustainable alternative,” says Richard Eyram, chief customer officer in the fast-growing Toronto office of Paris-based EcoVadis, whose 165 employees currently work in shared office space or from home.
“We expect to save at least 40 per cent of total cost by purchasing preowned furnishings versus new. We have set a target for 90 per cent of the office furniture to be preowned on this project and have weekly meetings to find other reuse options that come available to minimize the last 10 per cent.”
The office will include 75 refurbished workstations in addition to a number of open, flexible work areas with reupholstered chairs and refinished movable tables to create a home-like feel to attract workers into the office, Mr. Eyram says. “In the hybrid work environment there is going to be a lot more office furniture that is orphaned. If we can give it a new home, it’s a gain for everyone.”
Used office furnishings were seldom considered by clients in the past, but two trends have converged in the wake of the COVID era that have significantly increased interest, says Tatiana Soldatova, principal at Toronto design firm Syllable Inc., which is planning the new EcoVadis office.
Leases are getting shorter, creating an acceleration of products being put into a space, then two or three years later disposed of, either because they’re out of style or too expensive to move.
— Andy Delisi, vice-president of sales, Envirotech Office Systems
“Remanufactured office equipment has been around for many years, but the status quo was buying new,” she explains. “Now, a wave of nearly new furnishings is becoming available as companies facing a hybrid work future downsize their office space.”
At the same time, organizations are increasingly setting sustainability goals that calculate the carbon footprint of office furnishings. The extraction of raw materials to make new furniture is the most carbon-intensive phase of its lifespan.
“In the past when we talked about sustainability, a red flag went up because it was assumed it was going to cost more. But this way, you can get sustainability for far less,” Ms. Soldatova says.
As an example, Syllable recently outfitted a 55,000-square-foot Canadian headquarters of a multinational company in Toronto (that asked to not be identified in this story) with certified preowned and remanufactured furniture. It resulted in an estimated 50-per-cent reduction in the calculation of embodied carbon emissions and nearly $1-million in savings compared with the cost of a traditional new furniture build-out, she notes.
In 2020, non-residential sources, which include the industrial, commercial and institutional sectors and the construction, renovation and demolition sectors, were responsible for 58 per cent of disposed solid waste, according to statistics from Environment and Climate Change Canada. From 2002 to 2020, the amount of waste diverted increased by 9 per cent, or 0.4 million tonnes.
Canada’s Federal Sustainable Development Strategy has a 2030 target of reducing the amount of waste Canadians sent to disposal by 30 per cent from a 2014 baseline of 699 kilograms per person.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency estimates up to 17 million pounds of office furniture ends up in landfills in the United States annually.
At the company’s Mississauga workshop, employees at Envirotech Office Systems reupholster furniture for reuse.Supplied
The trends are a boon for Mississauga-based Envirotech Office Systems. In its 28 years in business, the company estimates it has diverted 30 million pounds of waste from landfills by refurbishing more than 40,000 workstations and desks and 100,000 chairs.
“Leases are getting shorter, creating an acceleration of products being put into a space, then two or three years later disposed of, either because they’re out of style or too expensive to move,” says Andy Delisi, vice-president of sales at Envirotech Office Systems – which has just opened a showroom on King Street West, near Toronto’s financial district.
Much of the inventory is nearly new, tested and come with warranties, but priced at a fraction of the cost of new, he says. Envirotech recently acquired the contents of several floors of offices that had been furnished with new workstations, desks and lounge chairs just before the start of the pandemic lockdowns. As that firm downsized its lease, the barely used name-brand furniture had been otherwise destined to be sent to landfill.
The trend to open and collaborative workspaces has increased the demand for lounge chairs and movable tables. Envirotech’s 50,000-square-foot warehouse in Mississauga repaints and reupholsters furniture to order. “You’d be amazed at how many clients will say, ‘That could be the perfect chair, but it’s the wrong colour.’ Lounge furniture can be perfectly functional for many more years, but fabrics go out of style very quickly,” Mr. Delisi says.
One challenge is to find new uses for cubicle dividers. “There are too many coming out and not enough going in, so we are looking at ways to turn the panels into mobile white boards or free-standing screens,” Mr. Delisi says. Other tricky-to-recycle pieces are custom-made private office furniture and large boardroom tables that are often sized for a specific room.
Among items in high demand – but hard to find used – are storage lockers and pods for private conversations in open-concept layouts. Envirotech tries to be a one-stop shop for clients and while most of what companies need can be supplied remanufactured or preowned, there are sometimes pieces that aren’t available used, which can be sourced new from Envirotech vendors, Mr. Delisi says.
“The most sustainable product is the one that already exists,” he notes. “With our showroom, we aim to educate companies and designers that the fusion of certified preowned, remanufactured and new office furniture is not just a trend – it’s a crucial strategy for decarbonizing our workplaces and steering us towards net-zero goals.”