Green Standards Gives a Second Life to Office Furnishings
4 min
When a company office needs a refresh, surplus items typically follow a straight line journey: out the door toward the landfill. Yet, much of this furniture and equipment could have a second life instead of being junked.
“It’s so critical with all the churn that’s happening at this moment in workplaces that we are thinking in a circular way about that journey,” says Green Standards CEO Trevor Langdon.
That’s where the Toronto-based global workplace decommissioning firm comes in. Green Standards acts as a project manager when companies upgrade or downsize, helping firms coordinate the process and the donation, sale, and disposal of items they no longer need.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports about 80% of furnishings end up in landfills, but Green Standards has diverted 98.6% of workplace goods away from landfills for its projects.
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Green Standards has always had a limited audience of early adopters, but Langdon, 37, says its approach is now considered the minimum standard.
“Tastes and attitudes have changed,” he says. Employees expect companies to follow through on their promises to be good corporate citizens, and not to abandon those standards on moving day.
Langdon witnessed these shifts firsthand during the past 11 years as he rose from a project coordinator position seeking charity partners for Green Standards to the CEO office. There’s been an acceleration in business since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, not only because of its massive impact on corporate real estate portfolios but because it sped up discussions of the impact of climate change, he says. Now more companies than ever before, including more than 25% of Fortune 100 firms, are seeking his company’s services.
THE SERVICE
“We take on the scoping of the project,” Langdon says, which includes bidding for and managing the logistics companies that take everything down and vacate the spaces.
Green Standards also manages the disposition strategy and tracks the outcome for each item. “We take an inventory and then figure out what’s going to go where,” Langdon says. The value of each item is determined by considering its age, quality, and reuse potential.
The firm uses a process it calls “sustainable decommissioning” to determine the best solution for items. This includes recycling (with specialized recyclers offering preferred rates), selling (through a network of furniture brokers and buyers), or donating items. One of several proprietary elements of the process is the network of over 20,000 nonprofits that have opted in to receive furniture donations from Green Standards clients.
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Though Green Standards does 95% of its business in North America, it’s recently started taking on international projects and is now active in 35 countries.
THE PRICE
“On the whole, we’re pretty cost-competitive with the conventional approach of sending everything to the dump,” Langdon says. Regardless of how companies dispose of items when they downsize or move offices, removing thousands of pieces of furniture from buildings comes with costs.
“Nobody volunteers their time to come do that,” says Langdon. “Often in a typical project, US$1 to US$2 a square foot is pretty standard.”
The type of office building and its geographical location often dictates hard costs like labor. He notes that higher-than-average local labor costs or elements that complicate removing goods like minimal freight elevators or the need to work after hours so as not to disturb neighbouring companies can increase costs to US$3-US$4 per square foot.
The residual value of office items dictates the offsets. Though some projects are cost neutral for clients, others with newer, high-quality furniture can be profitable. Because companies update their offices more frequently today than in the past, furnishings can often be less than 10 years old, Langdon says.
WHAT’S THE GOOD
Besides diverting goods from landfill, Green Standards has helped corporations make nearly US$40 million worth of in-kind donations to nonprofits. “It’s not a little bit here or there,” Langdon says. The donations enable these organisations to put money toward their missions and programming, rather than using it to purchase furniture and other items.
Green Standards prepares a report for each company at the end of the process detailing the disposition strategies and impact created. Some clients integrate this information into their annual sustainability reports, he says. These figures help show the ripple effect of Green Standards’ approach.
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When decommissioning multiple corporate campuses across Michigan for automotive giant General Motors, Green Standards kept “7,000-plus tons of surplus furniture from landfill while making in-kind donations of more than US$1,000,000 to 102 non-profits,” according to a Green Standards case study. By recycling items instead of taking them to landfill, the company estimates General Motors avoided creating more than 30,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
Meanwhile, in projects completed for Menlo Park, Calif.-headquartered software company Genesys, nearly 40% of items were donated to 25 nonprofits. In Genesys projects Green Standards oversaw in the Netherlands, Poland, and the U.K., the firm reached 100% landfill diversion rates.
WHAT’S NEXT
Aside from increasing its global presence, Langdon is looking at other areas of expansion. These include working with other types of companies, such as bank branches or clinical health offices. There are even possibilities, he says, to leverage the company’s technology to help clients track internal reuse of resources like furniture to re-deploy and extend lifecycles. Clients are “looking to us to help with that, which is really exciting,” he says.
The company is also having conversations with original equipment manufacturers who want to rethink how to improve product designs to account for their end-of-life reuse. Some products Green Standards encounters are made with multiple types of plastic, glass, metal, and other materials that make recycling challenging.
“Ten years down the road, we might see product that’s coming out of buildings that we had a bit of input into how to design for getting that out of the building effectively,” Langdon says.
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The lunar flyby would be the deepest humans have traveled in space in decades.
4 min
It’s go time for the highest-stakes mission at NASA in more than 50 years.
On April 1, the agency is set to launch four astronauts around the moon, the deepest human spaceflight since the final Apollo lunar landing in 1972.
The launch window for Artemis II , as the mission is called, opens at 6:24 p.m. ET.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration teams have been preparing the vehicles to depart from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on the planned roughly 10-day trip. Crew members have trained for years for this moment.
Reid Wiseman, the NASA astronaut serving as mission commander, said he doesn’t fear taking the voyage. A widower, he does worry at times about what he is putting his daughters through.
“I could have a very comfortable life for them,” Wiseman said in an interview last September.
“But I’m also a human, and I see the spirit in their eyes that is burning in my soul too. And so we’ve just got to never stop going.”
Wiseman’s crewmates on Artemis II are NASA’s Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
What are the goals for Artemis II?
The biggest one: Safely fly the crew on vehicles that have never carried astronauts before.
The towering Space Launch System rocket has the job of lofting a vehicle called Orion into space and on its way to the moon.
Orion is designed to carry the crew around the moon and back. Myriad systems on the ship—life support, communications, navigation—will be tested with the astronauts on board.
SLS and Orion don’t have much flight experience. The vehicles last flew in 2022, when the agency completed its uncrewed Artemis I mission .
How is the mission expected to unfold?
Artemis II will begin when SLS takes off from a launchpad in Florida with Orion stacked on top of it.
The so-called upper stage of SLS will later separate from the main part of the rocket with Orion attached, and use its engine to set up the latter vehicle for a push to the moon.
After Orion separates from the upper stage, it will conduct what is called a translunar injection—the engine firing that commits Orion to soaring out to the moon. It will fly to the moon over the course of a few days and travel around its far side.
Orion will face a tough return home after speeding through space. As it hits Earth’s atmosphere, Orion will be flying at 25,000 miles an hour and face temperatures of 5,000 degrees as it slows down. The capsule is designed to land under parachutes in the Pacific Ocean, not far from San Diego.
Is it possible Artemis II will be delayed?
Yes.
For safety reasons, the agency won’t launch if certain tough weather conditions roll through the Cape Canaveral, Fla., area. Delays caused by technical problems are possible, too. NASA has other dates identified for the mission if it doesn’t begin April 1.
Who are the astronauts flying on Artemis II?
The crew will be led by Wiseman, a retired Navy pilot who completed military deployments before joining NASA’s astronaut corps. He traveled to the International Space Station in 2014.
Two other astronauts will represent NASA during the mission: Glover, an experienced Navy pilot, and Koch, who began her career as an electrical engineer for the agency and once spent a year at a research station in the South Pole. Both have traveled to the space station before.
Hansen is a military pilot who joined Canada’s astronaut corps in 2009. He will be making his first trip to space.
Koch’s participation in Artemis II will mark the first time a woman has flown beyond orbits near Earth. Glover and Hansen will be the first African-American and non-American astronauts, respectively, to do the same.
What will the astronauts do during the flight?
The astronauts will evaluate how Orion flies, practice emergency procedures and capture images of the far side of the moon for scientific and exploration purposes (they may become the first humans to see parts of the far side of the lunar surface). Health-tracking projects of the astronauts are designed to inform future missions.
Those efforts will play out in Orion’s crew module, which has about two minivans worth of living area.
On board, the astronauts will spend about 30 minutes a day exercising, using a device that allows them to do dead lifts, rowing and more. Sleep will come in eight-hour stretches in hammocks.
There is a custom-made warmer for meals, with beef brisket and veggie quiche on the menu.
Each astronaut is permitted two flavored beverages a day, including coffee. The crew will hold one hourlong shared meal each day.
The Universal Waste Management System—that’s the toilet—uses air flow to pull fluid and solid waste away into containers.
What happens after Artemis II?
Assuming it goes well, NASA will march on to Artemis III, scheduled for next year. During that operation, NASA plans to launch Orion with crew members on board and have the ship practice docking with lunar-lander vehicles that Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have been developing. The rendezvous operations will occur relatively close to Earth.
NASA hopes that its contractors and the agency itself are ready to attempt one or more lunar landing missions in 2028. Many current and former spaceflight officials are skeptical that timeline is feasible.
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