Green Standards Gives a Second Life to Office Furnishings

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.

Note: Usual Northern Sea Route shown for illustrative purposes Source: Sea Legend Daniel Kiss/WSJ

Shipping cargo through an Arctic shortcut never made economic sense—until now.

Climate change and war in the Middle East are flipping the math that previously kept ships plying longer routes from Asia to Europe. A Chinese company on Saturday is starting the first regular cargo service to Europe through Arctic waters, seeking to reap the benefits of quicker travel time and less fuel use.

The shipper Sea Legend will dispatch the Dubai Tower from Ningbo, China, to Felixstowe in the U.K. on what it calls the Arctic Express, following a route along Russia’s north coast. The voyage by the vessel, which is capable of carrying 1,740 20-foot containers, is the biggest commercial step in the Arctic since a Maersk containership first completed the route in 2018.

Global warming is a big factor behind the new route, but it is not the only one. Nearly half the Arctic region’s summer ice—an area four times the size of Texas—has melted over five decades, clearing a fairly reliable path in the summer months. Meanwhile, high oil prices and attacks by Houthi rebels in the Red Sea have made the traditional routes costlier and more dangerous.

Members of China's 16th Arctic Ocean scientific expedition team take selfies on the ice surface. — Members of a Chinese scientific expedition team on surface ice in the Arctic Ocean this week. Wen Jinghua/Xinhua/ZUMA Press

Beyond that, Beijing has ambitions to play a role in the Arctic’s future, lending a geopolitical dimension to the Chinese company’s shipping route.

Last year Sea Legend completed a trial run from Asia to Europe in a record 20 days. That is roughly half the time of a voyage via Africa’s Cape of Good Hope that many carriers now take because of the Red Sea uncertainty.

Fuel accounts for 70% or more of the costs while at sea, said Alan Murphy, a former Maersk analyst who runs research firm Sea-Intelligence.

Saving fuel by shortening the journey doesn’t automatically make a route profitable. Insurance premiums for the Arctic are 40% higher than the Cape of Good Hope route, said Jonathan Steenberg, an economist at credit insurer Coface. Sea Legend’s Arctic vessels are relatively small. And even after warming, an icebreaker is still sometimes needed to help the cargo ship.

But if the ship can go without an icebreaker, Coface said the Arctic route is now cheaper than a Cape of Good Hope voyage in some circumstances. It estimated that at current oil prices of around $90, the cost of shipping liquid bulk such as liquefied natural gas could drop roughly 33% compared with the Cape of Good Hope route, while dry bulk goods such as cereals would cost about 8% less.

The container ship Istanbul Bridge being unloaded by large blue and red cranes at the port of Gdansk. — A containership operated by Sea Legend in the port of Gdansk, Poland. jackowski/epa/Shutterstock

The route is only passable in the summer and fall. Sea Legend plans eight voyages between August and late October, before conditions get too icy.

“It’s not the Suez Canal but it’s a significant number for the Arctic. It shows there is potential,” said Malte Humpert, founder of the U.S.-based Arctic Institute and author of a book on Chinese shipping in the Arctic.

Even in summer, ships have to navigate around dangerous ice floes and deal with rapidly changing weather. By the end of the shipping season in October, the sky is dark most of the time.

A Russian tanker suffered serious damage to its hull while sailing along the Arctic route despite being assisted by an icebreaker, its insurer, AlfaStrakhovanie, said Thursday, adding that it paid out roughly $650,000.

Coface estimates 3.5% of trade among East Asia, Europe and North America will be able to use Arctic routes within the next five years, representing $64 billion in goods.

Last summer, a record 23 cargo ships transited the Northern Sea Route, which hugs Russia’s north coast. That is tiny compared with the Suez Canal, where more than 30 ships transited daily.

Western companies that want to follow in Sea Legend’s path have to navigate treacherous politics. Russia claims sovereignty over the entire Northern Sea Route and permits for ship traffic are issued by its state-controlled nuclear operator, Rosatom.

Aerial view of a port with many cargo ships, red cranes, and rows of stacked shipping containers. — The Dubai Tower’s route will begin in the Chinese port of Ningbo. Huang Zongzhi/ZUMA Press

“Western companies are in a tricky position,” said Humpert of the Arctic Institute. “At what point do they jump back in the water? When does it become economically necessary, and how do you weigh that against environmental risks and the political dimension?”

An alternative Arctic route, the Northwest Passage that connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans via the Canadian Arctic, is less passable because it is dominated by narrow waterways where ice gets bunched up. The highest number of cargo ships completing the passage in a year was 13, in 2023.

China has declared itself a near-Arctic state despite not having access to Arctic waters. It depends on Russia’s goodwill to use the Northern Sea Route.

“Beijing is concerned that if they don’t establish a significant strategic presence in the Arctic now, it’s going to be more difficult in the future,” said Marc Lanteigne, expert in polar geopolitics at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. However, he said, “China needs to be careful not to give the impression that they are trying to challenge the strategic order in the Arctic.”

Sea Legend didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Any polar venture contributes to China’s quest to master Arctic travel. The country also has three icebreakers and a support vessel currently on a monthslong scientific expedition north of Greenland. Scientific and commercial voyages can yield data about natural resources awaiting below melting ice caps and information for positioning nuclear-armed submarines.

Green Standards Gives a Second Life to Office Furnishings

China is launching the first regular Arctic cargo route to Europe, offering faster journeys and lower fuel costs as melting ice and Red Sea risks reshape global shipping.