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.

Former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu delivered a warning to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a recent visit to Washington: Already-high airfares will surge if the war in Iran doesn’t end soon.

Sununu, a Republican who represents some of the biggest airlines as president of the industry group Airlines for America, has for weeks sounded the alarm to Trump administration officials about the economic fallout from high jet fuel prices. The war, Sununu has argued, must come to a close soon, or things will get worse.

Administration officials have gotten the message.

Privately, President Trump’s advisers are increasingly worried that Republicans will pay a political price for the rising fuel costs, according to people familiar with the matter. Many of those advisers are eager to end the war, hoping prices will begin to moderate before November’s midterm elections.

The fallout from the U.S.-Israeli attack in late February has slowed traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane, triggering a sharp increase in oil, gasoline and jet-fuel prices.

That means consumers are grappling with high costs ahead of the summer travel season, as they consider vacation plans.

Sixty-three per cent of Americans said they put a great deal or a good amount of blame on Trump for the increase in gas prices, according to a new poll conducted by NPR, PBS and Marist.

More than 8 in 10 Americans said struggles at the gas pump are putting strain on their finances.

Jet-fuel prices roughly doubled in a matter of weeks after the war began, and they have remained high. Airlines have said that will add billions of dollars of additional expenses this year, squeezing profit margins.

U.S. airlines spent more than $5 billion on fuel in March—up 30% from a year earlier, according to government data.

Carriers have been raising ticket prices, hoping to pass the cost along to consumers, and they are culling flights that will no longer make money at higher price levels.

In March, the price of a U.S. domestic round-trip economy ticket rose 21% from a year earlier to $570, according to Airlines Reporting Corp., which tracks travel-agency sales.

So far, airlines have said the higher fares haven’t deterred bookings and they are hoping to recoup more of the fuel-cost increases as the year goes on.

Earlier this week, Trump said the current price of oil is “a very small price to pay for getting rid of a nuclear weapon from people that are really mentally deranged.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that if Iran got a nuclear weapon, the country would have more leverage to keep the strait closed and “make our gas prices like $9 a gallon or $8 a gallon.”

Trump has taken steps in recent days to bring the war to an end. Late Tuesday, the president paused a plan to help guide trapped commercial ships out of the Strait of Hormuz, expressing optimism that a deal could be reached with Iran to end the conflict.

Crude oil prices fell below $100 a barrel on Wednesday, after reports that Iran and the U.S. are working with mediators on a one-page framework to restart negotiations aimed at ending the conflict and opening the strait.

Sununu said Trump administration officials are conscious of the economic fallout from the war: “They get it…and I think that’s why they’re trying to get through the war as fast as they can.”

But he cautioned that it could take months for prices to return to prewar levels.

“Ticket prices won’t go down immediately” after the strait is fully reopened, Sununu said. “You’re looking at elevated ticket prices through the summer and fall because it takes a while for the prices to go down.”

Since the initial U.S.-Israeli attack in late February, Sununu has met in Washington with National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, representatives from the Transportation Department and senior White House officials.

A White House official confirmed that Hassett and Sununu have discussed the effect of increased fuel prices on the airline industry. The official said the conversation touched on how the industry can mitigate the impact of high jet fuel prices on consumers.

“The president and his entire energy team anticipated these short-term disruptions to the global energy markets from Operation Epic Fury and had a plan prepared to mitigate these disruptions,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said, pointing to the administration’s decision to waive a century-old shipping law in a bid to lower the cost of moving oil.

Rogers said the administration is working with industry representatives to “address their concerns, explore potential actions, and inform the president’s policy decisions.”

A Treasury Department spokesman pointed to Bessent’s recent comments on Fox News that the U.S. economy remains strong despite price increases. The spokesman said Treasury officials have met with airline executives, who have reaffirmed strong ticket bookings.

“We’re cognizant that this short-term move up in prices is affecting the American people, but I am also confident, on the other side of this, prices will come down very quickly,” Bessent told Fox News on Monday.

The war has already contributed to one casualty in the industry: Spirit Airlines. Company representatives have said they were forced to close the airline because the sustained surge in jet-fuel prices derailed the company’s plan to emerge from chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The Trump administration and Spirit failed to come to an agreement for the company to receive a financial lifeline of as much as $500 million from the federal government.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has argued that the Iran war wasn’t the cause of Spirit’s demise, pointing to the company’s past financial struggles, as well as the Biden administration’s decision to challenge a merger with JetBlue.

Other budget airlines have also turned to the federal government for help since the U.S.-Israeli attack. A group of budget airlines last month sought $2.5 billion in financial assistance to offset higher fuel costs, and they separately wrote to lawmakers asking for relief from certain ticket taxes.

Green Standards Gives a Second Life to Office Furnishings

Administration officials have spoken to the airline industry, which has voiced concerns about the rising costs.