The sustainability trend coming to an office near you
It lends a whole new meaning to the concept of hot desking
3 min
Everyone is talking about environmental sustainability these days. From growing our own food to opting for less plastic packaging, there is an increasing desire to embrace practices that have as little impact on the environment as possible.
One of the last sectors to seriously consider the way their behaviours are contributing to waste is the office.
Prior to COVID, most offices were refurbished every five to seven years, in line with leasing arrangements. However, quality office furniture can come with warranties of 10 or more years. What to do with used – but still useful – furniture at the end of a lease has been a challenge.
The result is 35,000 tons of furniture from Australian offices ends up in landfill every year.
Designer furniture retailer Living Edge is calling on businesses to end the waste with a shift from one of purchase to leasing. This would result in the furniture supplier taking responsibility for the product over a lifetime.
Sustainability strategist at Living Edge, Guy Walsh, said while it has been a slow burn convincing businesses, interest has gained pace in a post-COVID, hybrid-working environment.
“We have been talking to the market about the life cycle model since 2016,” Mr Walsh said. “But in the last 12 months, we have seen an increase in interest, how it works and the sustainability benefits.”
He puts this down in part to the number of businesses committing to sustainability targets, sometimes without a plan for how to achieve them.
“The big organisations are all making their sustainability pledges and they are working out how to deliver them later,” he said. “You can’t just make claims anymore – you have to provide evidence. We can pull a report out and demonstrate the outcomes, which can be useful for external and internal communications.”
With many workers reluctant to return to the office full time, Mr Walsh said the need for a floor full of office furniture has also changed. A leasing model offers flexibility.
“One of the things COVID created was uncertainty, which requires more agility (from businesses),” he said. “We have promoted that concept around the life cycle model, which has a lot more agility than a traditional model.
“If the world changes, as it has in recent years, you need a strategy for what to do with those assets. One top of that, through a sustainability lens, change can often result in waste.”
Living Edge is the main distributor for Herman Miller, which has built its reputation on the high quality, ergonomic task chairs favoured by big business.
Mr Walsh said the chairs, such as the Aeron, come with a 12-year warranty. Under a leasing arrangement, businesses could return their chairs to Living Edge where they will be triaged according to useability under their LivingOn scheme.
“The top outcome is it gets refurbished and reused by the original purchaser,” he said. “The next option is we refurbish it and we resell it as a ‘second life’ chair. The next option is to recycle the parts. The last, and least attractive option is that it goes to landfill.”
It’s good news for commercial landlords, as well as tenants but it does require a different approach from the standard office fit out. One concern is how to ensure furniture is identifiable by the supplier as theirs. The other is a structural change in how budgets are created and managed.
“One of the big barriers traditionally is that furniture falls under capital expenditure but a lease model would put it under operational expenditure,” he said. “You are moving the cost from a one-off figure to ongoing. It is purely the legacy of how furniture has been bought for office spaces.”
While the model is still in its infancy both here and in Europe, Mr Walsh said there are already signs that it is the way of the future.
“We have heard examples of it happening in Europe but to my knowledge, we haven’t seen that ‘lift off’ moment,” he said.
Mirzaian is a senior director within CBRE’s Development NSW business, operating across the company’s Western Sydney and North Sydney offices
Singapore’s Formula 1 weekend has always looked different. Held beneath floodlights on the Marina Bay Street Circuit, the race transforms the city into a nocturnal spectacle of speed, heat and saturated colour. It is this distinctive atmosphere — and one of Singapore’s most important natural symbols — that has shaped IWC Schaffhausen’s latest motorsport-inspired watch. …
Continue reading “IWC’s purple Formula 1 chronograph pays tribute to Singapore after dark”
Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
Following the successful launch of its Palais Collection, MAISON de SABRÉ has unveiled a new modular handbag system offering more than 720 styling combinations.
A luxury lifestyle might cost more than it used to, but how does it compare with cities around the world?
