The sustainability trend coming to an office near you

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.