To Green or Not to Green?

Posted by: Mitchell H. Kirsch 0 comments

Office spaces these days aspire to be both efficient and environment-friendly… but achieving both takes some doing. Yes, it’s important to make an office more productive, but how can you do that in a greener, more earth-friendly way? How do you furnish your office and boost employee morale, without leaving the planet in the dumpster?

It’s actually easier than you think. Here are ten ways you can have your earth-friendly cake and eat it too, by choosing remanufactured office cubicles:

1. Minimize your impact on the environment with green furniture. Remanufactured office furniture rescues old furnishings from the landfill or the incinerator, minimizing the impact of these items on the environment. Recycled furniture gets taken out of the waste cycle, and placed back on the consumer market. This leads to less waste and fewer pollutants released into the atmosphere.

2. Green furniture is more cost-effective. Remanufactured office furniture looks and performs just like its brand new counterparts; yet offer up to 50% savings compared to new. This leaves you with more funds to allocate to more essential areas of your budget – something you need in a recession-plagued economy!

3. Green furniture is just as good – if not better – than brand new. Modern remanufacturing techniques have raised the bar for remanufactured office furniture. Green furniture is reassembled to match brand new office furniture in both form and function – replacing worn parts and discolored fabrics, refinishing desktops, and repainting panels. The end result is just as good as brand-new in all respects – with the added bonus of knowing you’ve done your part to save the earth!

4. Green furniture increases your use of recycled materials. Office furniture is typically replaced within a period of 10 years, long before any serious wear occurs. This explains the high reusability rate of remanufactured office furniture – more than 85% of the original material makes it into the remanufactured product. The other 15% consists of material recycled from other sources – the new fabrics used by Cubicles.com in their remanufactured cubicles are actually made from recycled plastic bottles.

5. When you buy green furniture, you contribute to a fast-growing sector of the economy. The office furniture remanufacturing industry is a significant sector of the commercial furniture business, earning about $1.2 billion in revenues a year. The business continues to grow, aided by new remanufacturing techniques and a growing supply of raw material. This just goes to show that green furniture isn’t just a worthwhile environmental goal – it’s good business, too.

6. Green furniture offers a constantly expanding product line. The recession has caused an increase in the supply of cubicles on the market, resulting in an increase in both supply and demand for remanufactured office furniture. The choices for conscientious businesses have never been greater, or more affordable.

7. A green office leads to less waste. Remanufactured office furniture extends the life of office furniture, the casualties of a wasteful procurement industry. It’s estimated that U.S. companies buy about 3 million desks, 16.5 million chairs, 4.5 million tables, and 11 million file cabinets a year – with half of this amount reaching the dumpsters at the same time. Remanufactured furniture short-circuits this process – items are spared from a pollution-spewing fate and put back to good use, for less than the cost of buying brand-new furniture.

8. Green furniture is good for your health. Think of all the emissions produced in the manufacture of brand new office furniture – volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are a common byproduct of the furniture making process, contributing to air pollution and extracting an equivalent cost to manufacturers and end-users alike. Green office producers like Cubicles.com use less harmful manufacturing techniques, like using powder-based finishing coats that create less waste and minimize VOC emissions.

9. Green furniture is flexible and grows with your company. Modern cubicles are designed for quick disassembly, and the remanufactured cubicles derived from them are no less flexible. The lower price point attached to these items increases the end-user’s latitude for choice, enabling them to pursue more ambitious solutions with a smaller budget at hand.

10. Using recycled furniture advertises your company’s commitment to corporate responsibility. There’s great cachet in being the first business on your block to embrace green office furnishing practices – this gives you a great talking point for clients, and also provides a foothold for increased office morale. After all, isn’t it wonderful to work for a company that serves a greater purpose than just the bottom line?

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