Haste Makes Waste: The Sustainable Practice of ‘Do It Once, Do It Right’ in Corporate Workplaces
While the building industry is having much needed conversations about sustainability through the lens of embodied carbon, energy and water use, there’s another often-overlooked culprit when it comes to generating waste. And we’re literally sitting on top of it.
The desire for ever-changing offices has led some companies to completely refurnish their spaces every few years to meet the design and furniture trends of the day. Consequently, over 10 million tons of furniture finds its way to landfills annually. Many companies also pay millions of dollars per year for costly warehouse storage where disused furniture now sits.
Over my 30-plus-year career as a workplace designer, I’ve witnessed many office design eras come and go. With each—from the demise of the cubicle to the obsolescence of metal filing cabinets, the rise of the standing desk and open office to the impact of technology and hybrid work—innumerable pounds of discarded products and materials have been generated. This cycling has only accelerated in recent years as companies iterate to find the right spatial configuration to adapt to new ways of working.
Imagine if you redecorated your house every five years. How much drywall and other forms of waste would that generate? Now, multiply that by upwards of 20,000 square feet across multiple floors. Multiply that by the number of commercial office buildings in major cities, and you start to get a sense of the scale of the problem. And while this issue has massive environmental impacts, it’s also an opportunity—to fundamentally reimagine how we approach tenant improvement with an eye to creating spaces that are more flexible and timeless, but also imaginative and better suited to the hybrid work environments of today.
We’ve thought deeply about this issue from multiple angles over the past few years and considered what tools we and our partners have, from the speculative and visionary to the immediately implementable. These three ideas are top of mind for us in this journey:
Maximize Use and Minimize Waste: A Kit of Parts Approach
As companies become more cognizant of their budgets and environmental footprint, it’s our job as interior designers and architects to guide them toward wise, strategic, and creative solutions in developing their interior design and furniture strategy. These decisions prioritize longevity by opting for fewer, higher quality pieces over quantity, moving from a fast to slow fashion attitude toward specifying furniture.
This thinking also means applying a “kit of parts” approach that considers a wide range of configurations and employee preferences, factoring in considerations like individual and team postures, duration spent, number of participants, technology and sound. The approach also looks at flexibility and intentionality across work points, focusing on collaboration areas, social spaces and social focus spaces. Rather than having different furniture solutions for each, kit of parts thinking points toward flexible and multi-functional furniture and an interior design strategy that emphasizes multiplicity of use.
An Endless Cycle: A Universal Planning Approach to Interior Architecture
To move away from the need to turn to gut renovation as the solution for companies that want to ensure their office spaces are distinct, we as designers should become adept at, and advocate for, 80/20 universal planning—designing spaces where 80% of both the interior architecture and furniture palette is intended to be reconfigured again and again; and a small portion, 20%, is designed to allow for high impact change. Think of it as designing for apartment buildings that exist for decades, housing thousands of unique inhabitants and families whose living spaces and preferences are very different—but in fact at least 80% of their built environment are, and remain, the same.
In terms of construction, this approach means looking to prefabricated solutions that minimize on-site waste and improve detail quality. And in terms of design, it means thinking about planning solutions as customizable design templates—creating a canvas with different room sizes that can be adapted in a multitude of ways or looking more toward rooms of different capacities rather than specified uses. For example, a variety of smartly sized small, medium and large rooms can be used however is most appropriate and can be adapted based on company need into conference rooms, team living rooms, private offices or storage or file rooms.
Break the Chain: Supply Chain and Logistics Innovation in the Furniture Industry
A handful of major furniture designers and manufacturers have traditionally supplied almost all the corporate and commercial office industry furniture. As we’ve seen major shifts over the past few years in how we design and think about offices, with fewer people coming in to use a sole dedicated desk and organizations totally retooling their approach to furniture, the environmental cost of furniture waste only looks to get worse. While this shift may at first seem like an existential threat to these furniture companies’ business, it’s an opportunity for a quantum leap in their innovation efforts and a complete reimagining of their services, infrastructure and business models.
Tapping into these companies’ hidden superpowers of supply chains, processing and logistics, their capabilities could be deployed to understand the materials and components present in discarded furniture stored in company warehouses, and to come up with innovative ways to disassemble and redeploy these various parts. Whether it’s repurposing steel and metal from 40 years’ worth of filing cabinets and table legs toward aerospace innovation, or upcycling wood tops and plastic laminate to make new cabinetry and flooring for our cities’ growing affordable housing groups, this obsolete furniture could have a valuable second life, creating entirely new industries and making the furniture manufacturers world leaders in environmental recovery.
Just as we’re working to create 50-100-year buildings, we should strive to design functional interiors that are intentional enough to be reformatted and adapted. It’s also an opportunity, if we let it be, for us as designers to challenge ourselves to be more creative and strategic in our interior design and workplace design planning to limit the need for extensive renovations and future furniture in the first place, and to forge innovative and cross sector partnerships to imagine wholly new ideas and solutions. Do it once, do it right.
