Environmental responsibility is more important than ever. People are more eco-conscious than ever, to the extent that environmental friendliness is often not only a cause, but a major selling point as well. And while most think of eco-friendliness in terms of carbon emissions and waste produced, even your next office furniture project in Toronto can help to minimize your company’s carbon footprint.
‘Green’ office furniture suppliers usually focus on three factors:
The manufacturing process represents a major part of office furniture’s carbon footprint. Eco-friendly factories will often run off of wind or solar power, and without using construction or treatment processes that produce unnecessary toxic exhaust or run-off.
Eco-friendly office furniture is often created from sustainable materials. This means components made from recycled or reclaimed materials. This could also extend to sustainably harvested materials as well, such as wood grown in tree farms or sustainably renewed forests. They will also avoid the use of toxic chemicals, such as certain lacquers, in its treatment and finishes.
Eco-friendliness doesn’t end when you’re finished with a piece of furniture. Eco-friendly office furniture will be designed to have a minimal impact when disposed of, employing biodegradable materials for cloth and padded components, and materials that can be reclaimed and reused in the construction of new pieces of eco-friendly office furniture.
While eco-friendly office furniture can be an excellent way to minimize your carbon footprint and promote a green workplace, there are a number of additional ways that you can run an eco-friendly business in Toronto.
The most obvious option is to minimize power usage, using LED light bulbs in lamps and track lights instead of tungsten or fluorescent lighting, and ensuring that any appliances in your break room are energy-star compliant.
If you’re willing or able to add some construction to your green efforts, there are also a number of ways that you can improve the building itself. Installing solar panels on the roof can produce a great deal of 100% sustainable power, and upgrading your building’s insulation can minimize heating bills during the winter and air conditioning requirements throughout the summer.
Low-cost low-quality ‘disposable’ office furniture has a terrible impact on the environment. Even if your furniture isn’t created by an eco-focused company, a high-quality piece of office furniture that can be reused for decades, and still be in good enough condition to be re-sold when you upgrade, is going to have a positive overall environmental impact compared to the low-quality alternatives. Plus, when you consider the cost of re-purchasing low-quality office furniture, the high-quality option will often prove to be more cost-efficient in the long run.
Finally, as with any Toronto office furniture project, you will want to make sure that you bring in the professionals. While manpower isn’t eco-friendly per-se, we have the tools, expertise, and experience to ensure that your Toronto office furniture project is completed in a time (and therefore cost) efficient manner.
If you’re ready to give your Toronto office furniture an eco-friendly upgrade, contact us today.