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John Spizzirri recently caught up with Steven Kooy, sustainability team leader for Haworth, Inc., for the CSBA’s Featured Member Profile.
Give us your 30 second elevator speech on the role of sustainability within Haworth.
Basically, Haworth, for the last five to seven years, has really built upon its history of being a steward of the environment. What started out as simple things, like recycling, has moved toward the strategic objective of becoming a sustainable company, from product design to social responsibility. In all, we have seven objectives:
• sustainable product and workspace design
• energy management
• green transportation
• zero waste and emissions
• green building and sustainable site management.
• social responsibility
• stakeholder engagement
And within each of these objectives are various long-term goals. For example, in energy management, we’re looking at the goal of becoming a climate neutral company through reducing our energy usage, increasing our renewable energy purchases and, as a last resort, carbon offsets.
Where does green transportation fit?
There are two areas that we look at that impact how we deliver our product. Office furniture, as you may know, can require a lot of packaging that reduces the amount of product carried per load. So first, our goal is increase product density per shipment as much as possible, which also speaks to our objective of zero waste to landfills. By reducing the packaging, we increase the density of the shipments and therefore decrease the number of shipments to the client.
What are the environmental implications associated with the manufacture of business furniture and how are you meeting those issues?
Our impact internally from manufacturing is relatively small compared to the whole footprint of the product. The environmental impact starts from where we extract the material and is determined, in part, on whether we’re using virgin or recycled materials. Aluminum, steel and wood (mainly particle board) are the primary components. So immediately, we look at where the materials are coming from and seek to increase recycled content and rapidly renewable materials.
Once we’ve identified our materials, we want to make sure we’re purchasing responsibly in terms of the chemical content. So we seek to reduce or eliminate all carcinogenic materials. We look at things like our flame retardants—polybrominated diphenyl ether, for example, a carcinogen which we eliminated from about 98 percent of our materials. And then there are other bad actors like formaldehyde, lead, mercury, and your phthalates.
Haworth is also trying to eliminate the use of PVC, which is typically used for edge-banding around work surfaces and as an insulator for electrical wiring. We’ve moved to ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) which appears to be more stable in the manufacturing process.
So we try to work with vendors that have the same environmental philosophy, but obviously, we want to start at home because we can’t push suppliers into something that we’re not into ourselves.
And do some of those things include recycling and the zero waste to landfill?
Right. Just as we reduced waste and energy use in our transportation (stream), we recently achieved zero waste to landfill in our Asian and North American facilities. Everything that comes out of our facilities is either recycled or sent to incineration for energy use.
We’re definitely the first in our industry to do this. Arguably, there are others who make that claim, but a lot of the companies that we benchmarked had actually pushed their suppliers to take back extra materials rather than take responsibility for it themselves.
We went from roughly 10 million pounds of waste going to landfills a year, down to just below one million pounds. So we had a 90 percent reduction simply by pushing people to recycle more, finding more recycling streams and sending the rest to incineration for energy. And yes, the incineration has its detractors, but the waste is sent to a municipal incinerator, where the energy it creates is fed back to the local grid.
Your Web site notes that Haworth set a goal to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent by 2009, through the EPA’s Climate Leaders program. Did you meet this goal?
Quite frankly, we did not. We reduced our absolute emissions by 14 percent. However the Climate Leaders goal was based on normalized sales, and as you probably know, 2009 was a bad year for sales. So we were meeting our goal from a reduction and overall energy standpoint, but our sales went down too much and it offset that.
We’re certainly not the only ones in that situation. It’s a voluntary program, so what we’re going to do is work with the EPA to reset that goal. They’re looking at it, saying, “Hey, you’re making progress, you’re actually measuring this and reducing it, so you’re moving in the right direction.”
Haworth’s Wood Policy has a lot of exclusions. Where do you actually get your wood from?
We don’t get it anymore. (He laughs.) Actually, we have a wood expert who works with our supply chain specialist to make sure all of our wood is coming from a responsible forest. Her first line of defense is to ensure that it’s coming from an area of the world that enforces laws that are not subject to bribery or illegal harvesting.
So, to your point, you’re limiting yourself fairly quickly to suppliers who can trace their wood back to the forest of origin and find that forest in an area of the world that has a stable government and follows its laws—so obviously, the U.S., Canada, several countries in South America, certainly countries in Europe. As you move into Africa and Southeast Asia, that’s where you run into risk factors.
What new information do you feel Haworth imparts to its clients and how do you practice what you preach?
Cost of ownership is something that really enters into the development of a lot of products and it’s not something the client always thinks about. You can’t just look at the initial cost of a product, you have to assess that cost over its lifetime. You can buy something that’s really cheap, but is it reusable, is it adaptable, will it morph as you change as a company?
Also, is it recyclable? We want to bring products to market that, after a long time of use, the consumer can recycle rather than dump into a landfill.
So we do preach this to our clients, but as a company, we really look at all of those variables ourselves when we begin to develop a product.
For example, we’re coming out with a brand new chair at NeoCon this June. We brought in all of our vendors, all of the people who would be involved in the development of the chair, and they all resided at Haworth for six months. We looked at the content of the materials, we looked at every single aspect of what was going to go into that chair and determine how recyclable we would be able to make it.
What’s really exciting is that we’re taking the initiative to involve everyone from the start to develop the most sustainable product possible. So we’re continually striving to improve our products and practices to meet our clients’ needs and become a more responsible citizen, as well.
John Spizzirri is a freelance writer and editor in Chicago. He has written on a variety of environmental issues, from greenhouse gases and brownfields to elephant sanctuaries and spider conservation. John can be reached at editor@chicagospeaks.com.
