Recycling office furniture helps save money, environment

Race two computers, and that still-shiny laptop you bought last year will grunt, strain and fall behind the processing pace of the latest model. Race two office chairs, and there’s no telling whether the first one to reach the end of the hallway is six months or five years old. Fortunately, some things around the office age more gracefully than technology.

With life spans that stretch past 10 years, pre-owned furnishings provide an inexpensive and conservational alternative to new office furniture, an industry that reached sales of nearly $12 billion in 2005, according to the Business and Institutional Furniture Manufacturer’s Association (BIFMA). One company’s discarded chairs, file cabinets and desks can be reused by another company. The cloth on cubicle walls can be replaced and workstations reassembled to make office spaces look like new.

For Columbia furniture companies such as Recycled Office Solutions, Marathon Office Interiors and Smart Business Interiors, pre-owned furniture is a market niche. Pieces become available to new owners when other companies’ budgets allow for furniture upgrades. Often the clients buying secondhand furniture are either startups with an immediate furniture need but little capital or established companies preparing for their first expansion. Buybacks and trade-ins are also negotiated by pre-owned furniture companies making bids on a job.

“This is the busiest I’ve ever been,” said Kevin Helsel, owner of Recycled Office Solutions, which has branches in Columbia and St. Louis. With a store open in Columbia since January, Helsel already is looking to move his operations into a bigger space by the end of the year. He’s currently renting an extra facility to store overflow inventory.

Before Helsel entered the pre-owned market 25 years ago, he was selling new office furniture during the day and repainting furniture already owned by businesses at night. At the time, he saw a demand for reselling furniture and little competition from companies offering that service. Now he estimates there are 300 used office furniture companies and dealers in the U.S.

Savings from purchasing previously owned furniture can range from 30 to 80 percent, compared to buying new furniture. New workstations, for example, can cost between $2,000 and $6,000.

“The companies don’t cheat themselves on quality,” said Helsel. “They’re getting the same furniture as Fortune 500 companies but for a lower price.”
Recycled furniture also broadens corporate initiatives installed to minimize waste.

“In the ‘90s, green companies recycled paper, but no one thought of office furniture,” Helsel said. Companies annually threw away more than three tons of office furniture in the late 1990s, the Office Furniture Recyclers Forum estimates in the 1999 report.

“Now a lot of people are looking at saving resources,” said Art Merkin, president of Furniture Finders, an online database that lets customers tap into a national network of more than 100 dealers.

Pre-owned furniture generates about 25 percent of sales at Marathon Office Interiors, though little of it comes from trade-ins. As a certified Steelcase dealer, Marathon uses the manufacturer’s network to acquire furniture from around the country. Optioncare was furnished with workstations from a company in Arizona, and furniture for the Columbia Daily Tribune offices came from Louisville. Marathon reconfigures the workstations to fit each customer’s office space.

“It’s like a Lego set when you put it together,” said Bruce Holtkamp, operations manager.

Other times, furniture emerges from bankruptcy courts. In September, Furniture Finders organized a sale of 200 workstations from Enron. Helsel also has dealt with furniture once owned by the fallen energy conglomerate.
“Enron bought the best of the best,” Helsel said.

Although no national sales are compiled for pre-owned furniture, BIFMA estimates that the sales add about 15 percent to the value of the new furniture market. That would put pre-owned sales at about $1.5 billion in 2005. In the past, these sales have acted like a barometer for the economy.
“Economic conditions drive a lot of this,” said Merkin. “We have a good sense of where the market is heading.”

Marathon recorded its best year in pre-owned sales in 2002, said Holtkamp.
Smart Business Interiors entered the pre-owned business when the recession hit in 2001.

“We were turning down opportunities to buy it, so went ahead and joined the market,” said co-owner Bill Schuette. “It filled a void for us and our customers during a tough time.”

During that same year, new furniture sales fell for the first time after steady growth in every year since 1991, according to BIFMA. Although the new furniture market has shown signs of recovery in the past few years, in 2005 it was still almost $3 billion short of the 2000 peak of $14.9 billion.

Meanwhile, the quality of furniture hitting the secondary market has never been better.

“Five years ago, most of the furniture I was buying was 10 years old,” said Helsel. “It was dirty and had scratches. Now most of my inventory is between six months and four years old.”