Where Does New York City Office Furniture Go When No One Wants It? | Hacker News Reader

Where Does New York City Office Furniture Go When No One Wants It?

nytimes.com

8 pointsasnyder5 comments

I've only done so three times, but when I've had to furnish a new office space, I've obtained all the office furniture from auction houses that sell the furniture from other companies that were liquidated.

I just assumed that was where most such used furniture went, but I guess not. That's too bad -- buying from a liquidator is not only better for the environment, but is a lot less expensive, and every startup should be minimizing costs where they can. This is an easy and painless way to minimize costs.

“The amount of waste in this industry would boggle your mind,” said David Esterlit, the owner of OHR Home Office Solutions, a refurbishing company and liquidator in Midtown Manhattan that has resold equipment from big office tenants.

Despite efforts to reuse and repurpose office equipment, most still ends up in the trash, said Trevor Langdon, the chief executive of Green Standards, a sustainability consulting company that helps to minimize office waste. Based on 2018 federal statistics on waste, the latest year with available data, Mr. Langdon estimates that more than 10 million tons of office furniture in the United States end up in a landfill every year.

I wonder, what would an appropriate amount of office furniture waste be? Sometimes irreparable damage of some sort happens, say flooding, mold, etc. 10 million tons of office furniture a year sounds high and gets even worse when you look at it in detail. Doing a straight up division by population times percentage of white collar comes out to ~100 pounds per year per person. That is certainly more than say "replace the office chairs every five years along with the printer" type sources of turnover.

The pandemic and its aftermath may be to blame for some of it being that alarmingly high. Other times and places would help shed more insight to know what the prior norms were for office work.

This article also from NYT, earlier this year, talks more about the used furniture industry and what's happening on the west coast:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/technology/office-furnitu...

Around the kick-off of the last big recession, articles started showing up about how refurbishing companies/liquidator were great investments during a down market. Same with the big recession before that, too.

I wonder if this is the trend is repeating... I don't know, but it makes me think it might be bad for a few years.

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