How can Green Standards help facility managers be more successful in their roles?

For the past 16 years, Green Standards has done one thing and one thing only: Sustainable office decommissioning. We’re the best in the world at keeping everything in your workplace in use and out of landfill. And from experience, we know that this is critical for facility managers looking to save time, money, headaches, and waste.

When it comes time for an office cleanout, facility managers are often the last to know and the first to be given the job of handling the decommissioning. It’s a problem that Green Standards was built to solve.

We find the next best use for everything in your facility, from furniture to office supplies to art to fitness equipment. And more importantly, we do all the work, from getting the best price on local movers to finding local non-profits who can put your surplus assets to good use to providing documentation on everything we handle.

At the end of the project, you’ll have a broom-swept space as well as best-in-class reporting on landfill diversion, charitable donation, and emissions avoided to share with your colleagues.

Why should FMs pick Green Standards as a partner?

Green Standards provides stakeholders across your organization with tangible benefits. For general sustainability initiatives, we focus on landfill diversion with a cumulative 98.6 percent landfill diversion rate. For circularity programs, we prioritize reuse via resale and donation, keeping assets in use for as long as possible. For community engagement, we support a vetted network of more than 25,000 non-profit organizations around the world, including charities and schools in your community. For ESG, we offer reporting that our Fortune 100 clients extensively use in their Impact Reports. And for climate commitments, we calculate CO2e emissions avoided on each project, a significant portion of Scope 3 emissions for many of our clients. We’d call that a win-win, but by our count that’s actually five wins.

How much does it cost?

Our program is cost competitive with traditional office decommissioning – with the huge advantage of maximizing environmental and social benefits. First, we run a competitive bid process on all labor and logistics, with the option to use your preferred vendors. Then, we maximize opportunities for revenue generation through our vetted global network of resellers and recyclers. Throughout the process, we are the single point of contact that handles everything, providing consistently excellent service everywhere we operate. And the one thing you won’t be paying for is trips to the dump.

What size projects do you handle?

Our program becomes cost competitive with more than 200 assets. That translates into 10,000 square feet or 100 employees’ worth of furniture, fixtures and equipment, and it allows us to maximize charitable donation on your behalf. Of the more than 2,000 projects we’ve handled all over the world, most fall between 20,000 – 2 million square feet of office space. We’re particularly proud of handling more than 4 million square feet for General Motors in Warren, Michigan USA, a multi-year commitment that has sent more than US$1 million worth of assets to local nonprofits.

What’s your company’s backstory?

Established in 2009, Green Standards is a Certified B Corporation that pioneered the practice of sustainable office decommissioning. Our mission is to eliminate workplace waste, and we advocate for this ambitious goal within IFMA, the Business and Industrial Furniture Manufacturers Association, CoreNet Global, the US Green Building Council, and many more industry groups. Headquartered in Toronto, we have representatives in Montreal, New York City, Charlotte, Houston, San Francisco, Seattle and Manila, and have successfully run projects in more than 40 countries. We have been recognized with the CoreNet Global Innovator’s Award, IFMA NYC’s Award for Excellence in Sustainability, and multiple inclusions on the Financial Times’ Fastest Growing Companies list. We’ve kept more than 125,000 tons of office waste out of landfill – that’s tons, not pounds! – and facilitated more than US$40 million worth of in-kind donations to local nonprofits.

How can this help my community?

Delivering surplus office assets to local schools and non-profits is the heart of what we do. When the thousands of food banks, shelters, libraries, community groups, educational institutions and charities in our network don’t have to spend valuable funds on office equipment, they have more money to put toward the important work they do. And it adds up! When our client Charles Schwab was renovating offices in the Bay Area, we helped them donate to the Foothill Community Health Center in San Jose. In the words of Salvador Chavarin, the Center’s CEO: “This furniture donation has saved us tens of thousands of dollars that will go directly toward patient care. Your donation has enabled us to provide free healthcare services to 150 low-income residents.”