Giving office furniture a new home

Challenge

Off the back of an internal restructure, a major financial institution sought to decommission its eight-storey commercial building within the ambitious time-frame of three months to prepare for a full office redevelopment.

JLL was engaged to manage the process, facing the unique challenge of not only meeting the deadline, but also identifying and ethically removing furniture that would not be used in the new office.

The aim was to rehome as much furniture as possible to avoid landfill.

Approach

Our project and development team established an eight-week programme to dismantle and remove over 2,700 furniture items which included 1200 workstations, 550 chairs, 100 lounges, 500 filing cabinets, 120 whitegoods and more.

We contacted local charity groups, schools, and second-hand furniture dealers to re-home as much furniture as possible.

Aside from the re-deployment of furniture and decommissioning of the building, we also managed use of the goods lift, disassembly of the building’s commercial kitchen and cafeteria, safety site checks, and the creation of an in-depth tracking schedule to verify the sustainable removal of furniture.

Result

We were able to donate 36% of unwanted loose furniture items to schools, churches, and a domestic violence support group. In addition, we sold 84 items to a second-hand furniture company. The money from this went to charity. Approximately 155 metric tonnes of chipboard, metal and wiring was ethically recycled.

All remaining items that could not be donated or sold were taken to a waste management facility for processing.

We were able to help the client meet its timeframe and achieve its sustainability focus, while at the same time establishing for JLL an important program methodology for the delivery of sustainable solutions for future clients.

Matt Lonergan, chairman of Movers Against Domestic Violence, which received donated furniture, expressed his gratitude: “I would like to thank you for making this happen and providing much needed support to the community while also being environmentally responsible. Surely it’s a win-win.”