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When businesses move, their used office furniture often finds itself unwanted. This can be for a variety of reasons - a dated style, poorly suited for the new space, a desire to change it up, etc. At the exact same time, there are thousands of customers looking to buy new office furniture. These customers have their own requirements - it must be this size, this height, this color, this fabric.
Eco Office takes particular pride in creating a sustainable solution to bridge that gap. We take used office furniture of many different shapes and sizes in from customers who need to get rid of it. The best of it gets sold as-is, and the rest of it gets refurbished -- new paint, fabric, etc. This has the pratical effect of making it virtually indistinguishable from new as the the look and feel is almost entirely paint and fabric. We then combine this refurbished product with small amounts of new furniture to create a seamless, one-stop solution for our customers to save the world and save money doing it, while not compromising quality at all.
We also make a deliberate effort to run our business practices in a sustainable fashion. Here's how we do it.
We handle hundreds of cardboard boxes each month from our new orders. We have our own baling machine which preps them to go out to local recyclers, a process we conduct every couple months. None of it goes in the trash.
Inside each of those cardboard boxes is all sorts of plastic and padding. This goes in its own blue dumpster, which is separately recycled from our regular waste.
When we determine that certain used products are not in sellable condition, we will take the metal from those products and sell it to scrap metal recyclers who then melt it down for re-use in industrial applications. We also do this with scrap parts that we have left over from the refurbishment process. This also happens every couple months.
We have some of these, mostly paint byproducts, and what we do have is kept to such a small footprint that we qualify for the ETA's Very Small Quantity Generator (VSQG) program, which means we're amongst the lowest producers of such waste, which we're especially proud of considering the high volume of painting and refurbishment that we do. We're efficient with our usage, and we dispose properly using all available local government resources.
All in all, we've built a highly sustainable business over a period of more than 40 years (Eco Office has been around since 1973, formerly under the name "Creative Solutions"). Best of all, we provide value to our customers and great jobs for our staff, all while helping the environment and promoting sustainability in the Bay Area.
