Furniture maker
Herman Miller has earned the third-ever Design for Recycling award from the
Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI).
Since 1991 Herman Miller has been stamping product parts that are recyclable, identifying what parts can be recyclable and what types of plastic they are in order to make it easier to recycle chairs and other items.
Around that same time the company took another step to make recycling easier with its Limerick chair, a lightweight product that is also 100 percent recyclable and includes complete instructions for disassembly.
Herman Miller's work with recyclable materials, making products easy to take apart and eliminating certain materials has earned it a number of
Cradle-to-Cradle (C2C) certifications for chairs, storage systems, filing cabinets and office setups.
This year, more than 50 percent of the company's sales came from C2C products, a goal it had planned to meet in 2010. Since Herman Miller met the goal early, it's now aiming for 60 percent of its sales to be from C2C products by next year.
The company has also made a big switch in the amount of material it recycles and throws away. Around 1991, the company sent about 40 million pounds of material to landfills and recycled 3 million pounds of material. Last year it recycled 26 million pounds of material and trashed 3 million pounds of waste, mostly ash, residual paint powder and wood.
The ISRI created its
Design for Recycling program more than 20 years ago, and the award recognizes programs, companies or individuals whose products or processes incorporate one or more of a number of factors: reduction in the number of different recyclable materials, reduction or elimination of hazardous constituents, increased yield of the product's recyclables, improvement in the safety of recycling, or easy disassembly for recycling.
The ISRI has given out two other awards: one to
Hewlett-Packard in 2005 for reducing hazardous substances, simplifying component design, and building products for easy disassembly and recycling; and one to the
Environmental Protection Agency in 2006 for creating design partnerships and working to help businesses and industry sectors to incorporate environmental considerations into decision-making processes.
Aeron chair - Courtesy Herman Miller
