The first thing to come to mind when you think of an office furniture manufacturer may not be how environmentally friendly the are. However with Herman Miller, that is a big part of their thinking process everyday. They have sustainability goals and zero waste goals that they work actively to achieve day in and day out. Herman Miller is a founding member of the Green Business Council and they come up with creative ways to find a home for hard to recycle materials.
One project Herman Miller works on is to help supply chains recycle and become more sustainable. When they receive material from supply chains, Herman Miller will work with them to figure out a better way to recycle. They want to close to loop on all their products. By sharing sustainability information with supply chains, they are able to learn from them too. This idea of going upstream instead of downstream to help recycling from the source, is a great example of the kind of forward thinking Herman Miller is involved in.
Another project that Herman Miller has been involved with is getting fabric from suppliers that cannot find a place to reuse them. Herman Miller knows that too often people will only look for convenient and easy solutions. So if recycling is not easy, they do not do it. Herman Miller wants to think outside the box and make that extra effort. This is how they came up with the idea of sending all this fabric to Haiti to be made into bags, and sent back here to be sold. This goes to a nonprofit to help provide women an opportunity to get into the workforce, and the funds from it help an orphanage in Haiti. These type of creative opportunities could have been easily missed with supply chains, but with Herman Miller, they constantly are thinking about how to do less bad and more good.
When Herman Miller looks to the future, they want to continue to focus their energy on enhancing and doing more good for their community. Creating new and innovative ways for recycling is something they are very good at. They do it to help make sure Herman Miller is doing their part to keep our state beautiful. At the end of the day, they hope to step back and say that Herman Miller products are recyclable and their employees are actively involved to keep it that way.
