Waste Into Change

How do you turn 100,000 tons of corporate waste into $40M in charitable donations?

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Green Standards was inspired by a simple observation: The way companies move is broken.

Traditionally, when an office is relocated, renovated, or closed, all of the contents go straight to landfill. This includes furniture, fixtures, and equipment that still have years of potential use. Why does this happen? In part, because it’s an afterthought. The prevailing sentiment of “Out with the old and in with the new” is all about the new; when it comes to the old, out of sight is out of mind.

There’s value in your old office

But there’s tremendous value in office furniture, fixtures, and equipment, particularly for non-profit organizations that would otherwise have to divert precious resources to buy these items. The founding idea of Green Standards was to help large organizations unlock this value in their office moves to benefit worthy charities, schools, shelters, and other organizations in their communities.

From this simple idea, we’ve built a fast-growing, award-winning company that has reworked every step of office decommissioning. Our turnkey process makes it easy to do the right thing, as follows:

  1. We calculate the value of every last item in your office, using our proprietary knowledge and deep networks to determine the best way to donate, resell, relocate, or recycle your furniture, fixtures, and equipment.
  2. Our teams take care of every last detail, ensuring efficient and ethical service every step of the way. Local non-profits of your choosing receive valuable donations
  3. You get complete data and documentation in our web portal, offering complete transparency and auditability that can feed directly into your company’s ESG reporting.

How is this possible? We’ve built a multinational resale system, ensuring that the financial value of high-quality furniture can be maximized. We’ve created a network of specialized recyclers, so that when office furniture, fixtures, and equipment reach the end of their lifecycles, their materials can be put back to use. And we’ve built the technology to measure and maximize all of our efforts, providing our clients with all the data and documentation they need to demonstrate that they captured the value in their workplace change.

We have helped large workplaces donate more than $40 million dollars in furniture, fixtures, and equipment to their communities, and in doing so have built the Green Standards Charitable Network of more than 20,000 non-profits around the world.

More than a decade after our founding, the values of environmental stewardship, social impact, and governance results are top of mind for shareholders and stakeholders in major organizations. When these organizations — including more than 25 of the corporations on the Fortune 100 — deal with workplace change, they depend on Green Standards to ensure their ESG values are integral to every step of the process.

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