What a Difference a Desk Makes: Universities Buy Eco-Friendly Furniture

By SCOTT CARLSON

Minneapolis

Baltix Furniture's headquarters, in a cinder-block building in the suburbs here, is not your typical office-furniture showroom -- which is fine, because this is not your typical office furniture. That's why it appealed to Thomas R. Fisher, dean of the architecture school at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

Chuck Lodge, the president of Baltix, walks among the cubicles and tables and points to boards made from sustainably harvested wood, or wheat straw, or even sunflower-waste material, which has an erratic, black-and-tan grain. He raps on a desk's silvery legs, made from recycled aluminum, and explains that they can be separated from the wood and easily reused when the desk has outlived its usefulness.

He stops to pick up a slab of dark-green countertop material that looks like polished jade.

"This is what we are most excited about," he says, explaining that it is actually made from shredded dollar bills. The shredded greenbacks are taken directly from the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis, then mixed into a slurry and pressed into countertops. The nation's 12 federal banks have no shortage of shredded money. "They are kicking out 15 to 20 tons each every 10 days," he says.

While green-building features like big solar panels or wind generators can be very showy symbols of environmentalism, some colleges and universities are starting to make environmental statements with even the simple cubicle and humble desk.

Mr. Fisher contacted Baltix and a number of other furniture manufacturers while outfitting the university's new architecture building. Instead of simply buying standard desks -- which are made with particleboard laden with toxic chemicals, as well as other components that are impossible to recycle -- he asked the manufacturers for nontoxic, sustainable, and recyclable options. To his surprise, even mainstream furniture companies were willing to alter their products to win a small account with the university.

"We were asking for a lot, and we're the smallest college at the U., and yet they were willing to comply," he says. "That made us realize the power of higher education to change the marketplace, simply because of the sheer volume of our purchasing."

Thinking Green

Sustainable office furniture is a little-known but effective option for colleges and universities that want to be eco-friendly. In environmental terms, purchasing furniture is no small decision, says Henning Bloech, director of communications for the Greenguard Environmental Institute, an independent organization that rates building products according to how they affect indoor air quality.

An office's furniture often has more surface area than the office's walls and floors, he says. Conventional furniture can emit fumes, like formaldehydes, from pressed wood finishes, glues, or fabrics. In some offices in the 1990s, he says, employees' complaints about sore throats and itchy eyes forced furniture manufacturers to recall truckloads of desks and cubicles.

Since then, he says, even major manufacturers like Knoll and Herman Miller have been mindful of environmental and sustainable issues with their product lines.

For the University of California at Merced, which has a contract with the furniture giant Steelcase, sustainable furniture is a major component in its quest for a silver rating in the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program. Through Steelcase, the university purchased scores of "Think Chairs" -- recyclable chairs that were designed by the firm of William McDonough, the former dean of the University of Virginia architecture school. Steelcase, which has been exploring more eco-friendly materials, recently started a program to help customers recycle old Steelcase furniture.

David A. Rinard, director of environmental performance at Steelcase, says market demand has driven his company's green programs. About 80 percent of bids now include some requirement for environmental design. But customer demand goes only so far. Although Steelcase could use even more clean and environmentally-friendly materials, those materials can be aesthetically risky or expensive, so the company favors time-tested and economical materials.

"An environmentally-friendly product people don't want or can't afford to buy cannot succeed," Mr. Rinard says.

Smaller furniture companies, it seems, have taken more chances on unusual products and designs -- and have nevertheless won contracts with colleges. Sonoma State University outfitted its new recreation center with sustainable furniture, some of it quite unusual: Tables were made out of Shetkastone, a recycled-paper product, and Vetrazzo, a terrazzo-like material embedded with chips of recycled glass. The university even bought benches and chairs with webbing made from recycled seat belts.

At the University of Minnesota, Mr. Fisher ended up buying desks from Baltix Furniture because he liked the company's commitment to green design and he wanted to support a local firm.

Baltix worked with the university's architecture school to create custom desks with panels made from pressed wheat stalk, an agricultural-waste material, and desktops made from linoleum, an all-natural product. With their speckled straw surfaces and silvery aluminum legs, the desks convey an industrial-meets-granola aesthetic. Baltix has also sold small amounts of furniture to Grinnell College, Purdue University, and Sonoma State.

The company also vows to solve its customers' waste problems, pledging to take back and reuse or recycle its office furniture when customers are ready to get rid of it. Old aluminum legs might be attached to new desks or melted down. Wheatboard might be ground up and used for animal bedding, then composted.

Mr. Fisher says his architecture school recycles furniture the old-fashioned way, too. To furnish their studio spaces, students go out and find beat-up chairs and tables, mostly in a used-furniture warehouse that the university maintains. "We sort of dumpster-dive here," he says. "We find stuff that is perfectly fine to us, but people are getting rid of it.

"It might need a new coat of paint," he continues. "It seems to us that that is all part of the design imagination. You appropriate and reconceive."