By Eils Lotozo

At the recent NeoCon trade show in Chicago, where more than 1,000 companies displayed furniture and furnishings for commercial interiors, you couldn't go anywhere without seeing green. Environmentally friendly products are still just a blip on the residential-furnishings screen, but in the realm of the cubicle and conference room, they are taking hold in a big way.

Victor Innovatex touts its Eco Intelligent fabric as the first polyester to be produced and dyed with entirely environmentally safe ingredients.

Herman Miller advertises its Celle chair, manufactured from materials that are 99 percent recyclable in a factory that uses alternative energy.

InterFace Flor, whose head, Ray Anderson, has been a pioneer for sustainability in the industry, has a take-back program for its jazzy carpet tiles and is developing carpeting that blends nylon with fibers made from plant materials.

Oceanside Glasstile gets points for a handsome line of tile that uses more than two million pounds of glass from curbside recycling.

It's not just that the makers of office partitions and acoustic ceiling tiles have been conscience-stricken over polluting the planet with toxic, chemical-laden wares - though that's part of it.

"This is customer-driven," says Julie Smith, spokeswoman for the office-furniture maker Haworth. "Our customers are asking for [evidence of] sustainability to be included as part of the bidding process."

Helping to boost that demand, says Penny Bonda, a commercial-interiors designer turned green-design consultant, is the rating system for green construction introduced by the U.S. Green Building Council in 2000. Dubbed LEED (for "Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design"), the voluntary system awards points toward a silver, gold or platinum designation.

"When I first got involved in green design in the early 1990s, it was really a fringe movement, like hippies with wood stoves," says Bonda, who helped the council create a separate LEED designation for commercial interiors in 2004. "Not anymore."

"The LEED rating system definitely helped drive things," says Diann Barbacci, vice president of sustainable design for the Mohawk group, whose contract carpet brands include Lees, Bigelow and Karastan.

"And now you also have state and local governments that are building green requirements into their procurement programs," she says.

That means if you want to sell to those agencies, you have to go green. (A number of federal agencies, including the General Services Administration, have adopted what they've termed "environmentally preferable purchasing," as well.)

"One of the standards you have to meet is do you have a recycling program," says Barbacci, whose company recently announced a major expansion of its carpet-recycling efforts. The new service features a toll-free number that commercial customers can call to arrange to have their old carpeting, even if it isn't a Mohawk product, hauled away.

The cost, Barbacci says, is often less than the tipping fees a contractor would pay to a landfill. "Then we have arrangements with our network of recyclers to buy some of it back to use in our own recycled-carpet products," she says.

Evolve Systems, a Marlton-based subsidiary of the Global Group, has developed a sleek-looking office cubicle made almost entirely from recycled or renewable materials.

The wall panels incorporate recycled wood and polypropylene and are insulated with a product made from slag, a byproduct of steelmaking. Fabric options include textiles made from recycled yarn. And the cubicle's desktops are made from a formaldehyde-free product made from resin and wheat straw.

"We've probably saved about four million pounds of waste from going into the landfill just with the wall panels alone," company spokesman Mike Yekenchik says.
Using reclaimed materials also has helped Evolve Systems keep product costs low, Yekenchik adds.

Cost and design are key, he says, "but our biggest sales have been driven by our green story." Since developments in the commercial-furnishings market often end up influencing the residential market, we could soon see the home-furnishings industry start to take a page from that green story.

Bonda expects a shift after the LEED standards for green residential buildings, now in a pilot phase, are introduced.

"That's going to be a big help in terms of educating consumers through the home builders they use," she says.

Mohawk's Barbacci says, "I think it's starting to get out there. We're starting to see our residential customers ask for recycled content and little or no VOCs." (VOCs, or volatile organic compounds, are commonly found in the adhesives, solvents, paints and varnishes used in furnishings and carpeting. They are a factor in indoor air pollution.)

InterFace Flor entered the residential market four years ago and has seen its sales grow. "Sure, when you're making a purchasing decision that involves a whole corporate office, that has a bigger environmental footprint than buying carpeting for one bedroom," says the company's Reva Revis. "But consumers are thinking about these things."