No matter how functional your office furniture may be, there may come a time when it’s either scuffed or damaged, no longer fitting in with your interior design scheme, the wrong size, broken beyond reasonable repair, or simply not needed. Through our asset management service, we can help store and/or catalogue your stock, helping you to manage old furniture in 3 different ways: upcycle, donate, or recycle. Our main aim is to extend the product life cycle as far as possible, only resorting to environmentally dispose when necessary.
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When your furniture is in good condition but requires a spruce-up, we can help refresh and renew furniture, including respraying steel carcasses, swapping worktops and storage tops for new ones, or re-upholstering task chairs and sofas. When we upgrade furniture, a Flexiform member of staff would be able to advise on the best materials to re-apply to your furniture, whether that’s a Fenix laminate that is designed for scratches to be heat treated without the need to remove the top, anti-bacterial paint or fabric, or a more hardwearing fabric for high-traffic areas. We’ll discuss with you how the furniture is going to be used, where it will be placed, and what challenges it may face.
We will first undertake a site survey and client briefing to understand what is required and the best way to upgrade the products with minimum disruption and cost to the client. Depending upon the furniture, some will need to be taken back to the factory to be fixed (ie, steel respraying, re-upholstery), while others will be able to be done on-site (ie. worktops). Your dedicated Project Manager will be able to discuss with you the best way to manage furniture being off-site, with the potential to loan temporary furniture.
As a true manufacturer, our in-house Design and Engineering team and factory can help remanufacture and reconfigure existing furniture to fit your new design. This can help to significantly reduce costs of new furniture, and help save excess wastage. The ability to to do this depends on the product, design and materials. We would first evaluate the product and end goal, to produce a solution and outline of the process involved.
We have previously worked with a Major High Street Retailer to save over 800 existing workstations that would be rendered obsolete. Although the workstations were purchased over 15 years ago, they were still in good condition and of a very high quality, however unsuitable for the project as smaller desks were required to maximise occupancy on the floor plates. We dismantled, remanufactured the steel underframe into new desks, recycled the old worktops, and replaced them with new resulting in the re-use of 700 workstations!
Where possible, we like to support local charities and schools by donating used office furniture or excess materials. We can work with clients to donate furniture straight from the site or storage to their chosen charity partner. As an added benefit, our installation team would be able to dismantle and re-install the furniture at the chosen destination.
“Flexiform’s kind offer was accepted with enthusiasm and gratitude! As the manager of a charity, it can be difficult to prioritise spending on anything but the immediate frontline work… This contribution from Flexiform is greatly appreciated and the reaction from staff, trainees, volunteers and visitors has been really positive” – Kirsten Horsburgh CEO of Scottish Drugs Forum.
We prefer to choose local charities, reducing our footprint and giving back to the clients’ local community. However, we have helped both UK and global charities with excess materials, saving them from landfill.
Once the product has come to the end of its life and there are no other alternative avenues, we can remove it from the site and environmentally dispose of it. As our products are designed to last, this can be a while – we still have some cabinets in use over 40 years old! We’ve partnered with Cossley Evans, a responsible and accredited waste management company that collects the furniture from our factory and breaks down the components for recycling. As a Zero to Waste company, you can be reassured that no products or materials go to landfill and any non-recyclable components are incinerated and converted to energy (EFW).
Unfortunately, as the products are combined with Flexiform’s factory waste to save on excess mileage, we cannot provide individual project certificates. However, our recyclability rate is continuously over 95%. Through our partnership with Crossley Evans, waste components are disposed of in line with our business policy statement, agreed objectives and in accordance with our ISO 14001:2015 certification.
We donate old furniture to local charities.
We prefer to donate and re-use where possible. Our furniture donations have created over £500k of social value, making a difference to charities, schools and communities and saving products from being recycled. Find out more.
Breathe a new lease of life into furniture.
If your furniture can be refurbished, re-upholstered, resprayed or amended to suit your needs, we can facilitate this through our Yorkshire factory. This can include major re-manufacturing work to a simple change in colour.
Environmental Disposal with 0 to Landfil.
As a Zero to Waste company, you can be reassured that no products or materials go to landfill and any non-recyclable components are incinerated and converted to energy (EFW) in accordance with our ISO 14001:2015 certification.
Health, safety & environmental accreditations.
Ensuring quality, sustainability and ethical business and manufacturing practices, we’re accredited to key governing bodies, including Safe Contractor (installation), FORS Silver (delivery), ISO 45001:2018 (health & safety) & ISO14001:2015 (environmental).
