Sustainability and saving costs: Trends, drivers or both?

Sustainability is back in style with a bang for 2015. This is the first of five megatrends from the Ethical Corporation, which is predicting big shifts as the year unfolds.

It’s an interesting statement for us at The Refinishing Touch. We’ve spent almost four decades working with businesses and organizations in hospitality, government and education. We work with these institutions to share our expertise and insight to enable them to apply furniture asset management best practices.

There are a number of benefits to business longevity. For example, there are now very few situations we face that we cannot formulate a response to: how to approach a seemingly challenging project; how to source an elusive element for a refurbishment or refinishing project; working to challenging deadlines. We are experts in our field, having completed thousands of projects for more than 22,000 public and private organizations.

Decades of experience also provide us with the perspective to comment first-hand on the ‘trends’ we have seen in our market. We believe that sustainability has always been a trend. Furniture asset management’s best practices, including refinishing, remanufacturing, and reupholstering, extend resources, reduce carbon footprints and emissions, minimize landfill and protect the environment.

Few people would argue against sustainability as a good thing. No good-natured CEO, director or facility manager wants to create a business that is intentionally destructive to the environment. But leading with sustainability as a ‘trend’ for a market can be challenging for organizations and businesses that are under too many fiscal restraints to simply lead with the fact that they would like to be sustainable.

Meanwhile we see the protection and re-use of assets for financial benefit as a consistent driver of projects across each of our industries and across the decades. Sustainability and fiscal responsibility complement each other. This is certainly true in furniture asset management. We frequently reduce budget spend by 80 percent and carbon emission by 90 percent.

We know that organizations and businesses want to be sustainable. But every hotel, government institution and college needs to spend wisely to protect its business. Furniture asset management enables them to protect their business and the environment. That’s no trend – just a fact.

For more information on the financial, environmental and business results that furniture asset management could have on your business, please email [email protected].