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The Business of Furniture | Subscribe at bof.press | November 20, 2019

Humanscaleis serious about the environment. That’s easy to see when scanning the company’s website, visiting its trade show stands and walking into any of its showrooms around the world.

For some companies, creating environmentally friendly products is more greenwashing than good for the globe. But Humanscale is taking leader- ship positions in important initiatives that will help the environment well beyond the world of office furniture. The company recently hosted a meet- ing for company leaders behind the NextWave Initiative — a meeting of the minds for business leaders who are eager to redirect plastics away from the ocean and into their supply chain.

NextWave is important because it is about more than just keeping plastic out of the ocean. NextWave member companies are establishing ocean- bound plastics as a commodity to decrease the volume of plastic waste be- fore it enters the ocean. Together, they are creating the first global network of ocean-bound plastics supply chains. These companies are also raising awareness in the global manufacturing community that ocean-bound plas- tics carry a commercial value.

The companies involved in NextWave are an impressive group. In addi- tion to Humanscale and Herman Miller in the office furniture industry, NextWave also includes companies like Interface, GM, Dell, HP, IKEA and Trek, to name a few. The idea of competition and exclusive use of materi- als is set aside by these companies when it comes to ocean plastic use, said Jane Abernethy, Humanscale’s chief sustainability officer.

NextWave was convened by nonprofit Lonely Whale, which brought together a group of manufacturers, partially inspired by Dell, according to Abernathy.

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“The thought was that a few manufacturers are starting to work in the space using ocean plastic as a source for manufacturing new goods,” she said. “And so we are trying to be part of the solution to this issue of ocean plastic. The thought was that if we started to join together, we can learn from each other, kind of build up a network of a supply chain that would make it more feasible to do for other manufacturers as we put a signal out that this is something that companies are looking for and that there’s a business case if you’re willing to recapture ocean plastic.”

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The Business of Furniture | Subscribe at bof.press | November 20, 2019

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Humanscale started introducing products using recycled ocean cast- offs in 2017. At NeoCon that year the company promoted a new prototype of Humanscale’s Diffrient World Chair made from 13 pounds of recycled fishing net. A year later, Humanscale introduced the Smart Ocean chair.Sourced from Bureo, an emerging venture developing innovative solutions to prevent ocean plastic pollution, it was the first tangible product of its new partnership and marks the first product available to purchase from the consortium of companies under the NextWave initiative.

“Ocean plastic has become one of the greatest threats to our oceans and discarded fishing nets are the worst kind of ocean plastic,” said Humanscale Founder and CEO Robert King when the chair was intro- duced. “These nets can ‘ghost fish’ for years and are often washed onto reefs, damaging or destroying these delicate ecosystems.

“Humanscale has partnered with Bureo who works with fishermen to salvage and repurpose discarded fishing nets. We then use this plastic to manufacture parts for our new Smart Ocean chair. This is one way we real- ize our vision of

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making manufacturing truly self-sustaining; every chair we make in this way has a positive impact on the environment.”

The nets used in the production of the task chair are from Bureo’s Net Positiva recycling program, which facilitates the collection of discarded plastic fishing nets and provides incentives to participating coastal com-

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munities. The nets are then transformed into plastic pellets and used to manufacture quality products such as skateboards, sunglasses and — for the first time ever — an ergonomic task chair.

NextWave believes in open-source collaboration. That means what Humanscale learns from recycling and using ocean-bound plastics is shared with all members so everyone can benefit from this new resource.

It is not easy to capture ocean-bound plastic despite the volume of it — eight million tons — that pollutes oceans around the world every year.

NextWave members meet twice a year to talk about the challenges in per- son.

“Some of us are from very different industries,” Abernethy said. “We have companies like Dell. Humanscale obviously is not making computers. We have IKEA. Trek makes bicycles. Then there is GM. All of us are from quite different industries but we are talking to each other and sharing what has been working, what’s not working, where there are potential sources of new material that seem to be reliable and are

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worth potentially explor-ing and starting to work with some of that R&D work around trying to use these materials.”

Sharing what works and what doesn’t helps get suppliers up and run- ning with the ultimate goal of getting other companies to see ocean-bound plastics as a resource. The more companies that demand the resource, the

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easier (and cheaper) it becomes to harvest from the ocean.“Right now we’re kind of in the starting stages, so we’re

sort of trying to set up the supply chain to source material that is from the ocean or ocean- bound as a resource,” Abernethy said. A lot of that ends up being about identifying which kinds of plastic are available, who is reliable to work with, doing a pilot project with the suppliers and sharing information, she added.

While Humanscale has worked to get fishing nets out of the ocean and into office chairs, HP is working directly with people in Haiti to help them set up a system that would not be owned by HP, but would be independent and sell to them and others. It is not easy or quick work — not like a beach cleanup. Instead, NextWave wants to create a systematic way of using this material to be part of the normal economy. There has to be a business case for those companies gathering back the material as well.

Ocean-bound plastic is often found in areas where the infrastructure is poor and labor laws are lax. Abernethy said it is an interesting challenge to navigate using this material

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in a socially responsible way. Add to that the chemical changes — salt and UV rays — that change the plastics.

“We’re experimenting with some chemical recycling to try and make some things more usable than they might initially have been,” she said. “It’s also hard because (the ocean-bound plastic) is very dirty and very mixed,

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so it’s really hard to find a reliable source. That’s where nets are kind of interesting because it is a known material, and that’s where the fishing nets were designed to be used in the ocean. So they’re using a kind of plastic that can hold up to a certain amount of UV and salts. Then, when we pulled them out of the ocean, they’re still a certain quality where we can use them to make products. But this is not the case for all plastics.”

Humanscale understands it can’t solve the ocean plastic problem alone, but it does believe it can make a difference — a philosophy that comes from the top at the company. Humanscale wants to leave the world a better place than it found it.

“I don’t think we have the impression that we were going to solve the ocean plastic issue with our specific chair, but more that we could put a signal to the world that this is something that’s possible, that this can be done and that we can take something that had been considered waste and use it as an input to your products,” Abernethy said. “It’s possible to have a for-profit company where you’re manufacturing and having a

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viable busi- ness while you’re still doing something good in the world. And I feel like the Smart Ocean is a good example of what we call our net positive philosophy or what we aim for as our sustainability call: We aim to do more good than harm. As we operate and grow and expand, if we’re constantly doing more good than harm, then the world is better off as you grow and expand.” BoF