There are plenty of conversations about what goes into a sustainable office furniture. Far fewer about what comes out of one. And quite a lot comes out.

A recent survey of 250 UK facilities and office management professionals found that 86% believed they were managing furniture sustainably. Yet half also said unwanted furniture was disposed of as general waste.

Those two findings, published by Business Moves Group, are difficult to square. They also say something about the way office fit-outs are still approached. Sustainability tends to be discussed while the new workplace is being designed. The fate of the workplace it replaces is often dealt with much later, usually when there is a floor to clear and a deadline approaching.

BRE’s latest overhaul of BREEAM Refurbishment and Fit Out arrives at an interesting time, then.

Released in July, V7 gives tenant-led interior projects their own Fit Out standard for the first time, covering the parts of a project architects and interior designers have the most direct influence over: layouts, finishes, furnishings and local services. Whole-life carbon and circular use of materials also receive more attention under the new version.

With registrations opening on the 24th of September, the question of what happens after an interior has served its first purpose is becoming harder to leave until strip-out.

An office can become obsolete long before its furniture does

Commercial interiors have an awkward relationship with longevity.

Manufacturers can design a desk to last for years. An architect can specify furniture for durability, repair and disassembly. None of that guarantees the company occupying the building will still want it in five or ten years’ time.

Businesses move, leases expire, headcounts change. A company that spent the early 2020s cutting desks for hybrid working may find itself adding them again a few years later. A new tenant may inherit a perfectly serviceable fit-out and decide it wants something completely different.

The useful life of an office and the useful life of everything inside it rarely run to the same timetable.

That leaves an enormous amount of perfectly decent furniture in limbo.

Business Moves Group’s research found that unwanted furniture which was retained spent more than eight months in storage on average. The facilities professionals surveyed estimated that more than 40% of what they were storing could be reused.

The problem, in other words, isn’t necessarily finding furniture worth keeping. It’s working out what to do with it between one use and the next.

The circular economy has a logistics problem

“Reuse” looks wonderfully uncomplicated on a sustainability strategy. It is rather messier at 4pm on a Thursday when a contractor needs a floor cleared.

Say an office refurbishment leaves 300 desks, 400 task chairs, meeting tables and loose furniture coming out of the building. Some will go back into the finished space. Some might work elsewhere in the client’s estate. Other pieces could be refurbished, sold or donated.

But they aren’t necessarily going anywhere today.

They have to be taken apart, removed without being damaged, identified and kept somewhere until somebody needs them. And all of that has to happen while the fit-out itself carries on around them.

This is the less photogenic end of circular design, but arguably one of the places where the idea succeeds or fails.

SFI Logistics, which handles FF&E logistics for commercial projects, sees the problem from the other end of the process.

An SFI spokesperson said: “We’ve worked on office fit-outs and furniture projects for more than 30 years, and one of the biggest barriers to reuse is rarely the furniture itself. It’s what happens to it once it comes off the floor.

“You can have hundreds of desks and chairs that are perfectly good for another five or ten years, but the project still needs somewhere to put them. They need to be dismantled properly, recorded, stored and then moved back out when another site or phase of the project is ready for them.

“That’s the part that can get missed when people talk about circular fit-outs. Reuse isn’t just a specification decision. There has to be a practical route from the first building to the next one, and ideally that needs to be worked out before strip-out starts.

“We’re seeing more clients think about this earlier, which gives everyone far more options. Once you know what is coming out, what can be kept and where it could eventually go, furniture stops being a clearance problem and starts being an asset you can actually use again.”

Perhaps the furniture schedule needs an afterlife

There is a cost argument here too. The standard rate of Landfill Tax in England and Northern Ireland rose again in April, from £126.15 to £130.75 per tonne. Two years ago, it was £103.70.

But cost isn’t really the most interesting part of this for architects.

The more interesting question is whether an interior can genuinely be described as circular if nobody has considered how its components will get into their next cycle of use.

Architects already spend a great deal of time recording what is being put into a building. Furniture schedules can run to hundreds of lines, capturing manufacturers, models, finishes, dimensions and quantities. BIM has made the information attached to building components richer still.

Very little of that information is useful if, years later, a clearance contractor sees only a room full of old desks that needs to be empty by Friday.

There is an opportunity to close that gap without turning architects into facilities managers.

Existing furniture can be audited before a new fit-out is designed, rather than once strip-out begins. Furniture schedules can contain the information a future team would actually need to identify, dismantle and reuse an item. Clients can be asked where furniture could move within their own estate before replacements are specified. And temporary storage can be part of the programme where the dates don’t line up.

None of this is as exciting as unveiling a new workplace. There probably won’t be many photographs of the warehouse.

But if circularity is going to mean more than choosing products with better credentials, the industry has to get better at the bit between taking something out and putting it back to work.

For a lot of office furniture, that may be the difference between having a second life and ending up in a skip.