On the Wednesday morning of NeoCon (June 12th), BIFMA members, the BIFMA executive staff and guests assembled at the 19th floor “NeoCon Theater” for the first annual “Sit Stand” breakfast meeting. After many years of meeting in the Wolf Point Room at the Holiday Inn across the street, the new venue seemed more appropriate – closer to the showrooms where everybody heads immediately after the event, a light bite to eat versus the standard hotel scrambled eggs and sausage, and an easier-to-navigate stand-up networking half hour or so. Still, after so many years of being “over there,” many attendees wandered in late after having paid a visit to the empty Wolf Point room first.
The meeting was called to order promptly by the president of the BIFMA Board, Don Van Winkle, President and Chief Operating Officer of Kimball International. He recognized and thanked the other members of the Board and invited members interested in serving on the board to let their willingness be known. He also reminded the audience that the annual BIFMA Leadership Conference will be held at Hyatt Regency Coconut Point, Bonita Springs, Fl. January 22-24, 2020. This conference has become an exceptional thought leadership event with “leadership” topics of general interest to both members of BIFMA and the workplace design and furnishings community at large. We highly recommend it. For registration information, look here.
Mr. Van Winkle then handed the meeting over to Tom Reardon, Executive Director of BIFMA. In discussing the activities of the BIFMA Board and staff over the past 12 months, Mr. Reardon praised the active involvement of the volunteer members of the Board, all of whom are fully engaged in the day-to-day running of their own businesses, but still make time to work on issues benefitting all member companies and the interests of the users of commercial furniture in all the vertical markets served by the industry.
Of particular note, Mr. Reardon pointed out that for over 45 years, BIFMA has represented the interests of commercial furniture brands by developing safety and performance standards intended to protect the public.
With the launch of LEVEL®, BIFMA’s sustainability certification program in 2009, the organization broadened its scope to providing manufacturers a guide and methodology to document their efforts to make commercial furniture products more sustainable and then to obtain third party certification of the steps they’d taken. Since the LEVEL® standard includes all aspects of sustainability – from efforts to reduce waste and pollution at the manufacturing facilities to publishing the material content of the products – the standard has earned adoption by ANSI, recognition in some LEED categories and praise from other sustainability platforms.
What LEVEL® has not received, as of today, is widespread recognition and use by the A&D community. To that end, Mr. Reardon reported on the outreach activities of the BIFMA staff to promote knowledge and understanding of LEVEL® to constituent audiences, including IIDA and ASID for CEU credits and to individual design firms as time allows.
Returning to the topic of BIFMA safety and performance standards, Mr. Reardon noted that many unscrupulous companies falsely claim to meet the standards, and to date there has not been a mechanism to allow potential users to know whether those claims are authentic or dishonest. Furthermore, when products fail that have falsely claimed to “meet BIFMA,” it undermines the value of the claim for all those who work diligently to assure their products do meet the standards.
Consequently, the BIFMA Board and Executive staff have agreed to officially launch in October 2020, BIFMA Compliant, a branded conformance program. The voluntary program will create a documented rule set for conformance and provide a registry to allow for ease in identifying products that comply with specific BIFMA standards. At that point Mr. Reardon turned the podium over to Jennifer Wammack, BIFMA Director of Outreach to describe the plan more specifically.
The program will cover nine mechanical standards that focus on safety and durability.
- ANSI/BIFMA X5.1 Office Seating
- ANSI/BIFMA X5.11 Large Occupant Office Seating
- ANSI/BIFMA X6.1 Educational Seating
- ANSI/BIFMA X5.4 Lounge and Public Seating
- BIFMA X6.4 Occasional-Use Seating
- ANSI/BIFMA X5.5 Desk / Table Products
- ANSI/SOHO S6.5 Small Office/Home Office
- ANSI/BIFMA X5.6 Panel Systems
- ANSI/BIFMA X5.9 Storage Units
BIFMA Compliant will be open to BIFMA members and non-members alike. Furniture manufacturers who elect to participate will upload product information into a searchable online database. They will pay a fee to be listed and will be required to furnish proof that the products listed do indeed, meet the standard. Access to the database will be free to anyone interested in finding products that meet industry safety and performance standards. It is anticipated that the new BIFMA Compliant program, once launched, will further establish BIFMA as the authoritative voice for the commercial furniture industry.
The guest speaker at the meeting was Chip De Grace, VP Workplace Applications at Interface. He joined Interface in 1989 and, as the longest tenured designer at the company, he is focused on amplifying an understanding of the power of the built environment to support the health and wellbeing of its users and the urgent role it plays in the drawdown of atmospheric carbon.
Speaking to an audience of individuals not uniformly convinced of the human impact on global climate change, he made the point that reducing waste and carbon emissions can contribute directly to a company’s bottom line, and he used samples of the financial results of Interface since Ray Anderson announced his “Mission Zero” as a proof source. That meant turning the petroleum-intensive carpet manufacturer of 1997 into one of the world’s first environmentally sustainable, and ultimately restorative, companies. At the time Mr. Anderson said, “If we’re successful, we’ll spend the rest of our days harvesting yester-year’s carpets and other petrochemically derived products, and recycling them into new materials; and converting sunlight into energy; with zero scrap going to the landfill and zero emissions into the ecosystem. And we’ll be doing well…very well…by doing good. That’s the vision.”
Mr. De Grace spoke passionately and knowledgeably about things companies can do to reduce their impact on atmospheric carbon – whether they believe it’s a factor in climate change or not. Importantly, he pointed out that most people think only about the release of carbon into the atmosphere “operationally,” for example releasing CO2 when burning fossil fuels.
But, a source of carbon pollution that is often overlooked is what he called embodied carbon, that is, carbon that is embodied in products that only enters the atmosphere at the end of the product’s life cycle. An example of this phenomenon is when a product enters the landfill and is burned or decomposes, releasing carbon that was embodied in the chemical make-up of the product. Working to reduce embodied carbon creates challenges that lead to innovative approaches and innovative products, often at significantly lower cost.
For me, as one who is completely convinced of the human impacts on climate change, it was an extremely welcome presentation. I loved seeing a peer presenting documentation that 22 years of dedication to an environmentally sustainable goal has seen Interface prosper beyond Ray Anderson’s dreams.
As is the custom at the annual meeting of BIFMA, it was left to Byron Morton, VP of Leasing at theMart to close the meeting with comments expressing appreciation to all those who had contributed to the success of NeoCon, and the commitment of Vornado and the Merchandise Mart Properties to the long-term continuation of that success.