Green Practices
Reuse of Office Furniture
There have been numerous renovation projects in the office and teaching areas on campus over the past few years. These projects focused on creating a welcoming environment for students to learn to share and to experience a multifaceted student life at HKUST. While we are trying fervently to fuel the vibrancy of the University to a higher ground, replacing load of old furniture as a result of the renovation work has created a dilemma to a University that embraces sustainability as a way forward.
To harmonize with new office design, lots of old furniture, albeit functionally good and aesthetically appealing in many cases, has to be replaced inevitably. In so doing, we have generated a large pile of usable furniture without destiny.
To prevent the furniture from being disposed as waste in the landfill has become a meaningful task that deserves a moment of serious thought.
Under the current arrangement, departments must return all furniture provided by the Facilities Management Office (FMO), damaged or not, to the FMO store if they consider the furniture is surplus to requirements when vacating an office or laboratory. As for the unwanted equipment and furniture under their own inventory control, functional or damaged, departments are required to report to the Finance Office (FO) for disposal. FO will circulate information of the functional items available for free to all Inter-Departmental Liaison Persons (IDLP). Interested parties can contact owners of the disposable items for making arrangement of an official transfer.
The whole process, however, only applies to inventory controlled items with a monetary value of more than $5,000 dollars. It is not too difficult to imagine that majority of the items entered this pool are laboratory or research related equipment as the cost of these pieces equipment generally exceeds the inventory controlled boundary. However, how often do we find a single piece of general office furniture item such as office desk, chair, mid-sized cabinet or partition which costs more than $5,000? There is no apparent, established channel for departments to spread the news to other internal units for non-inventory controlled items that they can offer for free. Regularly, FMO will assist departments to identify external NGOs to take advantage of the situation. More often, these items will end up as scrap or wastes filling up the landfill.
Without a recognizable channel, e-mail and verbal communication among colleagues are the two most common paths where news about giveaway equipment and furniture is received. Despite the lack of an established mechanism to help find new homes for used furniture and equipment, encouraging stories of reusing abandoned items are heard periodically. During the relocation of the Business School to the Lee Shau Kee Business Building, the Business School offered their equipment and furniture that they could not reuse at the LSKBB to other departments. Many departments were able to find office equipment and furniture that met their needs and benefited from the move. Another noticeable example was at the time when Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) group was dissolved. VPABO arranged several rounds of open house for campus units to collect usable items that were left by the ERP group. The amount of saving can be substantial. Among other departments and units, HSEO had taken advantage of the abandoned partitions, office desks, benches and cabinets that were left by various units over the years. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were saved during the course.
In essence, we should try our best to contribute to the development of a sustainable campus by conserving and fully utilizing our furniture.