Herman Miller advertises its Celle chair, manufactured from materials that are 99 percent recyclable in a factory that uses alternative energy.
InterFace Flor, whose head, Ray Anderson, has been a pioneer for sustainability in the industry, has a take-back program for its jazzy carpet tiles and is developing carpeting that blends nylon with fibers made from plant materials.
Oceanside Glasstile gets points for a handsome line of tile that uses more than two million pounds of glass from curbside recycling.
It's not just that the makers of office partitions and acoustic ceiling tiles have been conscience-stricken over polluting the planet with toxic, chemical-laden wares - though that's part of it.
"This is customer-driven," says Julie Smith, spokeswoman for the office-furniture maker Haworth. "Our customers are asking for [evidence of] sustainability to be included as part of the bidding process."
Helping to boost that demand, says Penny Bonda, a commercial-interiors designer turned green-design consultant, is the rating system for green construction introduced by the U.S. Green Building Council in 2000. Dubbed LEED (for "Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design"), the voluntary system awards points toward a silver, gold or platinum designation.
"When I first got involved in green design in the early 1990s, it was really a fringe movement, like hippies with wood stoves," says Bonda, who helped the council create a separate LEED designation for commercial interiors in 2004. "Not anymore."
"The LEED rating system definitely helped drive things," says Diann Barbacci, vice president of sustainable design for the Mohawk group, whose contract carpet brands include Lees, Bigelow and Karastan.
"And now you also have state and local governments that are building green requirements into their procurement programs," she says.
That means if you want to sell to those agencies, you have to go green.
