Cradle-to-Cradle Design at Herman Miller- Moving Toward Environmental Sustainability PDF

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Cradle-to-Cradle Design at Herman Miller: Moving Toward Environmental Sustainability Herman Miller was founded as the Michigan Star Furniture Company in 1905, but it’s true father was D.J. De Pree, who purchased and renamed (after his father-in-law) the company in 1923 .D.J. De Pree believed that Herman Miller should not be satisfied with offering innovation and good design. He also strongly believed that his firm served a moral purpose .There is a very strong culture at Herman Miller—humility is a big part of it. We respect each other, we care about the environment Herman Miller sales grew from $25 million in 1970, when it first became a publicly traded company, to $1.5 billion in 2002 .Herman Miller was one of the top four suppliers in the U.S. office furniture industry. Herman Miller offered a suite of office furniture like seating,systems furniture, filing and storage,desks and tables or healthcare. The company adopted the triple-bottom-line philosophy of financial, environmental, and social responsibility performance In 1989, the company formed the Environmental Quality Action Team (EQAT) to set the company’s environmental direction and priorities, and to measure the results The company was betting that global resource constraints were leading to tightening of legislation on the use of materials and energy, and waste disposal. William McDonough approached the company in 1997 with an offer to integrate sustainability principles.McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC) consulting firm with German chemist Michael Braungart, and was working with companies such as BASF, Ciba Geigy, and Nike on defining what would become the cradle-to-cradle (C2C) design protocol The C2C protocol was based on two premises: -Eco-effectiveness vs. eco-efficiency -Waste equals food Translating C2C Principles into Design There were four key elements for implementing C2C, according to MBDC: -Biological and technical nutrients -The Green-Yellow-Orange-Red list -Disassembly

-Recyclability and recycled content

Implementation of C2C at Herman Miller In 1997, Herman Miller initiated a project to evaluate a number of environmental protocols that could help the company move toward environmental sustainability Herman Miller product developers, engineers, supply chain managers, and the Environmental Affairs department worked with MBDC to develop the practical elements of the C2C design process. Herman Miller worked with MBDC on how to operationalize the C2C design protocol . The Mirra chair, intended to be a mid-level office chair, retailing for approximately $750,22 would be the first product designed from beginning to end under the C2C protocol. The Herman Miller product development process consisted of four phases: Exploration, Development, Launch, and Maintenance Toward the end of the Development phase, once the basic design had been determined, the manufacturing team began to design the line to assemble the Mirra chair There was considerable up-front work to populate the DfE materials database Herman Miller use a long suppliers chain management for its products Sales and marketing: Mirra chair was the first highly engineered product to use the C2C protocol so the price result from that and its marketing too Closing the loop : collecting the chairs to send to materials recyclers: 1) Herman Miller could collect the chairs itself, 2) retailers could collect them, or 3) a third party collector could collect them The PVC Decision PVC had gotten a lot of bad press since the death of 87 people the Mirra chair PVC-free would not significantly impact its DfE score as the contribution per part was determined by weight

Development and supply chain management teams preferred to proceed with PVC for the Mirra launch to buy them more time to either find a cheaper alternative to TPU, or work with the supplier to achieve consistent quality with TPU PROBLEM AND RECOMMENDATION The problem was here to respect the environmental protocol and my recommendation is to hire some people specialized in this way to control all the production to make sure that the error they already made will never happen again...