cradle to cradle
os t 9-607-003
REV: FEBRUARY 7, 2008
DEISHIN LEE
rP
LIONEL BONY
Cradle-to-Cradle Design at Herman Miller: Moving
Toward Environmental Sustainability
yo
We put Herman Miller’s corporate environmental goal quite simply: to become a sustainable business— manufacturing products without reducing the capacity of the environment to provide for future generations.”
— Herman Miller website
No tC op
Drew Schramm, senior VP of Supply Chain Management, reflected on the irony of his position at
Herman Miller. Brought in as a supply-chain specialist to cut costs, he somehow found himself on the steering committee of the Design for Environment (DfE) team, charged with setting the company’s environmental policy and direction. He agreed with the team when they decided to adopt the cradleto-cradle (C2C) design protocol1 for environmental sustainability,2 on the new mid-level office chair.
Herman Miller had been working with an external design house on the conceptual design for the
Mirra chair for several months and in October 2001, the DfE team became involved to guide the design and development of the product using the C2C design protocol. The Mirra chair would be the most advanced and complete application of the C2C design protocol among any product manufacturer to date.3 It was challenging to implement a new design process while designing a new product, but everyone agreed that C2C was the way to go. However, the team now faced a decision that was clearly a development milestone: whether to use polyvinyl chloride (PVC) in the arm pads of the chair. Arm pads were a critical part of the chair in terms of customer perception for comfort and wear (quality), and could contribute up to 10% of the cost of the entire chair. PVC violated the standards of the C2C protocol because of the toxins released during its manufacture and when it was burned.4 However,
PVC was a standard material in the office furniture industry (more than 50% of
REV: FEBRUARY 7, 2008
DEISHIN LEE
rP
LIONEL BONY
Cradle-to-Cradle Design at Herman Miller: Moving
Toward Environmental Sustainability
yo
We put Herman Miller’s corporate environmental goal quite simply: to become a sustainable business— manufacturing products without reducing the capacity of the environment to provide for future generations.”
— Herman Miller website
No tC op
Drew Schramm, senior VP of Supply Chain Management, reflected on the irony of his position at
Herman Miller. Brought in as a supply-chain specialist to cut costs, he somehow found himself on the steering committee of the Design for Environment (DfE) team, charged with setting the company’s environmental policy and direction. He agreed with the team when they decided to adopt the cradleto-cradle (C2C) design protocol1 for environmental sustainability,2 on the new mid-level office chair.
Herman Miller had been working with an external design house on the conceptual design for the
Mirra chair for several months and in October 2001, the DfE team became involved to guide the design and development of the product using the C2C design protocol. The Mirra chair would be the most advanced and complete application of the C2C design protocol among any product manufacturer to date.3 It was challenging to implement a new design process while designing a new product, but everyone agreed that C2C was the way to go. However, the team now faced a decision that was clearly a development milestone: whether to use polyvinyl chloride (PVC) in the arm pads of the chair. Arm pads were a critical part of the chair in terms of customer perception for comfort and wear (quality), and could contribute up to 10% of the cost of the entire chair. PVC violated the standards of the C2C protocol because of the toxins released during its manufacture and when it was burned.4 However,
PVC was a standard material in the office furniture industry (more than 50% of