Low carbon office furniture and services

Design, remanufacturing, and supply of furniture for office buildings to reduce embodied carbon.

Climate Change Mitigation Resource Use Advancing Net Zero

Problem Addressed

Furniture is a significant source of embodied greenhouse gas emissions for an office building over a 40-year life.

Offices across the UK send 300 tonnes of office furniture to landfill every working day (source: Loft UK).

Solution Overview

Rype’s mission is to substantially reduce the carbon emissions and cost of offices. Rype uses innovative engineering practices to remanufacture used office furniture items into as-new sustainable furniture.

Rype supplies high quality, low carbon furniture and provides design and consulting services to help create beautiful interiors to achieve Net Zero Carbon targets.

Rype’s unique approach harnesses the power of the Circular Economy to:

avoid emissions
reduce waste
save the client money

Remanufacturing allows for bespoke design solutions. Over 300 completed projects show that offices can be beautiful, sustainable, and cost less.

Rype’s services include:

Furniture supply, Rype’s 4 approaches to furnishing a sustainable and affordable office:

Rype Office runs a guaranteed take-back scheme where they take back the furniture that they provide to remanufacture it, which saves clients on disposal costs and waste.

2. Design, providing beautiful sustainable office spaces

3. Net Zero carbon consultancy, reduce embodied emissions by over 50% in the first circular economy project and 90% reduction in the second circular economy project

4. Clearance, Rype provides furniture fleet management programmes to help clients rehome or redeploy office furniture as and when needed, embracing the circular economy model.

Remanufactured furniture is up to 30% cheaper than buying new furniture made from virgin resources.

Rype have remanufactured over 30,000 office furniture items, saving:

£ millions for clients
over 1M kgCo2e
400T of waste

As well as providing more than 8,000 hours of real living wage work for those furthest from the workforce.

Company name

Rype Office

UK availability

Yes

Solution launch date

2015

Case Study

JLL 20 Water Street – Rype Office

Rype supplied all furniture for JLL’s 38,000 square foot Docklands office which created substantial savings in carbon emissions, waste, and costs – while also generating social value.

UK Green Building Council

In 2016 Rype helped to design and create the sustainable furniture scheme for the UKGBC office refit. The project achieved the lowest embodied carbon footprint ever recorded for an office refurbishment in the UK. At 139 kgCO2/m² the office has an embodied carbon footprint 22% below a comparable “standard” fit out and the lowest ever recorded in the UK (Sturgis Carbon Profiling database; WRAP database*).

~30 %

This page presents data, evidence, and solutions that are provided by our partners and members and should therefore not be attributed to UKGBC. While we showcase these solutions for inspiration, to build consensus, and create momentum for climate action, UKGBC does not offer commercial endorsement of individual solutions. If you would like to quote something from this page, or more information, please contact our Communications team at media@ukgbc.org.