When office leases end, the furniture becomes trash. Not any more – schools and NGOs in Hong Kong reuse it under sustainability initiative

Sustainable Office Solutions has saved more than 17,000 items of furniture, diverting 250,000 kilograms of waste from Hong Kong landfills, in less than a year

The furniture it rescues and redirects to schools, community spaces and NGOs in the city comes from companies that vacate rented office space

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AI lab at Lok Sin Tong Yu Kan Hing Secondary School, kitted out with secondhand furniture from the Hong Kong offices of a European bank.

Published: 7:15am, 26 Apr 2022Updated: 9:40am, 26 Apr 2022

In Hong Kong, when companies need to move offices most of their furniture and interior finishes end up in one place: the landfill.

For a city that produces more than 5.3 million tonnes of waste every year, that’s a big problem – one that Robert Wall hopes to alleviate.

“What is really remarkable is the quality of the furniture being discarded,” says Wall, managing director of JEB Group, which specialises in workplace design and architecture. Just under a year ago, he helped launch Sustainable Office Solutions – SOS for short – to recuperate and reuse as much of that furniture as possible.

So far, SOS has saved more than 17,000 pieces of furniture, in the process diverting 250,000 kilograms (551,000 pounds) of waste from the rubbish heap.

Robert Wall, the managing director of JEB Group, launched Sustainable Office Solutions just under a year ago.

Some of those items have been reused by the companies that would have otherwise discarded them, but many of them have gone to schools, community groups and other non-profit organisations that cannot stretch their budget far enough to buy new furniture.