Raymour & Flanigan’s Green Initiative Grows

October 25, 2007  by in UnCategorized   

By Home Furnishings Business in Furniture Retailing on October 2007 Raymour & Flanigan, Liverpool, N.Y., will divert 15.2 million pounds of cardboard, Styrofoam and plastic from landfills this year as part of a recycling initiative in which what were once waste materials are transformed into consumer products ranging from egg cartons and lunch trays to picture frames and counter tops.

Much of the recyclable material is sent to a recently upgraded 41,000-square-foot recycling center at the 72-store retailer’s main campus. This year, Raymour & Flanigan is on track to recycle 13.2 million pounds of cardboard, 1.3 million pounds of plastic and 700,000 pounds of Styrofoam.

With Styrofoam, the recycling center uses a heat extrusion process to reduce the material to one-tenth its original size, producing 50-pound “ingots” manufacturers can use to produce new products.

“Our technicians can produce approximately 100 ingots per day—the equivalent of seven full trailers of Styrofoam—that would have otherwise gone into a landfill,” said Jeff Lannier, senior vice president of distribution. “The company anticipates processing 700,000 pounds of Styrofoam this year, or the equivalent of approximately 1,000 trailer loads.”

Executive Vice President Steve Goldberg said, “As our packaging volume increased with our company growth, we made the decision (in 2002) to create a permanent Reycling Center on our main campus to process all this waste material. We added three new positions (in the center) since February for a total of nine associates.”

The company recently launched a “mixed office paper” initiative in which all showrooms and other facilities will send recyclable paper to Liverpool for processing.