Commercial removal and storage company Egans helps businesses remove, store and relocate their office furniture. Through its Wise Office Furniture program, Egans repairs, resells and recycles second-hand office furniture, workstations and storage units.

The company also works one-on-one with clients like the University of Sydney to relocate workstations across the campus, providing an expert dismantling and rebuilding service so as to avoid any waste, and providing access to second-hand furniture where needed.

The problem that Egans identified in the linear model of office furniture collection and disposal was the amount of waste that ends up landfill. In Sydney, the average office de-fit sends and estimated 79 per cent of furniture and workstations to landfill. That means that only 21 per cent is recovered for future use.

Egans set out to reverse this trend by setting the initial goal of an 80 per cent landfill diversion rate for office furniture, a milestone it has already achieved. Now, the company is working on procurement and education initiatives with the tertiary sector to push this figure all the way up to 100 per cent or, as company founder Andrew Egan puts it, “going full circle”.  

Egans also uses data to capture the benefits of a circular approach. For every piece of furniture it handles — which is around 300 per day — Egans can show customers "how much it sold for and who it sold to and, if it was recycled, how many tonnes of material were recovered and the remainder that went to the tip".

“We've never had so much interest in our company. We've never been so engaged with our customers. We've never generated results like we're generating now, both from our typical measures of landfill avoidance and resource recovery and volume,” Andrew says. “The volumes are sky high, customer interaction is sky high.”