Environmental Leader

Raymour & Flanigan Furniture says it’s on track to recycle 15.2 million pounds of waste this year “Furniture ships from our manufacturers in cardboard, plastic and Styrofoam packaging,” explains Michael Goldberg, Executive Vice President. “Considering we sell on average 8,000 pieces of furniture each day, we generate a lot of recyclable material.”

Raymour & Flanigan has renovated a 41,000 square foot recycling center on their main campus to handle the material. What used to be sent to landfills is now sent to the Recycling Center in Liverpool New York for handling and processing. The recycled materials are used by other manufacturers to create new consumer products.

Starting with a reduction process known as heat extrusion, technicians at Raymour & Flanigan take clean bulk Styrofoam; send it through a special processing unit which reduces it to 10 percent of its original size to make an end product called an “ingot” weighing approximately 50 pounds, the company reports. Ingots are shipped to manufacturers instead of area landfills.

The company’s goal for 2007 is to recycle 700,000 pounds of Styrofoam, 13.2 million pounds of cardboard, and 1.3 million pounds of plastic.

The recycling centers process all cardboard and Styrofoam generated from the company’s entire market area in the Northeast. All plastics are recycled at respective Customer Service Centers and bales of plastics are then consolidated at the main recycling facility.