In today's push to reduce, re-use and recycle the responsible office is looking for ways to meet and exceed these standards.  

It has become common to recycle used paper, toner and ink cartridges, plastics and a myriad of other small office consumables.

But one of the largest and frequently discarded items is the office chair.  

A small number can  be re-sold but, until now, the majority of these obsolete chairs have gone to landfill. 

Is there a solution?

Yes!

Since 1995 Office  MASTER has sold around 20,000 office chairs and the old, discarded ones had to go somewhere, most probably into Landfill if they weren’t able to be re-sold.  Not the best option!

Finding a solution meant talking to our current suppliers in an attempt to reduce this waste and re-use the components within the chair. This was not without some challenges but with a bit of lateral thinking we are now able to recycle 95% of an old ergonomic chair.

Discussions with Dunlop Foams, major chair component suppliers and a local steel merchant mean that we can now take back unusable chairs and have them recycled into foam carpet underlay, plastic chair bases, and many other items.

Dunlop Foams can recycle the used foam into carpet underlay.  We currently use chair bases that contain 20% recycled materials and these can also be recycled. 

The Recycling Program

How it works

Your old chair can be collected for free when we deliver your new one. It is brought back to our factory and stripped down to it’s individual components.  These are then returned to our suppliers or to the steel merchant for recycling. 

Office MASTER does not receive remuneration from either Dunlop or our component suppliers for these recycled items.  We do receive a small remuneration for the steel component.  This goes towards employing a number of persons with disabilities to provide this service. Thus giving an area of the workforce added employment opportunities.

What if we have old chairs but don’t need new ones?

We are happy to recycle chairs even if you are not purchasing a new one from us, however we do have a small handling charge of $11.00 (incl. GST) per chair to cover freight and labour costs.

What can be recycled?

• Foam—Dunlop crumble the foam and send it back to Melbourne to be turned into underlay.

• Mechanism, Back Post, Gas cylinder-Sent to a local steel merchant

• Plastic base, chair back and gas bellows– Returned to the supplier for recycling on the mainland

At this stage we cannot recycle the fabric , seat board or the castors, however we are looking at ways we can avoid sending these to landfill as well.