World Environment Day and the Butterfly Effect
This year, to commemorate World Environment Day on June 5th, TFX supported a Habitat for Humanity fundraiser for their New Jersey operations near our offices. Throughout the year, we also donate hundreds of furniture items to their retail resale operations and housing rehabilitation projects.
World Environment Day was established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1972 to raise awareness about climate change, global warming, and the subsequent loss of biodiversity caused by unsustainable practices worldwide. It is intended to draw attention to what individuals, governments and organizations can do to address pressing environmental issues.
Climate change and global warming can be an overwhelming topic to tackle for individuals. It can feel just too big for any one person, or for that matter one company, to do anything that can really make a difference.
And it got us thinking about the “butterfly effect.”
For those who don’t know, the butterfly effect is not just a sci-fi movie from twenty years ago. Rather it’s a term coined in the 1960s by an MIT meteorologist named Edward Lorenz who suggested that tiny changes can have big consequences. He used this theory in weather prediction for comparing starting points of weather patterns that might have totally different effects.
It goes something like this: a small butterfly flapping its wings can start a chain reaction that can lead to ripples of air, creating much bigger winds blowing weeks later, thousands of miles away.
Those winds can be destructive, like a tornado or a typhoon. Or they can be harnessed benevolently, by wind turbines creating alternative, more sustainable energy sources.
The point is that we are all interconnected and small things matter, in ways we often don’t appreciate in the big picture. And those small things can either combine to be chaos and catastrophe, or they can combine to be impactful in truly wonderful ways.
Historically, the decommissioning and liquidation sector has gained notoriety for its significant contribution to waste, with a considerable portion of our clients' unwanted office furniture often ending up in landfills. Long before it was fashionable to be “green”, TFX set our own standards for reversing this trend, making sustainability a key metric our clients could rely on.
Our CEO, Brian Silverberg, continuously challenges us to keep raising the barre for landfill diversions and certifiable recycling reporting, aiming for 90% diversion, which is not always easy!
How do we do it? It helps that we are an end-to-end service including planning, disassembly, trucking and moving, provider as opposed to outsourcing key functions, like so many in the business. We can hold recycling partners accountable to the last mile. And our inhouse remanufacturing services and donation services ensure that every item we recover in a decommissioning job gets a shot at useful life extension. But still, it requires relentless diligence, planning and focus.
What’s one desk or broken chair ending up in a landfill? Maybe not much, but cumulatively that mindset can add up to disastrous results for the health of the planet. We take pride therefore that our standards for sustainability in every job we execute are unparalleled in the industry.
Every incremental thing we do at TFX to provide reliable, sustainable services to our clients is our own personal commitment to a positive “butterfly effect” in the world.
Our World Environment Day 2024 contribution to Habitat for Humanity is a small effort in the grand schemes of things, but representative of the way we support charities nationwide through the year as part of our commitment to the circular economy.
That’s a lot of butterflies!
Contact us to talk about your own goals for sustainable office furniture management at inquiry@tfxfurniture.com