Most businesses that manage space today, whether in workplace, hospitality, retail or any other vertical, spend an inordinate amount of time and resources designing and building spaces that data shows will be demolished well before the end of their useful life. Such is the reality of commercial real estate. The rate of change of the experience is higher than what can be accommodated by traditional design and construction timelines.
Outside the tremendous negative impact all of this has on demolition waste, the financial waste is also staggering. For CANOA this is an opportunity to recreate a wasteful 20th century industry into it's lighter, 21st century version.
Build Less. Buy Better. Waste Nothing.™
Interior architecture that is built in-situ can be great, but it lacks any flexibility. What happens if our teams need something different over time? What happens if we change our mind or make a mistake? It is pretty unforgiving. One tactic to navigate the hybrid office needs' for flexibility and adaptation to change are interior modular architectures that can be deployed as furniture. These systems are great for those designing with reuse and low demolition waste in mind.
A subset of commercial furnishings, interior modular components like phone booths, nooks, private offices and even conference rooms can be purchased and assembled directly from manufacturers instead of choosing traditional construction.
The benefits are clear: a higher quality experience, faster to deploy, more freedom to adapt and less waste.
In today's hybrid world, team needs are constantly changing. Having the ability to deploy physical changes faster, cheeper, and with less waste is a powerful tool.
See templates that use modular architecture
We don't always need to buy new. And, when we do, we can buy with longevity in mind. Most of our customers come to CANOA to transition to a circular way of working inside of their own spaces.
We strongly believe people should be armed with the information they need to make good decisions. Unfortunately, this is far from reality in the world of furniture today. Our research shows that less than 3% of commercial products even publish Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) or life cycle assessments (LCAs) today.
To address this gap in data, we have generated a dataset that aggregates certified LCAs and EPDs to generate taxonomic averages for categories of products. Applying volume and mass data to our taxonomic averages allows to produce directionally-accurate product-level predictions of their carbon footprint, a critical data point in calculating carbon savings of reuse over new products.
Our Carbon Index is in beta and already helping our customers make informed purchasing decisions based on data. We will be publishing more detail on our methodology over the coming months.
See how our carbon enriches design templates
Just because we're done using something, doesn't mean that product has reached the end of its life. Many commercial furniture products have warranties that span from 5 to 10, 12 year warranties. Some even have lifetime warranties. Yet, the average business uses and depreciates these assets at 5 years or less.
We already see reuse at scale in hospitality and food and beverage, so why not in workplace?
Businesses should have complete visibility into their own inventory and should be able to use it, deploy it and redeploy it as needed with minimal effort.
It is a common problem for businesses to not have structured inventory or plan data which makes reuse hard. Canoa simplifies this problem and provides tools for teams to onboard and maintain their own inventory whether they're a small company or large.
Enabling teams to reuse their own goods effectively is step one. Step two is to allow other businesses to leverage those goods once you are done with them. Canoa's users are able to submit inventory for sale in the marketplace, allowing other users to see, plan and buy it for their own spaces.
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