Where is office furniture in New York City?

Herman Miller is one of the most respected manufacturers of office furniture in the world, its design is so appreciated that the Aeron chair, which became a fixture of New York City cabinets, was placed in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

This month, some Herman Miller chairs, which can sell for over $1,000, met a less dignified fate: a deal with the crushing metal jaws of an excavator.

More than three years after the coronavirus pandemic began, about half of office space in the New York City metro area was occupied in June, according to Kastle Systems, a security card company that tracks activity in office buildings. The hollowing out of the city̵[ads1]7;s cubicles has raised existential economic and cultural questions, but also big logistical questions: What do you do with all that office furniture?

The answer can often be found in the back of a moving truck – on its way to the auction block, a liquidator or, more likely, a landfill. Some of the furniture has found new use in schools, churches and moving rooms; other parts have been repackaged by hip retailers, or shipped worldwide.

More than 70 million square feet of direct office space was available for lease in Manhattan in the second quarter of 2023, a record high, compared with about 40 million square feet before the pandemic began, according to Savills, a major commercial real estate firm that tracks the market. New leasing is also still far below pre-Covid levels.

A small class of movers and liquidators have been thrust into the suddenly growing office afterlife market. Lior Rachmany, CEO of Dumbo Moving and Storage, said a number of businesses were moving their furniture into the company’s storage facilities in 2021 and 2022. Nearly 2,000 medium-sized businesses in the region, from law firms to technology startups, have stored office equipment in Dumbo’s three warehouses in New Jersey since Covid hit.

We’ve “never seen so many Herman Miller chairs,” he said.

The shift in the wait-and-see attitude has this year led to an increasing number of clients being unable to pay for storage, Mr. Rachmany said; The company now holds auctions for non-performing lots five times a year, up from once or twice a year before the pandemic. It also regularly donates unclaimed items to local charities, he said, but much of that inventory is still discarded due to a lack of warehouse space.

At a Dumbo company warehouse recently in East Orange, N.J., on an industrial stretch across from a cemetery, a crew of workers prepared to dump the last of a 9,500-pound piece of office space that a Brooklyn tech company had been storing since April 2021. According to Mr. Rachmany, the client paid for disposal of, among other things: 25 Herman Miller chairs; 20 racks for computer monitors; 10 cabinet panels; nine boxes of carpet; and two flat screen TVs.

“The amount of waste in this industry would boggle your mind,” said David Esterlit, the owner of OHR Home Office Solutions, a remodeling company and liquidator in Midtown Manhattan that has resold equipment from large office tenants.

The Dumbo crew drove over an hour to the Maspeth neighborhood of Queens, arriving at a waste disposal facility — one of 38 in New York City — where tall excavators were crushing all manner of commercial debris, and the air smelled of acetone. The trash’s final destination could be a landfill in New York state or Pennsylvania, a station manager said.

The van backed onto a giant industrial scale to weigh the load: 1,080 pounds, at a cost of $81 to Dumbo. Two workers in lime green shirts tossed one chair after another near a mountain of chewed-up debris that was roughly sorted into recyclable metal and everything else.

Despite efforts to reuse and recycle office equipment, most of it still ends up in the trash, said Trevor Langdon, CEO of Green Standards, a sustainability consultancy that helps minimize office waste. Based on 2018 federal statistics on waste, the most recent year for which data is available, Mr. Langdon estimates that more than 10 million tons of office furniture in the United States end up in a landfill each year.

Green Standards said it has diverted almost 39,000 tonnes of office waste from landfills since the pandemic began.

The office equipment in Brooklyn was not so lucky. In a jerky motion, the excavator’s mouth swung over the half-ton pile of furniture and stomped down, contorting the chairs into a hanging metal squid.

Then a worker removed a final chair from the van and carefully placed it on the tarmac. Its ergonomic backrest caught the wind to perform a final spin. Then the excavator crashed, and the chair exploded in a hail of plastic pieces.

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.