Learn more about the best ways to go green with your office furniture manufacturers

What to do with it when you're over it. We can't promise we're going to like something forever or that our furnishing needs won't change. When it's time to bid a chair, table, bed, or dresser farewell, make sure it goes to a good home. Sell it on Craigslist, eBay, or the local paper, give it away via Freecycle, or include it in your next yard sale. Putting it safely on the curb with a "free" sign on it can also do the trick. If you are the crafty type, lots of furniture can be repurposed into new functions or just freshened up with new paint or finish. No sturdy artifact should have to live out eternity in the landfill. If it's your mission to get deeper into the office furniture manufacturers space, put on your designer's smock and start tinkering. Think about refurbishing old furniture or entirely repurposing other objects, like this bathtub turned arm chair. In this design, a clever individual speced out a top-notch chair from heavy-duty fabric-covered cardboard tubes, aluminum rings, and wood. Heavy-duty cardboard can be fashioned to interlock in creative ways. If you've got fertile ground and some time to spare you can even grow your own furniture to suit. The Spanish group Drap-Art has a reuse festival that is ripe with ideas.

Founded in 1905 to make traditional wooden office table, Herman Miller began its modern furniture design saga by hiring designer Gilbert Rohde in 1929. Rohde's influence on Herman Miller's destiny was profound; his austere designs derived from his studies in Europe, especially at the Bauhaus, that fountain of modern architectural design. He undoubtedly was influenced by the Bauhaus masters as well as by Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld's Red and Blue chair and Finnish architect Alvar Aalto's deceptively simple plywood chairs.

Furniture made with reclaimed materialsIf wood is taken care of, and sometimes even if it isn't, it can last a really, really long time. So shouldn't we be able to make good use of all the wood that's already out there? A lot of designers think so and are doing just that. Reclaimed wood usually comes from old furniture, houses, or other built things that are ready for some friendly reincarnation, from flawed wood, or from scraps from a factory that makes other stuff. Some reclaimed wood even comes from logs that sunk to the bottom of rivers as they were being floated downstream to MDF board office table, or from the bottom of man-made reservoirs (check out the Sawfish). Either way, furniture made from reclaimed wood is a great example of resource efficiency, but usually comes in shorter supply. The Rainforest Alliance has a Rediscovered Wood Certification label to look for.