Raymour & Flanigan: A sustainable business culture
Retailer goes green on variety of fronts
Heath E. Combs -- Furniture Today, June 11, 2008
LIVERPOOL, N.Y. — Saying that Raymour & Flanigan is going green is an understatement.
Saying that a company-wide culture of sustainable business practices has taken hold would be more like it. And the retailer demonstrates this commitment in many tangible ways.
Take, for example, that Raymour & Flanigan – the nation’s tenth-largest furniture retailer – recently switched all the showroom lighting in its 83 stores in seven states from incandescent to compact fluorescent light bulbs. The new CFL bulbs have a lifetime of about 10 years.
 Raymour & Flanigan reduced energy consumption in its Customer Service Centers by installing fixtures that provide twice the illumination of the old ones. This energy reduction is the equivalent of removing 70 cars from the road, saving 44,850 gallons of gas or preserving 108 acres of forest. |
| Raymour & Flanigan reduced energy consumption in its Customer Service Centers by installing fixtures that provide twice the illumination of the old ones. This energy reduction is the equivalent of removing 70 cars from the road, saving 44,850 gallons of gas or preserving 108 acres of forest. |
 Raymour & Flanigan began collecting and baling mixed office paper at the Liverpool Recycling Center in October 2007. |
| Raymour & Flanigan began collecting and baling mixed office paper at the Liverpool Recycling Center in October 2007. |
That meant switching out 17,000 bulbs, said Sonny Rousell, vice president of real estate and construction for Raymour & Flanigan. He added that the changeover saved some 62,000 gallons of gas.
Rousell said that the stores have a contract in place to recycle the CFL bulbs, keeping their mercury out of the trash.
In another example, the retailer has been converting to more efficient flat-panel display monitors from cathode ray tube screens. Replacing more than 2,500 of the conventional monitors has saved another 6,923 gallons of gas or 67 tons of carbon.
Going green mean more than simply following a trend -- it’s a deep commitment, said Rousell.
“We’ve tried to quantify green into tangibles. So our customers, associates and communities can see the trees for the forest, pun intended,” said Rousell.
Company officials say the move toward green really took off in 2006, when Neil Goldberg, president and CEO, saw Styrofoam while visiting a customer service center and asked if could be recycled.
Goldberg tasked his logistics and distribution teams with finding what it would take to recycle all of the retailer’s packaging materials.
In June of 2007, the company opened its new recycling center, which contains a heat extruder for processing Styrofoam into ingots that can be used for creating recycled consumer products such as picture frames and counter tops.
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 Raymour & Flanigan recycles its Styrofoam into ingots that can be used to make picture frames, countertops and tub surrounds. |
| Raymour & Flanigan recycles its Styrofoam into ingots that can be used to make picture frames, countertops and tub surrounds. |
The retrofitted 41,000-square-foot building is located on Raymour’s 63-acre main campus in Liverpool.
Last fall, the company moved an 80-ton cardboard bailer into the center. Since the facility opened, nearly 18.5 million pounds of cardboard, Styrofoam and plastic packaging have been recycled.
“Considering that we ship over 3.4 million pieces annually, this is a considerable savings of packaging material waste diverted from Northeast landfills,” said Vicky D’Agostino, director of communications.
Raymour & Flanigan’s transportation center project launched last fall. The waste oil generated by the company’s fleet of 500 vehicles was used to heat the new 12,000-square-foot service garage that opened last winter.
And it’s also a way to keep waste oil from being carried offsite, lower power consumption and keep waste out of oil separators.
“It’s a multi-prong approach to save some utility money and some environmental energy impact to your site,” said Rousell. “It starts a little at a time and builds momentum.”
The recycling center and the transportation project were championed by Jeff Lannier, senior vice president of logistics and distribution.
Operations have been a big focus of the retailer’s green efforts, but there’s also a big focus on stores. This summer, Raymour & Flanigan will open its first Energy Star-rated store in New Jersey.
 Raymour & Flanigan Recycling Technician Gordy Avery packs a final Styrofoam ingot for a shipment that will be collected by a broker. This shipment contains about 38,000 pounds of byproduct. |
| Raymour & Flanigan Recycling Technician Gordy Avery packs a final Styrofoam ingot for a shipment that will be collected by a broker. This shipment contains about 38,000 pounds of byproduct. |
It will become the model for more green-compliant stores that the company will build in the future.
The highly insulated Energy Star facility’s energy-saving features include special glass that helps control heat transfer and lower energy costs; white reflective roof membranes to reflect ultraviolet gains from sunlight and keep roofs cooler; and a load-shedding energy management system that reduces energy demand based on peak energy.
The company has begun employing similar systems in other stores across its seven-state footprint.
Energy Star buildings meet strict energy efficiency guidelines set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy.
“Securing the approval rating requires a significant commitment of company resources beginning with design premise, construction methodology and engineering modeling,” said Rousell.
Rousell said the company also is beginning to extend green efforts to some of its construction methodology, partnering with material companies that use post-consumer recycled content, from carpet to ceiling tiles.
The company also has begun tackling power consumption. Across most New York locations, it is using renewable energy. Starting in January, Juice Energy began helping Raymour & Flanigan manage its electricity budget with custom renewable power strategies.
The green power purchase takes the form of Green-e certified renewal energy credits generated at wind facilities across the United States and saves more than 800 tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year.
The company is purchasing 10% of its energy in New York state from renewable sources and has established itself as an EPA Green Power partner.
“It was a conscious effort to avoid an increase in utility rates and get rid of ever-increasing market rate utility costs by buying green power,” Rousell said about the program.
The retailer’s energy-management system enables it to better control usage during non-operating hours.
“We’re continuing on the low-hanging fruit right now. As the fruit continues to get higher up the tree, to extend our green initiatives, we must increase efforts across the organization accordingly,” Rousell said.
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