Herman Miller

Herman Miller is an office furniture manufacturing company, established in 1923, and headquartered in the town of Zeeland in southwestern Michigan. In addition to manufacturing furniture and office products, it also provides design services to help clients more efficiently organize their office space. While its best-known product is the ergonomic Aeron chair, it has also been consistently recognized as a leader in green manufacturing and design. (This company is not to be confused with Howard Miller, the clock-making company that was spun off in the 1930s from Herman Miller and is also headquartered in Zeeland.)

There are three main reasons for Herman Miller to be highlighted in a compendium on green business. First, most of its products are certified under third-party organizations that designate products with low chemical and particle emissions in order to improve indoor air quality. Second, it is heavily involved in the green building industry, not only by providing products that help meet green building goals, but by having its own facilities certified under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program of the U.S. Green Building Council. Third, its holistic approach to environmental management not only includes its buildings and products but its entire production process and has done so for many decades, not only as part of the early 21st-century green wave.

One of the difficulties involved in making manufacturing processes environmentally friendly is the complexity of those processes. Particularly in the age of global assembly lines, many different suppliers contribute to the final product. For example, an office chair incorporates fabrics, plastics, and metals. Herman Miller's Design for the Environment team incorporates all of these items in a database that lists every material used in each of their products. The database was a necessary first step in requiring all of their suppliers to use materials with low emissions and/or recycled materials. This results in products that enable customers to meet their own goals with regard to indoor air quality by using low-emissions furniture. The company was one of the first to have many of its products follow third-party certification schemes such as Green Guard or cradle-to-cradle. By definition, cradle-to-cradle means the use of materials that are not only sustainably harvested or manufactured, but can be recycled at the end of their useful life. Since 2001, all of Herman Miller's new products must meet these standards, and the goal is to have every one of its products meet cradle-to-cradle certification by the year 2020.

[Page 312]One of the common criticisms of such third-party certifications is that they focus on the characteristics of a single manufactured object and only tangentially on the environmental impacts of the manufacturing and distribution processes. In contrast, Herman Miller has devoted as much effort to its facilities as to its products. In particular, it has been among the pioneers of green building in southwestern Michigan (along with competitors Haworth and Steelcase), leading to the Grand Rapids–Holland metropolitan area having the highest number of green buildings per capita anywhere in the United States. While only a few of these buildings are associated with Herman Miller, they have served as a model for other institutions in the region in the same way that universities or local governments have in other parts of the country.

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