Are you looking for a way to defray the expense of your furniture investment? Or maybe you’d like to find a sustainable way to give your retiring furniture another life?
Perhaps you want to engage in a program that will allow you to continuously keep your residence halls looking fresh and up to date without the waste of disposable furniture.
At DCI, we offer you a robust furniture buyback program. When you furnish your residence halls with our products, we’ll gladly buy back all your furniture at the end of its lifetime. That includes removing it from your campus at no expense to you.
And you definitely heard me right. We’ll even pay you for it!
Why Extend The Life of Your Furniture?
So why is this a good idea for you, for us, and for the planet? And how does it work?
First of all, whenever possible, we try to advance the values of sustainabilitythrough our business. Our founder, Henry Kober, is fond of saying that “sustainability just makes good business sense.”
In that spirit, we recycle, reuse, and repurpose everything we can. In fact, we can run a zero waste manufacturing facility because we don’t squander any of our wood.
For example, we power our factory with renewable biomass fuel—the sawdust we capture from our own machinery.
Let Us Repurpose Your Old Furniture
Ok, but where does your old furniture fit in here?
One hallmark of sustainability is extending your product lifecycle. Can you extend the life of a product and keep it out of the landfill? The longer you can use a product, the better. That way, you don’t burden the earth with more trash.
Even better, can you reuse or repurpose it? We don’t have unlimited landfill space after all.
If you take advantage of our buy-back program, you’re practicing one of the most powerful tenets of sustainability: reduce, repurpose, reuse, recycle.
So how does the buyback program make you a sustainability champion?
Because we are going to significantly extend the life of your furniture. We’re going to reuse almost all of it. And what we can’t reuse or repurpose, we’ll recycle or burn as renewable biomass fuel to power our factory.
We’ll Remove Your Old Furniture
Also, you probably noticed, but it’s a big pain to get rid of your old furniture. It costs time and money. Who is going to do it? What are they going to do with it? Where will it go? And how will you get it there?
In many cases, you also have new students moving in soon and your housing staff is already maxed out.
So we’ll take care of it for you.
And before we install your new furniture, we’ll also remove your old furniture, whether we sold it to you or not.
That also saves you money since you don’t have to pay anyone to remove your old furniture.
Defray Your Costs With Our Buyback Program
But with our buyback program, when you buy DCI furniture and take advantage of our buyback plan, you’re making a long-term investment.
We’ve been in business for 45 years, and we have this agreement in place with a number of schools. For example, we have an arrangement with the University of New Hampshire where we buy back the hardwood furniture we installed on their campus over 25 years ago.
Then we break it down and use the wood for internal components in their new furniture. That’s repurposing and upcycling at it’s best.
Giving Old Furniture New Life
So how do we manage this process and what does it look like?
First, we remove your furniture and bring it back to our factory. Once the trucks are unloaded, we start the sorting process.
- Step 1: When the furniture arrives, we inspect it and then disassemble it.
- Step 2: We remove and inspect all the drawers. We then remove all the drawer glides and reuse the ones that operate smoothly and recycle the broken and sub-standard glides.
- Step 3: We refinish and reuse all the drawer fronts in good condition. Funky drawer fronts get cut up and used as structural components in new furniture.
- Step 4: Likewise, we refinish and reuse drawer sides in good condition. We use the lower quality drawer sides as renewable biomass fuel.
Tops, Backs, Components, Hardware
- Step 5: We sort the tops, refinishing and reusing the good stock. We cut up the substandard tops and use them as structural components in new furniture.
- Step 6: After the case backs are removed, we reuse the ones in good condition.
- Step 7: We remove components for either reuse or fuel depending on their quality and condition.
- Step 8: We sort and remove all hardware.
The Blessings of A Buyback Program
The buyback program blesses you with a bunch of benefits.
First, it’s a strong sustainability play. Your furniture will live on beyond its tenure on your campus either in the form of new furniture or as fuel for our factory. Or we’ll recycle it. Nothing will go to waste.
Second, the program saves you money on several fronts. We’ll absorb the cost of removing it from your campus. Not only that, we’ll pay you to take it back when you’re through with it.
Finally, it will allow you to engage in an ongoing program to keep your residence halls refreshed with furnishings that continuously adapt to the latest trends and designs to accommodate modern students and their evolving needs.
So what are you waiting for? Let’s do this!