Sustainability stories
Grassroots environmental committee
Stories that inspire our path to a better world
Back in the late 1980s—long before the word "sustainability" entered the corporate conversation, or the conversation at all—a Herman Miller chemical engineer named Paul Murray started asking some big questions. He wanted to know: How can we make our products, operations, and buildings better for the environment?
Murray didn’t wait for someone at the top to tell him to go ahead. Instead, he pulled together a small group of people from different parts of the company—designers, engineers, managers, and operations employees. This coalition believed that if we were going to stay true to our values, we needed to rethink how we made things.
As an early initiative, Murray and the team partnered with architect William McDonough to design the GreenHouse—a building so ahead of its time, it became a model for what we now call green building.
But they didn’t stop at buildings. The grassroots committee also collaborated with McDonough to create a new way to design products called Design for the Environment (DfE). The Mirra Chair by Studio 7.5 was the first product created using the new process, which resulted in the designers using more recycled materials, eliminating harmful plastics like PVC, and creating a chair that could be taken apart easily for recycling. Most notably, none of this came from a top-down initiative. It started with people on the floor, doing what they believed was right, and grew to over 400 of our then 6,000 employees being involved.
That same mindset continues today through MillerKnoll’s goal to reach net-zero carbon emissions, use 100 percent bio-based materials, and eliminate waste—all by 2050.
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The MillerKnoll GreenHouse
Our seating plant in Michigan provided a template for the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program.
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