More space, less carbon: how we moved office without the waste

Our sustainability work with clients is often about maximising impact and efficiency while minimising cost on projects big and small. We applied that knowledge to save two fitouts and 41 tonnes of carbon in our own recent office move.

As our team in Edinburgh grew, we knew we’d soon need to up-size our office space. But we didn’t want to increase our carbon footprint in the process. Instead, we trialled a more sustainable way to relocate.

The typical Cat A fitout is something of a dirty secret in our industry. These fitouts are regularly responsible for generating tonnes of carbon emissions and material waste simply because they are routinely installed and removed as tenants come and go in offices, often to be replaced with a slightly newer version of what came before.

At the same time, breaking the standard practice of the ‘fit-out-strip-out’ cycle is not straightforward, especially when case studies for its success can be few and far between.

So we decided to become our own test subjects, using our office move as an opportunity to do things differently.

By retaining what we could from the previous tenants and working with both our existing and new landlords, we managed to save around 41 tonnes of CO₂ during the move. This equates to around 144 kgCO₂e/m², a saving significantly below the 312 kgCO₂e/m² LETI target figure[1] and the equivalent of 500 flights between Edinburgh and London City Airport.

This process didn’t take a radical feat of engineering, cutting-edge materials or an expensive team to achieve. What it needed was a technical understanding of the impacts and the key dial movers, which we had in-house, but it also required careful negotiation of complex planning and logistics issues between otherwise cooperative landlords and tenants who recognised the benefits it brought them.

As with all new things, we have learned some valuable lessons during our move. Some parties were more amenable to a new dilapidations process, and we had to work hard to convince other parties who had no experience of a ‘greener’ procedure and were potentially resistant to change.

The carbon savings we made also demonstrate that taking significant action is not just for large corporate occupiers. We hope that this will resonate with SMEs and that they will apply some of the lessons we have learned to achieve similar cost and carbon savings when considering relocation in the future.

Considering SMEs make up 99.9% of all companies in the UK, there is great scope for all of us to change best practice, making it the new standard practice as we evolve into an increasingly sustainable, responsible, industry.

DNA: the building blocks of a sustainable office move

The process we went through can be described as: ‘DNA’: Desire, Negotiate, Agree. This applies to all parties, across existing and new premises whilst relocating. We approached our move in the following way:

• Desire. What does this building already have that we want? Evaluate the furniture, fixtures, equipment and overall fitout, then draw up a list of what you could reuse or benefit from
• Negotiate. Open communication with the existing tenant and agree what they are prepared to sell or leave, and what they are going to be removing. Give them time to discuss with their landlord about what will be left in the building during the dilapidations process  
• Agree. Decide with the landlord and departing tenant to allocate the liability for the retained parts of the fitout, considering the type of lease being undertaken (FRI, IRI, etc). Agree a price for the new fitout, and then exchange

This process has the advantage of relying on open, in-depth communication which helps to mitigate the otherwise adversarial process for an exiting tenant beginning dilapidations negotiations with the landlord. For our own former premises, the process looked like this:

• Desire. Would a prospective new tenant want any of our existing fitout? Would they – or the landlord – be willing to take on the liability for our equipment?
• Negotiate. Assess what is to be removed, what can be retained, and what the landlord or a prospective new tenant would be happy to keep in the space
• Agree. Settle financially between the three parties for the costs of the fitout and complete the dilapidations process

Making sustainable choices pay off

This approach had three major benefits:

• Reducing TFT’s dilapidations liability for a property that requires less remediation
• Being compensated for a fitout that would otherwise have ended up in a skip or recycling facility
• Being incentivised to maintain and reuse our equipment and ensure it serves a full, useful life so that we have the opportunity to sell it with the fitout at the end of our tenancy

The exiting tenants in the new premises benefited too. As well as reducing their dilapidations liability, they gained financially from a fitout that is usually costly to remove and saved themselves from entering into potentially lengthy and confrontational discussions over dilapidations. No element of the existing tenants’ fitout had served its full life so a ‘standard’ dilapidations process in this space would have been a significant waste of carbon. Meanwhile, we were not required to pay an as-new price for a quality fitout that was less than three years old.

We were able to benefit from not needing to install a number of big carbon impact items such as raised access flooring and building services, as well as some smaller, more building specific items such as window blinds (bespoke to the 3m high glazing). Our new office is larger than our previous one, so it made sense to retain all our existing furniture as well as ordering new tables from reclaimed scaffold boards via a local supplier. This has reduced the quantities and carbon intensity of any new items.

What could you achieve?

We have saved 41 tonnes of carbon whilst moving in June 2024, of which, 9.8 tonnes was saved from our existing office equipment. We are looking to continue to minimise our footprint by keeping our operational costs (financial and carbon) low. Our team of in-house engineering specialists is helping us to look at ways of lowering our operational carbon, by upskilling all office users to use passive measures to regulate the temperature of the office and generally reduce overall demand on mechanical systems in the long run.

When moving, there are considerations to be made about logistics, liability and cost. Making these work in a way that is relevant to carbon reductions means reinterpreting the standard convention of what ‘value’ is.

Value should consider more than just financial benefits and reflect the carbon associated with what is being purchased as well as that associated with what is being saved. This means thinking about your workspace fitout not just as a depreciating asset with a residual monetary value but as a store of upfront carbon investment which is to be paid off over time. The amount of carbon embodied into an item may not be reflected in the cost, so cheap items can be carbon intensive, but that doesn’t mean that only premium items are low carbon.

Most of all, it shows what we can achieve when we investigate familiar processes and decisions in more detail. Hopefully you’ll be inspired to try this too.

If you’d like to discuss more about how we made the move happen and how we can help you lower the carbon impacts of your buildings and construction projects, get in touch with Neil & Emily, here:

Neil Granger , Head of Sustainability

Emily Baigent , Energy & Carbon Consultant

[1] This is based on LETI’s lower target of 600 kgCO₂e/m² with the 48% embodied carbon typically associated with the superstructure excluded. We have excluded this figure as we cannot attribute it to our own carbon saving