Avoiding buying new goods?

This is a good question, Cara - the issue of "salvaged" furniture can be tricky within the LEED context. First off, it is possible to count salvaged furniture towards the credit threshold by determining the "replacement cost" of a comparable piece of furniture. However, your example of using chairs that had been in storage is not guaranteed to earn compliance. LEED doesn't want to encourage project teams to move old chairs from one floor of the project building to another floor and count it as salvaged. The concept of "salvaged" material makes a lot more sense in the NC context, where you can deconstruct a steel wall frame and then use the salvaged steel to create an interesting architectural feature on the newly built wall; the concept just doesn't translate as well to EBOM. The best example I can give you of a piece of furniture that would count as salvaged in EBOM is the following: picture an old chair made of conventional materials with absolutely nothing sustainable about it. It's nice, but it's old and the owner gets rid of it by donating it to an antiques store. You then go and buy this chair to be used in an office of your project building. Since it's from a resale shop, you can consider it 100% salvaged, even though when it was made in 1970, it was built using virgin materials. Make sense?

To follow up on Jason's (absolutely accurate) comment, in my experience the most common type of LEED-compliant furniture salvage is in institutional settings where furniture, when permanently removed from a building, is placed in long-term storage and made available to other buildings within the institution. Most large universities have a warehouse where old desks, filing cabinets, etc... are kept for years at a time until a need pops up. This is in contrast, as Jason notes, to a situation where furniture is temporarily removed from a building while a renovation takes place and then returned, or alternately moved directly from one building to another. Hope that helps.