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Sustainability

Enriching the planet and its people is
everything we do.

As a company founded by a landscape architect and outdoor enthusiast, sustainability, stewardship and a profound respect for natural spaces are deeply rooted in our company DNA. Our stated purpose is to “Enrich Outdoor Spaces,” and environmental stewardship is part and parcel of achieving this purpose.

Today, we strive to be a model for others in our industry, so collectively we all make a significant contribution to preserving our planet for future generations. Design, Culture and Craft—the three pillars at the core of Landscape Forms—are all backed by a strong sense of environmental accountability that drives us in every aspect of our business: product development, materials, facilities, manufacturing, supply chain, and people.

1,216 mt

Carbon Offset

1,216 metric tons of CO2e emissions were saved through pallet recycling and reuse initiatives.

90%

Recycled Waste

We recycle more than 90% of our waste, diverting it from landfill.

60%

Local = Low Impact

In 2023, we sourced 60% of our materials within 60 miles of our facilities.

5 Tons

Gen 50 Aluminum

Over 5 tons of 100% recycled aluminum was utilized in our Generation 50 bench supports.

Our Products

Litter being powder coated

  • Durable is sustainable

    • Our products are designed and engineered to withstand the rigors of natural environment and heavy use to live long, successful lives in outdoor landscapes. The durability, longevity and low maintenance of our products is instrumental to the responsible stewardship of the earth’s resources.

  • Partnering for a Better Future with SITES®

    • We are proud to be a SITES Community Partner, sharing in the commitment to creating outdoor spaces that are ecologically resilient, high-performance and enhance communities in meaningful ways. The Sustainable SITES Initiative® is a rating system that evaluates and certifies a project’s sustainability throughout planning, design, construction and management. It captures all the benefits outdoor spaces can provide, and guides us to confidently build new landscapes, better and with fewer tradeoffs. And through our solutions and specific support, we help landscape architects, designers and planners streamline the process toward SITES Certification.

      Discover available SITES credits with Landscape Forms’ products.

      Learn more The Sustainable SITES Initiative® at sustainablesites.org.
      SITES®, The Sustainable SITES Initiative® and the related logo is a trademark owned by Green Business Certification Inc.™ and is used with permission.

  • We Measure What’s Hard to Measure with LCAs

    • As part of our commitment to enhancing transparency in our industry, we conduct Life Cycle Analyses for many of our core products. Encompassing a cradle-to-grave examination of carbon footprint from raw material all the way to disposal at the end of a long usable lifespan, the Life Cycle Analysis is the way to better understand a product’s impact from the standpoint of embodied carbon. By taking this additional step, which has been verified by third-party SCS Global Services, we’re setting a quantifiable baseline upon which to improve, we’re helping our partners better understand the overall impact of their designs, and we’re pushing our industry evolve for the better.

      Read the Report

  • Lighting for the people and the planet

    • We design lighting to support both the health of the planet and its people. High quality lighting components—from internal electronics, to LEDs, to surge protection—allow the luminaires to last longer without the need for replacement.

      Our lighting fixtures utilize aluminum heat sinks because 1) aluminum an efficient conductor of heat and 2) it is easily and infinitely recyclable.

      Many of our lights are International Dark Sky Approved fixtures. These fixtures protect our night skies from harmful light pollution—actively reducing glare, light trespass and skyglow which can impact many aspects of the natural environment from crop yield to animal migration.

      We design lighting to be acutely mindful of pedestrian safety and human wellbeing. Excessive blue light can be harmful to human health, altering a person’s circadian rhythm. So we utilize correlated color temp LEDs set below the temperature of moonlight as to not impact sleep and light-temperature-guided hormone cycles.

  • We use recycled material wherever possible

    • All of the products we launch in 2022 incorporate pre-consumer and post-consumer recycled content. In our packing and shipping, we use corrugated board made with recycled material and utilize custom-size box system to further reduce the use of new shipping material.

Our Process

Litter being powder coated

  • Leaner is always greener

    • We follow Kaizen principles of continuous improvement across all aspects of the company—from the corner office to the manufacturing floor. The Kaizen approach offers inherent environmental benefits to business operations and is a useful tool for waste reduction and pollution prevention. At the end of the day, increased efficiency will always be key to the sustainable use of finite resources.

  • We’re all-in on recycling

    • All steel, aluminum, concrete, wood scrap and sawdust generated in our manufacturing processes is recycled, some using specialized recycling processes. Ninety nine percent of the water used in our manufacturing process is also recycled.

  • Sustainability is in the smarter use of materials

    • In our wood furniture, we purposely utilize species that weather naturally and don’t require paint or finishes. And for materials that do require coating, we think it’s important that all finishes are free of lead, free of hazardous air pollutants (HAPs), does not generate hazardous waste, and contains less than 1% of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Once processed these trace VOCs are fully inert and therefore cause no emission into the environment.

  • We go local to lower our impact

    • We give preference to local material suppliers and vendor services to significantly reduce the environmental impacts resulting from extended transportation. The majority of our steel and extruded aluminum originates from mills and plants within 150 miles of our facility, and we make sure all suppliers from whom we source material are regularly audited for responsible environmental practices.

Our People

Litter being powder coated

  • Our efforts start at home

    • As our facilities expand and evolve, implementing leading sustainability solutions is always a driving motivation. Our 50,000-square-foot office expansion in 2000 incorporated many large-scale changes to reduce its impact, including breaking up heat islands and leveraging site orientation to maximize energy conservation. We have also gone all LED for our lighting, reducing our energy consumption from lighting by more than 80 percent.

  • Local change has global effects

    • We believe that when we support our local communities, collectively we can enhance global social and environmental sustainability in big ways. We support local businesses wherever possible throughout our supply chain, and we invest in our local Kalamazoo workforce by offering a diverse range of opportunities for professional development and mobility. For our local landscape, we participate in the Michigan Adopt-A-Highway Program, sponsoring a two-mile stretch of highway in our community, and we partner with the Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy to help maintain the Chipman Preserve, a 228- acre park with six miles of trails.

  • Working together to put people and our planet first

    • We recently teamed up with Bell’s Brewery and other local Kalamazoo-area businesses to help keep more plastics out of our landfills. Because many small businesses don’t meet minimum quantity requirements for large-scale recyclers, the recycling “co-op” pools and bales recyclables from smaller operations to ensure these materials stay out of landfills.
Working together to put people and our planet first.

Landscape Forms is a proud member of 1% for the Planet, a global movement that pairs businesses with approved environmental nonprofits, creating high-impact partnerships that amplify the influence of their members’ giving. We believe it is our duty to best nurture our planet and drive environmental stewardship in as many ways as we can, but we also recognize that we can’t just do it alone.

By joining together with others to share in our success, we can create a bigger and farther-reaching positive impact on our environment than what we as a business alone could achieve. We have pledged our donations to the Landscape Architecture Foundation, a nonprofit organization working to increase the impact of landscape architects in creating a more sustainable future.
© Landscape Forms 1999 - 2020