Positive Impacts
Shipping with UPS Carbon Neutral
When shipping to customers located in the United States and Canada, all of our shipments are certified as UPS Carbon Neutral. According to UPS, "the carbon neutral option supports projects that offset the emissions of the shipment's transport. UPS has supported projects that include reforestation, landfill gas destruction, wastewater treatment, and methane destruction."
Read more about UPS Carbon Neutral certified shipmentsReducing Environmental Footprints
The Windowfarms Core Team has paid a great deal of attention to the environmental impact of Windowfarms kit parts. We will continue to improve the systems through community input. When we started looking at parts carried in hardware stores here in Brooklyn, we soon found the parts had travelled across the world. Thus, we have taken care to purchase as many parts as we can directly from manufacturers close to our facilities here in New York.
Supporting Local Recycling
Windowfarms accomodate the use of 1.5L plastic water bottles as containers for growing your food.
All of the bottles for sale on our website are sourced bottles from trash pickers and recycling facilities in Manhattan and Brooklyn, New York.
The bottles are prepared for use by workers who clean, cut, and paint the bottles.
By using recycled materials as our standard product option, we are offsetting the flow of these bottles from landfills and up-cycling them into our product to become containers for growing food.
Part of Larger Efforts
Started in 2007, The Designers Accord outlines an opt-in set of sustainable design guidelines for designers, educators, and business leaders. This coalition works together to create and define positive environmental and social impacts in their own practices. The fundamental missions driving Windowfarms (described on this page) are inline with those of the Designers Accord.
The Windowfarms Story
Learn more about the mission, theory, team, and more behind the Windowfarms Project in the Windowfarms Project Look Book. Download a copy for yourself here (3mb), or browse it below.
Empowering People to Innovate
We seek to empower urban dwellers to grow some of their own food inside year-round. The Windowfarms Core Team leads this process by hosting a web platform for global mass collaboration, providing access to free multilingual instructions to build your own windowfarm, and offering kits for sale that allow citizens to collaboratively innovate toward more sustainable cities and food systems. Folks collaborate online and are encouraged to use locally-available materials to suit locally-specific conditions.
We call this process R&D-I-Y, or Research and Develop It Yourself.
Doing Social Good
Often times, being environmentally responsible requires higher amounts of human labor. This is true for most D-I-Y projects and products with recycled components.
The cost of our kits and bottles reflect the high amount of human labor involved in their production. The cost breakdown of our Windowfarms kits has a high percentage of the purchase price going towards supporting local labor. The proportion is extremely high when looking at just the bottles alone, where the majority of the cost is going towards the human labor required to inspect, collect, clean, cut, drill, paint, and package the bottles.
Providing Green Jobs
By partnering with the Mid-Hudson Workshop for the Disabled (MHW), we help provide meaningful work for the New York Hudson Valley's Disabled Veterans and other Physically and/or Medically Handicapped residents. MHW is a non-profit founded in 1948 and located right up the river in Poughkeepsie, New York.
MHW's workers do the light manufacturing, packaging, and shipping of Windowfarms kits. The workers also perform the cleaning, painting, cutting, and drilling to prepare the bottles available for purchase with the kits.
