KALAMAZOO, MICH.—Landscape Forms, North America’s leading designer and manufacturer of premium site furniture, structure, LED lighting, and accessories, continues to expand its commitment to sustainability, announcing its new status as a SITES Community Partner and introducing a groundbreaking embodied carbon Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) initiative.
A commitment to continuously improving sustainability and mitigating environmental impact is a cornerstone of all Landscape Forms’ operations, guiding the way in which the company designs, manufactures, packs, and ships its products and informing the way it conducts its administrative processes. From this commitment, Landscape Forms announces two new leading actions from its sustainability program: An alliance with The Sustainable SITES Initiative as a SITES Community Partner and an industry-leading push to conduct Life Cycle Analyses for the company’s core products.
“Becoming a SITES Community Partner and developing our Life Cycle Analysis initiative are two big steps forward in providing the valuable resources necessary to cultivate a culture of greater sustainability, accountability and transparency in our industry,” says Landscape Forms Sustainability Leader Amy Syverson-Shaffer. “As landscape architects and designers of outdoor space, our customers care deeply about the environmental impact of their work. So, by helping streamline the SITES certification process and by providing unparalleled visibility about our products’ carbon footprints, we’re enabling them to more confidently make the decisions that are right for our communities and right for our planet.”
SITES Community Partnership
SITES is a rating system that guides, evaluates, and certifies a project’s sustainability in the planning, design, construction and management of landscapes and other outdoor spaces. It is used by landscape architects, designers, engineers, architects, developers, policymakers, and others to guide land design and development in a way that puts ecosystem health and stewardship at the center. As a SITES Community Partner, Landscape Forms shares in the commitment to prioritizing projects that enhance biodiversity and mitigate climate change, while conserving resources, improving public health, and protecting critical ecosystems. This commitment includes providing solutions and resources that simplify SITES Certification, developing products that achieve points towards credits under the SITES Rating System V2 and streamlining the documentation process.
Life Cycle Analysis Initiative
Conducted in collaboration with trusted third-party certification body SCS Global Services, Landscape Forms has conducted Life Cycle Analyses of the embodied carbon impacts for many of the company’s core products. These analyses examine the carbon footprint of every product stage, including upstream materials, core manufacturing, packaging, transport, use, maintenance, and disposal at end of life. One of the first outdoor site furnishing manufacturers to conduct such an analysis, Landscape Forms is addressing an unmet need for this data in the landscape architecture industry while also setting a quantifiable baseline to inform new best practices.
“Our Life Cycle Analysis Initiative is an important achievement in our ongoing efforts to enhance sustainability at Landscape Forms and also in the way we’re looking to guide our industry moving forward,” says Michael Blum, Chief Strategy Officer. “We’re using this information internally to improve design, supply chain, manufacturing, and distribution—all the aspects of a product life cycle that we can affect. But we’re also sharing what we learn with others in our industry to help foster more widespread transparency regarding sustainability and carbon emissions overall.”
