Designtex

Hands in the dirt

Spring planting at Designtex's HQ is underway this Earth Week. A New York City roof garden is usually windy, and sometimes dry. But we are planting some hardy vines and staking and trimming our roses, as well as pruning the wild birches! If you're ever nearby, please come visit us and join us out on the terrace.

New Plants

Tools

Francesca repotting herbs

New butterfly garden bed

 

Pruned river birch branches

Million Trees Campaign Japanese Maple, with herb garden

 

New Offset Wind Project Supported by Designtex

This April marks Designtex’s third year of carbon neutral operations!

We continue in our partnership with NativeEnergy, a leading provider of carbon offsets, renewable energy credits, and carbon footprint consulting. Since 2000, NativeEnergy has brought essential funding to more than 50 community-based renewable energy and carbon reduction initiatives, with corporate support from companies like ours.

As a Project Supporter for NativeEnergy’s Help Build^tm carbon offset projects, Designtex previously brought funding to the Greensburg, Kansas wind farm project as well as the Wewoka, OK landfill gas-to-energy project.  This year, Designtex is supporting the Iowa Farms Wind project, which features the construction of two 1.6 MW wind turbines on family farms in northern Iowa. The project will generate enough power to meet the needs of 5,200 homes, and is expected to reduce an average of 9,000 metric tonnes of carbon emissions per year for the first ten years of operation.

NativeEnergy assessed Designtex’s total operational footprint for 2012 according to the World Resources Institute’s (WRI) Greenhouse Gas Protocols. The resulting footprint of 4,207 short tons of CO₂ emissions includes all facilities’ energy use, business travel, employee commuting, freight (inbound and outbound shipments), and waste. A summary chart is available on Designtex’s website here.

 

The Iowa Farms Wind Project from NativeEnergy, Inc. on Vimeo.

Product Stewardship and EPR consensus

Recently three product NGOs came together to hammer out several important definitions in the product stewardship arena.  The Product Policy Institute, the Product Stewardship Institute, and the California Product Stewardship Council convened stakeholders from across North America to harmonize these concepts and align them with international definitions. Please use these definitions when referring to the lifecycle impact of products and the producers who make or sell those products:

Product Stewardship:  Product Stewardship is the act of minimizing health, safety, environmental and social impacts, and maximizing economic benefits of a product and its packaging throughout all lifecycle stages. The producer of the product has the greatest ability to minimize adverse impacts, but other stakeholders, such as suppliers, retailers, and consumers, also play a role. Stewardship can be either voluntary or required by law.

Extended Producer Responsibility:  Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a mandatory type of product stewardship that includes, at a minimum, the requirement that the producer’s responsibility for their product extends to post-consumer management of that product and its packaging. There are two related features of EPR policy: (1) shifting financial and management responsibility, with government oversight, upstream to the producer and away from the public sector; and (2) providing incentives to producers to incorporate environmental considerations into the design of their products and packaging.