Sustainable Design By Bruce Zaretsky, Zaretsky and Associates, Inc.
Sustainability. The newest buzzword or a reality-based concept? Every year, there’s a new trend. One year it’s the year of the water feature. The next, it’s container gardens. Recently, all the talk has been about backyard kitchens. These fads come and go. There are so many new ideas emerging every year that it’s sometimes hard to keep up with them. Some ideas deservedly run their course. Others hang on for longer periods of time. And mixed in with all of these ideas is this little concept: sustainability. Sustainability. What is it? Is it the real thing? Or is it just a fad? Should you get on this bandwagon? Is it going to increase your bottom line? Is it the latest and greatest thing to “sell” to your clients? It should be. It should be the core tenet of everything we do as designers and installers. Sustainability in design and in our daily lives means simply that we do our very best to conserve resources and minimize waste. This means that we do things as simple as turning off the water when we brush our teeth. And as complex as designing everything, from gardens to office buildings, in as a “green” way as possible. How do we do that? Well, we need to consider all aspects of our designs and installations. Look at waste products, water use, hauling distances and the like. Everything we do in my design/build practice revolves around not only our clients’ desires and the site conditions, but also how we approach the site in regard to conserving resources. We need to consider ourselves stewards of the earth, and if landscape designers aren’t stewards of the earth, then who else is? We are, almost by definition, required to preserve our planet; after all, we purport to be the ones beautifying it. Let’s look at a few simple processes that we can implement in order to live up to our billing:
and brick? Do you recycle your paper waste from your office? I’m not suggesting that you design every project to use your leftover materials. But I am suggesting that you think about what you are going to do with your leftover materials. And how you design a site in the first place. We are almost too quick to “play God,” wiping out an entire site so that we can fulfill our “vision” for what the site should be. We rip out walls and shrubs and pools and regrade the land and haul in stone from distant shores and in the process fill dumpsters and landfills with thousands of tons of “waste” material a year and pay exorbitant shipping costs. Think about a new use for some or all of that waste. As an example, we recently worked with a client who had us remove an old patio and retaining wall. The debris from this project, which is not all that large, would have filled a 30-yard dumpster. The retaining wall consisted of hundreds of old rotted pressure-treated timbers which cannot be reused (unfortunately, these do go to the dump). The original patio was installed about 15 years ago using two-foot-by-two-foot concrete slabs with scores in them to make them look like pavers. There were 250 of these slabs which, stacked up, would have taken up about 6 yards of that dumpster. But, aside from the fact that they were not visually desirable and a bit worn, they were perfectly usable for things such as a floor for garbage cans or firewood storage. What I told my client was that we were going to place these slabs on pallets
If you are installers, take a quick look at your disposal costs for the last year. How many dumpsters did you fill with debris to be hauled off to the local landfill? How much of that debris could have been salvaged or reused on site, or on another project? Do you reuse scrap lumber GROUNDWORK 1 6 J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 2 1
