Sustainable Spaces

When building out the new office space, our top priority was finding furniture and materials that were not only of the highest quality, but also produced in an environmentally-conscious way, and utilized as many post-consumer materials as possible. Our interior design team, led by Jeanne Rickard, went to great lengths to meet these goals.

The desks used for our workstations are from Watson Desking, a Washington-based company that not only produces beautifully designed office furniture, but has also been recognized for years for their low-impact manufacturing practices, waste reduction efforts, recycling programs, and heavy reliance on recycled materials. You can read more about the work they did for our space in the case study that they wrote for their Web site.

And we didn’t stop there – all of the furniture purchased for our office was selected based on its usage of recycled material and sustainable manufacturing processes, from the conference room table and chairs down to the material used for the panels that divide individual workstations (recycled buttons, I kid you not!)

To avoid having our old furniture (which was still in good shape even after having been used in three different office spaces since its original purchase in 2001) end up in a landfill, we donated it to a local community foundation and a Chicago-based company that hires underemployed citizens in urban centers to design and build geothermal energy solutions.

And we’re happy to report that the efforts don’t stop at our doorway – the company that manages our building has embarked on a number of “green” initiatives, including installing timers for the lights in the common areas, to reduce the amount of energy that they use.

Last year around this time, I posted about some of the things we had done to reduce our energy usage. We’re still doing those things and more. For the second year in a row, we’ve purchased offsets to compensate for Palantir’s carbon footprint. The number we came up with in this year's calculations was 103 metric tons of CO2, covering the period from April 1, 2008 through March 31, 2009. That represents a 35% increase in our average monthly carbon emissions, which is not too bad considering that our new office space is more than double the size of our old one, and we’ve also hired a number of additional employees in the last year. By far, the single factor that contributed most to our carbon footprint was the number of airplane miles we accumulated traveling to conferences and client meetings both in the United States and abroad.

Like last year, we purchased our offsets from Terrapass, but this time we asked that they be directed toward a single program at the Greater Lebanon Refuse Authority Landfill in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. This program converts methane gas captured by the landfill into renewable energy, and has been recognized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Environmental Defense Fund, and other independent organizations for both its quality and accountability.

While we understand that global warming and other environmental issues seem daunting and that our efforts alone are but a drop in the proverbial bucket, we also believe that consistently following sustainable practices and publicizing our efforts can work to encourage others to do the same and eventually lead to meaningful action on a larger scale. Happy Earth Day!