Etsy headquarters earns Living Building Challenge Petal certification

Online marketplace Etsy, Brooklyn, New York, earned the International Living Future Institute’s Living Building Challenge Petal certification for its global headquarters.

The Living Building Challenge certifies building that create a positive impact on its surrounding environment and include seven performance areas: place, waster, energy, health and happiness, materials, equity and beauty.

Early on in the project, it became clear that Etsy’s aspirations to hold this project to the highest standards for sustainability aligned with the goals and Imperatives of the Living Building Challenge, particularly those of the Materials Petal, with more than 90 percent of construction debris diverted from landfills.

These five principles guided the project from concept to ribbon-cutting:

• Aspire to be a fully interdependent, regenerative ecosystem through carefully considering the long- and short-term effects of design and materials selection on all stakeholders.
• Celebrate the handmade through a reprogrammable work platform that is committed to working with and engaging makers and local artists on a large scale.
• Create positive community impact by supporting local businesses and the responsible use of local, natural resources.
• Implement resilient, mission-aligned infrastructure through the use of resilient and efficient materials and systems.
• Make space that embody Etsy’s values by integrating local, sustainable materials from makers and artists, with an emphasis on inspiration from the natural world.

The wide range of collaborators on this project is nearly innumerable. They included many of the internal Etsy teams—Workplace Ecology & Design, Sustainability & Social Innovation, Culture & Engagement, Global Food, Brand Design, Audio Visual and IT, among many others—the design firm Gensler in San Francisco, dozens of local artists and Etsy sellers and hundreds of other partners. This collective effort resulted in a space that reflects Etsy’s values and its overarching mission.