The human impact on Earth relates to the depletion of our natural resources and ecosystems. These impacts are driven by the choices we make as a society and as individual human beings.

It’s no longer reasonable to believe that humans have no consequence on the health of our planet. We know that if we don’t make serious changes, we will meet real consequences. Already we’ve begun to see major shifts in climate with the intensity and frequency of natural disasters.

Any company that utilizes natural resources to build spaces, environments or products must now be aware of its environmental footprint. Here at DLC, we make it our mission to be efficient and responsible with our work and resources in order to consistently reduce our footprint. Whether it’s about increasing our efforts with managing our resources, materials and equipment or to develop more efficient work techniques and truck routes, our goal is always to do better than we did last.

That’s why over the course of the company’s growth we’ve made some adjustments to reduce our fuel consumption by adding smaller vehicles for our employees that didn’t require travel with work trucks, like our foreman and salesman. We’ve also optimized our weekly schedule in order to minimize our employees traveled distance, even if it means that we need more time to accomplish the same workload. As funny as it sounds, we’ve reduced our left turns by 50%; left-turns are extremely inefficient. We’ve noticed a 10% decrease in fuel-consumption just from that change — we actually got the idea from UPS.

We also increased our efforts to reuse as much material as possible in order to reduce the amount of waste we produce in a given week. That’s why we buy all our natural resources (topsoil, gravel, sand, dust, polymer sand, etc) in bulk and manage it from our yard. There is far less waste that way and the overall transportation of resources is reduced by a lot as we only need to move it once to our yard. Consequently, our employees leave with only what they need every morning.

Also, we’ve added a big wall in our massive garage to separate it into one big space and a smaller one. Since then, we’ve reduced our heating cost by a lot as a result of only heating the smaller space. We love saying that we have a garage in our garage!

Lastly, at DLC we create work that is of the highest quality and that utilizes materials made to age in the most graceful way possible. We’re excited to continue moving in that direction as we build timeless environments for our clients through future generations. We try to come up with new ways to increase our efficiency and decrease our footprints every day.

Dexter Church
Founder and President