Community Service

            Dreamscape Designs is dedicated to being a socially responsible company.  We have adopted several practices within our company to make sure that we are steward to the environment and within the communities in which we do business.  We are always looking for new avenues to better the community and ways to help preserve what is already there.  We are not jumping on the “green” bandwagon because it is the latest trend right now.  This is just us doing business as usual.

            Over the years we have been committed to serving the community in which our offices are located.  As we have grown, we have branched out into new areas of Atlanta and want to continue our efforts in those new areas.  In the past we have teamed up with Trees Atlanta and Park Pride to help beautify the streets and parks in which we frequent on a daily basis.  We realize that not every community has the opportunity to work with these great organizations, so we have come up with some ideas of our own to help those ones that want to work with us and want to improve their neighborhoods. 

            As our crews are out trying to make Atlanta a more beauty city, our office staff is hard at work in our offices where we are have taken measures to make our operations kinder to the environment as well.  Our designers are always working on projects in which they are using plants that are native to our region or have been proven to have no to little impact on our native plant and animal species.  They are also designing hardscapes that have permeable surfaces to prevent obstructions to our water shed and in some case we are capturing that water to use for watering the garden in which we have designed. 

            Rainwater harvesting is a great way to help conserve our fresh water supplies.  We install these rainwater harvesting systems for our clients and we use one for all of our outdoor watering needs at out offices.  Whether we are washing our fleet of trucks that run on Bio-fuels or watering our plant inventory, we are using water that we have collected in a large cistern, from the roof of our office.  This water that we collect is also used for watering streetscapes across the city for Trees Atlanta.  We have a crew that goes out about every 10 days during the summer to help keep our trees across the city thriving.

            Our crews accumulate and large amount of green waste each day.  Whether it is our installation crews tearing out old shrubs or our maintenance teams bringing back clippings from pruning shrubs and mowing grass, we do not consider this green waste to be waste.  Instead, we take these old plants and clippings and use them to create our own compost, in which we use to improve the soil conditions in the gardens that we plant.  Just as a home needs a good foundation, so does a garden and the foundation of a garden is its soil.  We are also considering using our compost for making a sustainable compost tea to use for fertilization.

            Our crews also accumulate a lot of non-organic waste that cannot be composted.  Most of the plants that we install on a daily basis come in plastic containers.   There are not many facilities that accept these containers for recycling, so we have teamed up with several growers that take these containers and reuse them for a new crop of plants.  This way they are used over and over, until they cannot be used anymore.  We have cut back on the amount plastics used in our seasonal color production by about 50%, by using a grower that uses bio-degradable Elle pots.  This eliminates the small 4” containers that annuals are traditionally grown in and are usually thrown away after planting, because they are not reusable. 

            We have also set up a recycling program within our office where we reuse or recycle much of our waste.  Any scrap metals that we accumulate are recycled or used by a local artist, who uses the scrap metal to create some great folk art.  Any paper waste that we produce is either recycled or shredded and introduced to our compost pile.  We are also salvaging old stone and bricks from tears downs to reuse in hardscapes when our clients desire an aged look.  This helps us reduce the amount of waste that we introduce to our landfills.