The Greenpoint-based botanic design and plant shop Greenery Unlimited (91 West St.) announced that the business will stop delivering plants nationwide due to the impact that transportation and shipping materials have on the environment.
Owners Rebecca Bullene and Adam Besheer based Greenery Unlimited on the concept of the beneficial interaction between humans and plants known as Biophilia. Their business will continue to deliver plants to customers in the NYC area, and the retail space that launched last February will remain open.
Greenery Unlimited’s sister company Greenery NYC (195 Dupont St.) opened approximately ten years ago focusing on large scale design, installation and maintenance services mostly for interior gardens. The online store opened three years ago shipping plants nationwide and delivering large plants in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.
“We will re-engage our nationwide presence in the future, but only when we can ensure our practices fully align with our values,” Greenery Unlimted wrote in an email update:
What does this mean for our New York City customers? No change. We’ll still be delivering the best plants, pots, tools, and accessories throughout NYC, and we encourage you to come visit us in person at our retail outpost in Greenpoint. Since opening in February, the amazing connections and community that have sprouted from our store have been deeply rewarding. We want to encourage all our national customers to visit their local plant shops.
As our business has grown and changed over the years, the concept of sustainability has always been a guiding principle. During our nine years of operation we’ve had to examine what works and what doesn’t countless times, and be fearless in moving beyond those things that don’t align with our values.
While there are so many benefits to shipping our plants nationwide, as this portion of the business has scaled the negative environmental impact has become too big for us to ignore. We are deeply proud to offer the highest quality plants to our customers. However, the reality of trucking plants thousands of miles and mailing them throughout the country, with the abundance of packaging waste and carbon footprint that’s incurred shipping delicate living organisms, is not the impact we want to have on the world. We’ve been fortunate to have a large customer base in Florida, but trucking plants from Florida to New York only to ship them miles away from where they were grown will never make sense for the planet. There’s profound waste inherent in this equation. We have to get smarter.
As business owners and as global citizens, we feel deeply that our core values should be more about people and the planet than about growth and profit. As parents, we want to create a world where younger generations will thrive, and not look back and wonder why we didn’t do more to address the climate crisis.
Part of what we love about being a 100% family owned and operated business is that we can make choices that appeal to our conscience. We are going to take time to examine our practices and hopefully be part of the solution and no longer part of the problem. We will re-engage our nationwide presence in the future, but only when we can ensure our practices fully align with our values.
Thank you for continuing to support us as we learn and grow. We so deeply appreciate your business and hope to see you in Greenpoint!