Growing Spaces is now a Certified B Corporation

Growing Spaces is now a Certified B Corporation™.

B Corp certification is a third-party review of a company's social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability. A company can’t simply pay for the logo. It has to complete a detailed assessment, provide documentation for material claims, and go through a review with B Lab™. In our case, the process took months and required us to show the work behind claims we had made for years.

The scoring threshold is meaningful. A company needs at least 80 points to certify. B Lab lists the median score for ordinary businesses that complete the assessment at 50.9. Around 10,000 companies globally have cleared the bar as of this writing. Certification is reviewed every three years, and it can be revoked if a company no longer meets the standard.

For a 20-person manufacturer in rural Colorado, clearing that bar is something we are proud of. And we’re already looking at the next areas where we can be even better.

Learn more about B Corp Certification at bcorporation.net

What the process forced us to prove

The most useful part of the B Corp process wasn’t the score, it was the discipline it forced us to have, and to commit to long term.

We’ve been building passive-solar geodesic greenhouses since 1989. Our domes are designed for year-round growing in hard climates: cold, high-altitude, arid, off-grid, and other places where a conventional greenhouse may need continuous mechanical heat.

For a long time, we have said that a Growing Dome uses substantially less operating energy than a conventional mechanically heated greenhouse. The claim made sense to us. It fit the design, and customers could feel the difference. The B Corp process asked a harder question: can you document it?

So we did. We built a comparative operational energy model across all six Growing Dome sizes and six climate zones. The model compared our passive-first design against a conventional mechanically heated greenhouse of similar growing area, using the same climate bands across each case. The result: our greenhouses were modeled at 31 to 40 percent of the electricity of the conventional alternative, depending on climate.

In a sub-arctic climate, a single 42-foot Growing Dome was modeled to avoid roughly 15,000 kWh of electricity per year compared with the conventional alternative.

It doesn’t mean every customer will see exactly that result. Site conditions, use patterns, climate, and supplemental heating choices all matter. But it does give us something we didn’t have before: a defensible, documented method behind a claim we have been making for decades.

The same standard applied outside the product. B Lab didn’t only ask whether the greenhouse performs well. It asked how the company operates.

We looked at employee practices, workplace safety, benefits, customer support, community impact, documentation, governance, and the systems behind day-to-day decisions. Some of that work confirmed real strengths. Growing Spaces is a small manufacturing business where people still know the product, customers can still reach a person, and the company has long tried to treat employees and customers with fairness.

It also surfaced gaps. We lost points in several categories because we hadn’t built the documentation to support things we were doing in practice. In other cases, the assessment pointed to areas where our internal operations need to become more durable, measurable, and consistent.

If we sell a greenhouse meant to last for decades, the company behind it has to be built for the same kind of durability. A company that builds long-lived greenhouses should also be trying to build long-lived systems: clear policies, safe work, fair employment practices, responsible financial decisions, repairable products, honest customer communication, and a business model that can keep serving people years after the initial sale.

Some of that work is already underway. We have been standardizing customer agreements, clarifying warranty and installation practices, improving internal systems, strengthening documentation, and giving our team clearer authority to solve customer problems fairly. None of that is as visible as a finished greenhouse, but it is part of the same idea.

The assessment rewards what a company can prove, not what it believes about itself. That is uncomfortable in places, but useful. Certification is not a finish line. It is a baseline we will be expected to improve on when we recertify.

What changes, and what doesn’t

Day to day, the intent of the product doesn’t change.

We have been building Growing Domes on the same passive-first principles for more than three decades: capture solar energy, store heat in thermal mass, insulate where it matters, ventilate naturally when possible, and use fans or supplemental systems only when needed. We have also had a long-standing commitment to repairability, maintenance, and long service life.

Two things do change:

First, we have made a legal commitment to consider the impact of business decisions on stakeholders, including employees, customers, community, suppliers, and the environment. In practice, that has already been part of how this company has operated since its founding. The new part is the external commitment.

Second, we will go through recertification every three years. B Lab’s standards are evolving, and recertification will require us to show that our practices still meet the current standard. That means we will have to keep improving, documenting, and testing whether our practices still meet the standard.

Thank you

This certification reflects more than the work of one owner or one review cycle.

It belongs to the people who built this company over 37 years, the employees who still build every kit in Pagosa Springs, the customers who chose a Growing Dome because of what it makes possible, the crews and subcontractors who install them, and the suppliers who have worked with us for decades.

For customers considering a Growing Dome, the certification gives you one more thing to rely on: the claims we make about our product and our company have now been documented, challenged, and reviewed as part of an independent certification process. That was a major reason we went through it.

More on what comes next soon.

-Gary