How To Combat Climate Change With Empty Offices

In a world that’s already stretched with food shortages, office spaces that are empty courtesy WFH may hold a solution to growing quality food

- Jen Thomas

Office space, post-Covid-19, has become a wasteland. What used to house a vibrant hum of workers talking on cell phones, checking their watches as they busily made their way to meetings, lies eerily empty with remnants of recent history. Covid-19 unshackled us from our desks and sent us all home to work from our bedrooms and kitchen tables, leaving our office space looking like the set of the next big horror movie.

Perhaps extreme, but COVID-19 was not only a hallmark and harrowing experience in our lifetimes, but it's also one that transformed many things about our society, not the least of which was our desire to collectively work from a big building. Companies have realized how virtual they can be when pressed and have learned how to optimize their workforce to deliver the same quality of their operations despite workers dispersed across major geographical areas. Office buildings are now mere monuments to a time just passed.

And what do we do with such empty vestiges of the corporate world? Grand office buildings take up space and require energy and money to maintain, but equally so to bulldoze them to the ground. Well, some innovative companies worldwide are looking at these empty hulls and realizing that they make amazing vertical farms.

A vertical farm is precisely as it sounds: a farming structure that is vertically stacked on top of each other, some by using hydroponics and aeroponics, some with conveyor belts to mimic a plant’s transition through a circadian rhythm. Whatever the process, the goal remains: we can grow food in these structures.

GROWING CLEANER FOOD