Urban Biofilter creates, implements, and advocates for biological systems solutions to pollution in urban areas.

Community Health

The community of West Oakland suffers disproportionately severe health problems resulting from proximity to point-source pollution, vulnerability to the effects of climate change, poverty, lack of green space, and lack of access to healthy food.

Our Approach

As a collaborative team of ecological engineers, designers, and community organizers, we create environmental justice solutions. We engage with conventional public agency processes and transform them into dynamic grassroots campaigns utilizing new media, electronic communication, and ecological design solutions from the ground up.

Through empowerment with scientific and engineering knowledge, our community organizing campaigns empower underrepresented community members and neighborhoods to assess the ecological needs of their communities, to assert these needs to agencies and organizations, and to design grassroots solutions together when agencies fall short. We work to transform the technical language and bureaucratic processes used by government and scientists into effective and accessible tools.

We design and help fund urban greenspaces through quantifying the value of ecosystem services such as air, soil, and water filtration, heat island mitigation and climate change preparedness. We transform undervalued resources from blighted land, brownfields, and excess nutrients from waste-streams, into ecosystem services and jobs in the community. Microorganisms, minerals, and plants that can provide rapid solutions for collecting, sequestering, and transforming particular pollutants and wastes are selected specifically for each site. These dynamic living systems filter toxins from the environment, facilitating healthy communities and creating jobs.

Our unique approach of bringing together disparate community groups, coupled with innovative ecological design, results in a powerful force of transformation in our urban ecosystems.

Urban Biofilter is based in Oakland, CA, and is a project of the non profit 501(c)3 organization, Earth Island Institute.