ENVIRONMENT GLOBAL WARMING

 What is sustainability?

Sustainability Trends for 2017

Consult on the implementation

Many of the mistakes organisations make implementing sustainability are predictable change management blunders. This is hardly surprising given that most of the people implementing sustainability have no change management training. HR professionals can be critical partners in crafting a successful implementation plan to fit their particular organisation’s circumstances. They understand the importance of involvement; they know how to respond to resistance; they are familiar with reframing techniques to enrol stakeholders; they are in control of many of the communication and educational systems, and they often coach managers in their own performance.

For example, the new executive director of the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland, Oregon was passionate about sustainability but recognised that in her organisation, top-down directives were rarely as long-lived as bottom-up ones. So she hired us to help her develop an implementation strategy. We formed a steering committee of employees and managers whose job it was to study sustainability, catalyse a few pilot projects and, by the end of the year, recommend whether the organisation should adopt sustainability as one of its strategic goals. The steering committee developed two broad improvement goals: zero waste and climate change. A task force was formed to work on each issue and they reported their results back to the steering committee. They made reports to all-staff meetings about reducing their solid waste by 40 per cent and encouraging alternative transportation. The steering committee also set up informal lunchtime sessions where people could learn about sustainability. By the end of the year, everyone at the museum was familiar to some extent with sustainability and the steering committee gave the executive director the enthusiastic go-ahead she had hoped would come.

A second role that the HR department can play is to help individual departments map out and improve their processes. Many environmental impact analyses, especially those associated with environmental management systems, are based on a process diagram. Many HR professionals, either through their experience with organisational development or the quality management fields, are well prepared to do this.

Resources:

Doppelt, Bob (2003) Leading Change toward Sustainability. Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf Publishing.

Eisler, Riane (2007) The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating Caring Economics. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

Natrass, Brian and Mary Altomare (2002) Dancing with the Tiger: Learning Sustainability Step by Natural Step. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers. Provides an overview of the popular Natural Step framework with case studies from North America.

MonsterTRAK, in alliance with ecoAmerica, a non-profit environmental group, started GreenCareers. The site lists positions in companies that reduce their impact on the environment, making it easier for students to connect with businesses that support their environmental goals.

Align human resource systems

Human resource systems have a powerful influence on employee behaviour, so it’s important to ensure that your systems are supporting the behaviour that you want. Companies that touted teamwork and collaboration, for example, soon discovered that their individually focused performance appraisal and reward system undermined the collaboration they were trying to instil. If you don’t watch for these types of mismatches you can undermine your own implementation efforts.

Orientation. Many organisations run a blanket training programme when they begin a sustainability effort but then forget about employee turnover. Including sustainability in your new employee orientation will ensure that you don’t lose ground.

Selection and job descriptions. Eventually, sustainability becomes embedded in the jobs people do. This should be reflected in job descriptions and selection criteria. Chevron made an understanding of environmental issues a selection criterion for their CEOs.

You will also want to reach out to disadvantaged populations. While this may already be part of a strong diversity programme that you pursue other reasons, sustainability strengthens the case for engaging with this segment of society. In the US at least, sustainability still is predominately an upper-middle-class white phenomenon. As you hire people from disadvantaged or minority communities, you not only extend the concepts of sustainability to new populations, you learn more about what is important to those communities, helping you to reframe sustainability in terms that will resonate with them.

Training. Embed sustainability into your training programmes. In particular, include it in supervisory and management training, but you can also include sustainability-related examples in many other classes. Make sure all employees get some basic-level understanding of sustainability concepts and, over time, provide more in-depth training in

specialised topics as they are needed. Remember that training doesn’t just happen in classrooms. Find ways to embed sustainability into regular staff meetings and other corporate communication vehicles.

Training doesn’t always have to be job-related. Wal-Mart, for example, has been providing sustainability training to its employees and encouraging them to adopt personal sustainability projects. The programme is voluntary, but many employees are participating.

The goals include eating healthier foods, using environmentally friendly materials in their homes, and volunteering for related causes. Many organisations have found that discussion

courses are also an effective way to engage employees. Helping employees integrate their personal values into daily life at work and at home can be a powerful motivator. Reviews and rewards. Align your pay and reward systems with your sustainability policies. Often, linking a minor portion of pay to sustainability is enough to get action. Norm Thompson, a catalogue retailer, wanted their buyers to use sustainability as part of their decision-making process when they chose products for their catalogue. But just telling them this was not enough to change behaviour because their pay system didn’t reward them for the extra work. So HR told them that 10 percent of their pay would be based on improving the sustainability quotient of their purchases.

This got their attention! Instantly, the buyers wanted to know how they could tell if one product was greener than another. This led to the creation of an elaborate scoring system and associated toolkit. Certainly, you will also want to ensure that you are paying a fair, living wage. Deciding what constitutes a living wage can be a knotty problem, however. Rejuvenation, a small period lighting manufacturer in Portland, Oregon, struggled with how to determine a living wage and how to fund paying it in a world of global competition. They found a regional research study on what constituted ‘fair pay’ but learned that what is adequate for a single adult living alone is different from that for a dual-income couple or parents with three children. This led them to learn more about their employees’ households. They used this information to determine a fair wage and then did what they could afford to provide that for their entry-level employees. Part of their strategy is to accelerate pay increases for the lowest grade positions faster than higher grades to close the gap.

Most organisations link their performance review systems to pay, so find ways to embed sustainability there as well. This can take some effort since the goals are often linked to job tasks. One of the barriers associated with implementing sustainability is that people can’t imagine what they should do differently. The solid waste division of the Washington Department of Ecology found that many people said ‘I just follow the regulations’ while others had no problem envisioning how to incorporate sustainability into their everyday work life.

To solve this problem, we helped them develop a process for guiding employees so they could integrate sustainability into their jobs. The department already had Job Alike Groups (JAGs) that were composed of people from across the state who did the same job. We designed a process similar to ‘backcasting’ where the JAGs examined their work process, identified their impacts, defined the sustainable future state and then worked backwards to identify what they would have to do differently in ten years, five years and one year as well as things they could change now. We trained people to facilitate these JAG meetings. The management JAG went through a slightly different process to determine how to support these efforts. This included a process linked to their performance review system. Employees were expected to bring ideas about how to change their work practices to the performance review discussion so that these new practices could be reflected in individual performance plans.

Reward programmes. Award/reward programmes and contests can be risky because the psychological effects of rewards on human behaviour are quite complex. (We recommend Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn for more on this.) Sometimes it’s just a matter of making sure there is something in it for the employee. Luper Brothers is an auto repair shop in Lewiston, Idaho. In the office, Luper Brothers’ employees recycle aluminium, cardboard, plastics, scrap iron and polystyrene. They realised that nagging wasn’t the best way to get employees to recycle. Instead, they developed an incentive programme that enabled employees, on their own time, to recover the more valuable metals and metal parts (copper, aluminium, bearings) from waste components and earn extra income by selling them.

One of the most famous and effective reward programmes was run by Dow Chemical Company back in the 1980s to improve environmental performance. While the example is dated, there is a lot to learn from their success. In 1982, their Louisiana Division created a contest to find energy-saving projects with a high return on investment. In that first year, there were 27 winners, requiring capital investments of $1.7 million and an average return on investment (ROI) of 173 per cent. What was most surprising, violating the commonly held assumptions about diminishing returns, was that each year the employees found better and better projects yielding better ROIs. Many of these projects involved process improvements such that the productivity gains started to exceed the energy and environmental benefits. After ten years the programme was generating ideas that on average returned 300 percent! What was going on? Why didn’t they quickly exhaust the low-hanging fruit? We believe the employees got increasingly sophisticated in their ability to identify improvement opportunities.

Transportation-reduction programmes. Many HR departments operate programmes to reduce commuting impacts. These range from subsidising bus passes and coordinating car pools to encouraging telework. For service organisations, transportation may be a major source of environmental impact. For example, at SERA Architects in Portland, Oregon, their backcasting process revealed that commuting and travel were by far their biggest impacts, bigger by a factor of two over any other activity. At the time they began investigating travel issues, they were issuing each employee with the cash equivalent of a monthly bus pass.

Employees could do what they wanted with the cash, so drivers were using it for parking expenses. The firm didn’t feel that the policy really sent a strong enough message. When they crunched the numbers they discovered that 33 per cent of their staff were commuting alone in cars and that the travel subsidy the firm paid out to them came to enough to give every employee an extra two days’ paid holiday. SERA decide to revoke the payment to single occupancy commuters and gave every employee the extra two paid days of holiday. Now they ask each employee to submit a quarterly travel report. If an employee can demonstrate that he used alternative transportation to get to work at least 80 percent of the time, he is paid a quarterly bonus equal to the cost of a three-month bus pass.

Governmental agencies have also been able to justify significant incentives to encourage alternative commuting. Clark County, Washington is a suburban and rural community outside Portland, Oregon. Clark County recently adopted a sustainability policy and is embarking on several initiatives including significant incentives to encourage alternative commuting. In addition to providing employees fully subsidised bus passes and car-pool parking, Clark County offers two hours’ vacation bonus for any employee who takes at least 12 round trips via alternative transportation in a month. While some people argue that could represent a loss of work time, Pete DuBois, Sustainability Coordinator, argues that people tend to compress their work into the time available. ‘Think about the week before you go on vacation. Somehow, you get more done that week to compensate.’ The vacation bonus is available only for car-pooling, transit, walking and cycling and can be viewed as time back for sacrifices made waiting to catch the bus, meet up with your carpool partner or travelling by bike or on foot. Through a grant from Washington State Department of Transport, Clark County also offers employees the Commute Alternative to Shift Habits (CASH) which offers cash rewards to employees committing to trying a new alternative commute. Not known for transit-friendly development, Clark County is taking the lead on its commute trip reduction programme.

Reinsurance company Swiss Re is so concerned about climate change that they provide incentives for employees to reduce their personal carbon footprint at work and at home in their COYou2 Reduce and Gain programme. Until 2011, they will rebate half the cost of such measures as purchasing a hybrid car, installing solar panels or taking public transportation.

In the US you can set up a pre-tax Transportation Savings Account (similar to a health savings account) that allows employees to pay for alternative transportation expenses (eg bus passes) with pre-tax earnings. Japanese automaker Mazda is paying employees 1500 yen (about US$12.50) a month to walk to work to improve their health and help the environment. Employees must live at least two kilometres away from work and commute by foot at least 15 days a month to qualify. Yamaha has a similar programme. These programmes may pay for themselves in reduced health plan costs. Historically employers have felt that employee commuting was not their business. But take a bit of time to compute the cost of providing employee parking. What is the cost of that asphalted land? What is the cost of obesity and related health problems to your health plan when you make it easy for employees to limit their exercise.

Portland State University, sited in downtown Portland, Oregon, realised they couldn’t possibly increase their student population as their strategic plan directed if all employees needed a parking space. So they did a number of things to encourage alternative transportation. Parking lots are inconveniently located whereas public transit stops are close to the front doors. Monthly parking passes show the annual cost of parking on the receipt to emphasise the true cost of driving. The university also provides ‘Flexcar’ benefits so that professors and employees can rent a car on an hourly basis when a car really is the best way to get around.

It’s not just commuting. HR can reduce the need for business travel through technology. With sophisticated technologies like Cisco’s TelePresence (which provides a realistic meeting environment) and Second Life (which provides an unreal experience!) travelling will become less necessary. Windshield time and jet lag are productivity busters. Collaborate with your information technology department to identify and train people on

the best tools available. Then build in incentives to reduce transportation. Progressive Investment Management, a socially responsible investment manager, actually charges their employees for the climate impacts of their transportation choices. Employees track both business trips and commuting, and a fee to purchase carbon offsets is deducted from their annual bonus. Work/life balance support systems. With both parents working these days, it’s unrealistic to expect people to leave their home lives at the door. Helping employees juggle their commitments can pay off in employee retention. SAS at their Carey, NC headquarters, has on-site day care and highchairs in the cafeteria so kids can eat with their parents. Employees can take unlimited sick days and they work seven-hour days. SAS is often in the top ten of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list and has a turnover rate of only 4 percent compared with 20 percent in industry. Since it can cost the equivalent of up to 18 months’ salary to bring a new person up to speed, the investments are well worth it.

Resources:

In the US, a good source of information about living-wage jobs and also green jobs is the Political Economy Research Institute, part of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, www.peri.umass.edu/

Eisler, Riane (2007) The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating Caring Economics. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

Investments and retirement funds.

In many organisations, the retirement benefits are part of HR responsibility. Screening investments on social responsibility criteria can send important signals to the marketplace. The huge California public employees’ pension programme, CalPERS, has been a leader in this practice.

Resources:

For training materials, see the following resources:

Galea, Chris (ed.) (2005) Teaching Business Sustainability: Volume 1 – From Theory to Practice. Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf Publishing. Also see Volume 2 – Cases, Simulations and Experiential Approaches, published in 2007.

In the US, see the Northwest Earth Institute for discussion courses which can help employees get in touch with their values and learn about ecological principles, www.nwei.org.

Hitchcock, Darcy (2001) Making Sense of Sustainability: An Employee Guide. Portland, OR: AXIS Performance Advisors, Inc. This is a short primer for employees that includes a couple of simple exercises. It covers the triple bottom line and The Natural Step system conditions.

Hitchcock, Darcy (2008) The Dragonfly’s Question. Self-published at this time. This is a novella and discussion guide for business and community groups to learn about sustainability concepts and principles. Contact Darcy Hitchcock for more information: '); document.write(addy55250); document.write('<\/a>'); //-->\n This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .">This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

Human Resource Instruction and Sustainability

Human Resources for Sustainability

Human resources and sustainable development

When sustainability meets human resources

Human Resources: How to Support the Change Process and Bolster Employee Commitment

While at first sight, it may not seem to be the case, human resource professionals are actually in a good position to influence the sustainability of an organization. When taken together, the practices and strategies we are addressing in these texts amount to an organizational change initiative, not unlike those from the last few decades, particularly Total Quality Management, process improvement, customer satisfaction and participative management. However, human resource (HR) professionals have been slow to pursue sustainability, in large part because they don’t understand how much they have to offer.

We can identify with this problem. We too come from an organizational development background and when we encountered the concept of sustainability as a business issue in Harvard Business Review in the mid-1990s, we had an epiphany: by showing our clients how to be more productive, in many cases we had also shown them how to deplete the world’s resources better, faster, cheaper. This was not the legacy we had in mind! We also experienced a crisis of confidence. There was no going back to the blissful state of ignorance but yet we couldn’t see the path forward. What did we know about sustainability? Weren't we biologists or chemical engineers? What did we have to offer? What we’ve discovered on our journey is that implementing sustainability is a lot like implementing any other corporate change initiative. As an internal consultant, you need to get up to speed on certain concepts and terms, but the most troublesome issues most organizations face are not technical ones (do we use this chemical or that?) but concern organizational change: how does sustainability fit with our corporate strategy? Where should we begin our efforts? Who needs to be involved and how can we engage them? What framing is going to be most helpful? What structures do we need in place to manage the effort? At what point do we ‘go public’ with our efforts, internally and externally?

It’s ironic that while we tiptoed into this field, we have never felt more valued for the contribution we bring. Technical people, including scientists and engineers, the same ones who roll their eyes when you try to engage them in a team-building exercise, have practically begged for our help. As one engineer put it, ‘To do this work, you have to bring together a good cross-section of people, all of whom have their own opinions. Pretty soon, someone gets angry and then I don’t know what to do.’ Many human resource professionals have excellent facilitation and conflict management skills, exactly the skills that others in the sustainability field lack.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY

Increasingly, sustainability is becoming an important recruitment and retention strategy:

• Youth: MonsterTRAK.com, a career website for students and entry-level employees found that 92 percent would be more inclined to work for a company that is environmentally responsible. 80 percent of young professionals wanted a job that directly improved the environment.

• Canadian workers: In a similar study in Canada, Monster.ca found that 78 percent of employees surveyed would gladly quit their jobs for a more environmentally friendly employer. In the same poll, 81 percent were less than impressed with their current employer’s performance in that regard.

• US workers: An Adecco USA survey of employees in the US found that 36 percent would be more inclined to work for a green company, 59 percent think their company should be more environmentally friendly (a desire that is more pronounced with women and young adults), and 68 percent of adults think companies’ actions don’t always match their green hype.

Of course, improved social conditions in the workplace also help with retention: on-site day care, flexible work schedules, and incentives to bike to work are examples of programs HR can implement to contribute to the sustainability effort.

Don’t underestimate the power of giving people a meaningful mission. We remember talking to an employee at a lumber mill who used to dodge questions about where he worked. After his employer adopted sustainability, he became proud to tell people about his work. Many executives have found that sustainability motivates people in a way that no other organizational change program has. Programmes like total quality, Lean, Six Sigma and self-directed work teams focused on making the organization better.

Sustainability is about making the world better. It gives people a way to address their latent concerns (about climate change, toxics, poverty, etc.). These seem like overwhelming problems and many retreats into denial or learned helplessness. The psychic toll of this often goes unacknowledged but it is significant. When you give people permission to use their job as a catalyst for positive, transformative change, many end up with a passionate calling, not just a career.

Be sure to talk to your facilities people as well because green building practices have

been found to improve productivity. Based on a study of 12 retrofits of federal buildings

in the US, these remodel resulted in a 29 percent boost in employee satisfaction while

also reducing water and energy use as well as greenhouse gasses.

Human resources are often the department which provides organizational development advice about how to launch and sustain new initiatives.

As we consulted with organizations, we found many organizations making unnecessary implementation mistakes that will be familiar to anyone with an organizational development background:

Spray-and-pray training. A manufacturer of wood products trained all their employees in The Natural Step framework and then sat back, waiting for miracles to happen. Of course,

many people forgot what they were taught since there was no planned way to use the knowledge immediately. Few ideas were suggested until the organization put into place a more structured way to involve staff.

The big black hole. Another company trained all employees on sustainability and asked employees to share ideas about actions the organization could take. These ideas were collected but there was no process to assess them, act on them or give feedback to employees about them. So for about two years, the ideas disappeared into the black hole, leaving employees wondering just how serious the organization was.

A rose by any other name. An organization based in ‘Ecotopia’ (Oregon) found out the hard way that their employees on the east coast of the US didn’t have the same connotations for such terms as ‘environmentalist’. Rather than building excitement with

their training, they were deepening the resistance to the concept.

If you don’t know where you’re going ... A boss in a property development firm got the sustainability bug and hired someone to lead the effort. However, the top management team had never had a conversation about how sustainability fitted into their business strategy. At this point in time, they have got through two sustainability coordinators, both of whom left in frustration.

Unrequited expectations. The owner of a construction firm got his employees too excited about sustainability. Employees started leaving because they felt the company wasn’t changing fast enough.

You should recognize these change management mistakes. They are generic problems. Had these organizations involved an HR professional in their plans, they might have avoided these unnecessary complications.

So don’t be intimidated if you don’t yet know the difference between PVC and PBTs. It doesn’t matter. Your skills are critical to carrying out sustainability. It’s your job to be the generalist, the change consultant, the process designer, the meeting facilitator. These are all things you know how to do. For the technical sustainability topics you don’t already have under your belt, take a class, read a book or hire a sustainability expert as a shadow consultant. You’ll pick it up quickly.

Sustainability is at its core an issue requiring organizational change and cultural change.

Edgar Shein, the author of Leadership and Organizational Culture, identifies five primary mechanisms that affect culture:

1. What leaders pay attention to, measure and reward?

2. How leaders react to critical incidents;

3. What leaders deliberately role-model;

4. Criteria for allocating rewards and status; and

5. Criteria for selecting, recruiting, promoting and firing.

Note how many of these mechanisms are the responsibility of human resources, either overtly through HR systems or through management training and coaching. So HR is key to making sustainability ‘stick’.

STRATEGIES YOU CAN USE

We see the role of the human resources director and department falling into the following categories:

• Introduce the concept to top executives. If your senior managers are not yet well versed in sustainability, assess when the time is right and then find the best way to introduce the topic.

• Consult on the implementation. Help put in place a plan that has a high probability of success.

• Align human resource systems. Incorporate sustainability into your HR systems (eg orientation/training, hiring, reviews, pay, benefits) to reinforce the organization’s efforts.

• Model appropriate behaviors. Assess your own impacts and make changes to your meeting management, paper processing, and other tasks.

• Measure the benefits. Enhance your existing measurement systems to track the return on your sustainability initiatives.

Introduce the concept to top executives

Because the HR department often includes an organizational development function and may facilitate strategic and operational sessions with top management, HR professionals are often in a good position to introduce new trends to senior management. Unfortunately, few in HR are well versed in sustainability. Remember, you don’t have to be the expert.  Your role may be as simple as pointing out articles about sustainability as a trend and inviting management to explore this as one of many interesting global trends that could affect their business.

Here are some ideas to get you thinking:

• Route a reprint of a sustainability-related article from a respected management publication (eg Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review or Business Week).

• At a management meeting, show a video related to sustainability (eg ‘The Next Industrial Revolution’) and use it as a discussion starter.

• In preparation for a strategic planning session, suggest to management that sustainability should be one of a handful of emerging trends they should examine.

• Bring in executives from other respected organizations to talk about why they have adopted sustainability as a strategic issue and how they use it to improve their performance.

Resources:

Here are some of our favorite articles to introduce executives to sustainability:

Senge, Peter M., Benyamin B. Lichtenstein, Katrin Kaeufer, Hilary Bradbury and John S.

Carroll (2007) ‘Collaborating for Systemic Change’, MIT Sloan Management Review, Winter,Vol 48, No 2, pp44–53.

Senge, Peter and Goran Carstedt (2001) ‘Innovating our Way to the Next Industrial Revolution’, MIT Sloan Management Review, Winter. This article provides a good explanation of why sustainability is going to be the real ‘new economy’ (versus the dot-com version of the not-so-new economy). This would be an excellent summary to give to executives unfamiliar with the issue as it includes most of the basic concepts (eg natural capitalism), quotes from big-name executives, differentiates eco-efficiencies from sustainability, and recounts some good profitability stories.

Hall, Jeremy and Harrie Vrendenburg (2003) ‘The Challenges of Innovating for Sustainable Development’, MIT Sloan Management Review, Fall. This article helps to explain why sustainability can be viewed as cutting both ways. ‘From a company’s perspective, innovation can be a primary source of the sustained competitive advantage as well as a significant source of risk, competitive disruption, and failure ... The additional interacting pressures from social and environmental concerns make SDI [sustainable development initiatives] more complex than conventional market-driven innovation.’ Monsanto’s GMO debacle is given as an example. The article also explains how Suncor and Transalta have managed that risk successfully.

‘Global Sustainability and Creative Destruction of Industries’, MIT Sloan Management Review, Fall 1999. This article does a good job of distinguishing green strategies from sustainability ones. For example, green strategies focus on incremental improvement in existing products, processes, suppliers and customers, while sustainability involves focusing on emerging technologies, markets, partners and customers - a list which suggests more emphasis on discontinuous creative destruction/restructuring of industries. It also segments the global market into three parts: consumer economy (1 billion people), emerging markets (2 billion people) and survival economy (3 billion people). Depending on which market you’re in, you should be asking different questions and focusing on different results.

The ‘Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’ study, performed for the UN by scientists from all over the world, summarizes the main issues. The 31-page overview report ‘Living Beyond our Means: Natural Assets and Human Well-Being’ nicely covers the global challenges we face, www.millenniumassessment.org/en/index.aspx.

 Waste Management and Recycling

Waste Management World 

Wate Management

Operate the building efficiently

The design of a building will clearly dictate the range of performance you can expect. However, everyday decisions can have a huge impact as well. Some are within your purview as a facilities manager, but you will need to become a behaviour modification expert as well.

Commissioning

It would be funny if it weren’t so common: most buildings simply don’t function as intended. Parts of the building may be hot while others are cold. The electronic controls may not be set properly. Building commissioning is the process of checking, usually with a third party, if the building is functioning the way it was designed. Aster Publishing in Eugene, Oregon saved more than $40,000 on its annual electricity bill in part by correcting an improper economizer operation and disabled HVAC controls. These services may not be free, but they often pay for themselves in the first year.

Energy management

Probably the biggest operations and maintenance (O&M) cost a facility manager watches is energy. Certain factors are largely within your control: flushing the building with cool evening air to reduce the air conditioning (AC) load the next day; bringing parts of the building on over time so you don’t create as much of a spike in energy demand; etc.

The big headache is usually the occupants: whining about being too hot or too cold, twiddling the thermostat, sneaking space heaters under their desks, leaving lights and computers on, etc. There are actions that you can take which will have some success. For example, Tufts University in Massachusetts estimated that if all students turned off their computers for six hours at night, they could save 572 tons of carbon equivalents and $87,000. Comparing current energy use in your buildings with past records can also uncover unnecessary use. But in reality, this will be the hardest part of the job.

Find creative ways to educate and inform occupants about the impacts of their decisions. TriMet, the transit authority for Portland, Oregon’s metropolitan region, employed at least one elegant tactic – they posted the electricity bill in the lifts. No entreaties. No guilt tripping. Just information. And their energy use dropped by 20 per cent in the next month!

When doing remodels, set up better measurement systems. For example, SERA Architects in Portland, Oregon installed a separate electrical metering system when they remodelled their offices so that each would pay its own energy bills. They immediately switched to green power (at a nominal annual cost of $800 for 9000 square feet) and further divided their metering to separately track lighting, mechanical systems and plug loads. This separate metering enables them to target improvements and monitor energy use.

Resources:

DSIRE is a comprehensive listing of energy-related incentives in every US state, www.dsireusa.org

.Manage waste

The first step in managing waste is to change your thinking. It’s not waste, it’s a resource.

This new mindset has allowed a number of organizations to achieve the goal of zero waste to landfill. Just imagine no dumpsters/skips!

Interface has eliminated over US$165 million in waste. They have learned how to make new carpet from old carpet, reducing their need for oil. They also have a factory powered in part by solar energy.

Xerox has saved more than US$2 billion since 1990 and diverted the equivalent of 2 million printers and copiers from the landfill. With their remanufacturing system, they take back old copiers and disassemble them. Parts that pass rigorous testing then get put in new products.

Hewlett-Packard in Roseville, California reduced its waste by 95 per cent and saved $870,564 in 1998. One action that contributed to this was switching from pallets to reusable slip-sheets to transport product.

 In 2000 Epson in Portland, Oregon reduced its waste to landfill to zero and saved $300,000. One of the strategies they used to achieve this was to buy a compactor to compress foam packaging, which was passed on as input to another manufacturer.

Excess ink is shipped off as pigment for paints. The final 10 per cent that can’t be reused or recycled is sent to a facility to be burned for electricity.

From the above examples, certain appropriate strategies become clear. Do a waste audit to see what is being thrown away. Even better, do a purchasing audit to see what you are buying - for your major purchases, consider their necessity, sourcing, recyclability and longevity. Find markets for whatever ‘residual resource’ (normally referred to as waste) you can’t prevent through purchasing practices or process changes. Many communities have a waste exchange website that helps connect potential users of various waste streams.

Resources:

GrassRoots Recycling Network website, www.grrn.org

Check with your local college or municipality to see if they offer low-cost waste assessments.

Provide green cleaning and landscaping services

Many facilities contract out their cleaning and landscaping services. Whether you do the

work yourself or contract it out, seek out greener, more benign options. Many traditional cleaning products are loaded with hazardous chemicals and artificial fragrances. These often cause skin irritation and/or respiratory problems for cleaning staff and represent a significant spill risk. Such fragrances can also increase sick days for employees who have respiratory problems such as asthma. Much of this risk is truly unnecessary. There are effective green cleaning products to serve almost every cleaning need. Instead of using a strong caustic product on every surface, decide when and where the ‘big guns’ really need to be used. Most of the same points can be made for landscaping chemicals. If you use native plants appropriate to their location, the need for chemicals drops considerably. If you have any lawn, lower your standards and allow some ‘weeds’ to interrupt the monotonous carpet of green. Spray and fertilize only when needed, using the most benign product that will do the job. Switch back to raking instead of using noisy, polluting leaf blowers. Replace gasoline- or diesel-powered machines with ones using cleaner fuels such as biodiesel, compressed natural gas, hydrogen or electricity (if it is sourced from renewable).

In both cases, periodically do a chemical inventory, tallying what you use and rating the products by hazard. Make every effort to eliminate those products that pose the most threat to environmental or human health. Material safety data sheets can help you with these decisions.

When we have done chemical inventories for clients, we find that initiating the inventory often leads to other business benefits. People clean out their shelves of old, unused product so they don’t have to count it in the inventory. We often discover that the same organization buys different products from different vendors to serve the same purpose; when they combine purchases, they often get a significant quantity discount. To make the process of doing a chemical inventory easy, require your vendors to provide you with your usage information.

Resources:

Green Seal has a certification system for cleaning products, www.greenseal.org

Green/Blue is working on several projects related to chemicals, packaging and design for the environment issues, www.greenblue.org

Dolphin Software has a neat database that compares chemicals for a certain function by both cost and toxicity so you can easily find alternatives that would meet your needs that both cost less and are less toxic. Go to www.dolphinsafesource.com/ and look for the Green Product

Selector under Products and Services.

King County, WA has done an analysis of a number of commonly used landscape products, rating them on a scale from high concern to low, www.govlink.org

Manage transportation issues

Add up the amount of land - both parking and access roads - that you have devoted to the car. How much more would that property is worth if it were a building site? This is your missed opportunity cost. Now figure out what it cost to build those parking areas and associated swales, landscaping and sewer lines. Add these two numbers and divide by the number of parking spaces. The purpose of this math’s problem is to make the point: there really is no such thing as free parking.

Portland State University calculated that they could not accommodate the expected growth in student numbers if they maintained the same student to parking ratio. Their existing 30 per cent public transport use – a level that would be the envy of many institutions – would have to be radically improved. As previously mentioned, they placed what parking they did provide further away from campus than the transit stops. They charge for parking and indicate the annual total on the monthly bills to shock people into the recognition of what it costs to own and operate a car; some of the parking revenue is used to subsidize bus passes and bike facilities. They provide a ‘Flexcar’ (a shared vehicle that can be rented by the hour) for people who do not have parking spaces. All this contributes to managing costs and reducing climate impact.

When it comes to transportation, the Field of Dreams movie refrain ‘if you build it [near bus stops], they will come [via public transportation]’ doesn’t work without carrots and sticks. So charge at least what it costs you for parking. If you can, subsidize bus passes and help people find alternative ways to get to work. Reserve the best parking spots for car pools. Instead of validating customer parking, consider giving drivers a free bus ticket instead. Of course, some people will still need to drive. So Quantec LLC, a small 35-person firm in Portland, Oregon, offers its employees a $9000 incentive to purchase a hybrid Toyota Prius ($150 per month over 60 months). They also buy bicycles for people who prefer to commute that way. In addition to reducing greenhouse gases and air pollution, Quantec found these are effective programmes to recruit and retain good talent.

Because of the potential for cost savings and the relative size of the impacts, many organizations begin their sustainability efforts with a focus on their facilities. While you will find the biggest opportunities when you are first building or selecting a new facility, there are still many measures you can take with an existing structure. Where you are a tenant and don’t control many aspects of the management of the facility (eg you don’t have a separate electric meter or any influence over cleaning practices), consider your leverage with your landlord or opportunities to unite with other tenants to make requests for different services.

 Resources:

The Westside Transportation Alliance advocates balanced transportation choices, http://www.wta-tma.org/

The US Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality, www.epa.gov/otaq

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 What is green building? (video)

What is a Green Building?

Facilities: How to Save Energy and Water, Improve Productivity and Reduce Waste

Buildings, their construction and operation, are usually a significant cost for any organization. They both displace habitat and affect transportation and land use patterns. They also consume a large percentage of our energy and produce much of our waste. Consider that US buildings, which represent about half of the nation’s wealth, consume 70 per cent of the nation’s electricity, generate 30 per cent of waste, and are responsible for more global warming than any other nation’s economy except China. In contrast, green buildings – with more natural light, better air quality and greater comfort – typically also contribute to improved occupant health, comfort and productivity. A more complete accounting of these costs and benefits demonstrates that green buildings are generally cost effective today, with average financial benefits exceeding additional costs by a factor of ten to one.’

According to the Climate Protection Manual for Cities, schools in the US spend over $6 billion on energy each year, more than they spend on computers and books combined! In the typical school, about a third of that energy is wasted. Thus facilities managers have a tremendous opportunity to make their organizations more sustainable while also saving money. Because buildings last for decades if not centuries, their choices have long-term consequences for the building owners and occupants and the community at large.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY

Facilities managers often find it hard to believe that they are not already doing all they can. However, sustainability often uncovers new opportunities. Facilities managers need to guard against the following common mistakes:

Being pound foolish. Often facilities will choose the cheapest first-cost option. But this can end up costing more in the long run. For example, vinyl flooring is typically cheaper than linoleum. However, linoleum usually lasts about four times as long. If materials represent about half the cost of a flooring job, the cost of the vinyl should be multiplied by eight to give a true comparison. Looking at the life cycle costs can make the more expensive product seem cheaper!

Wasting energy. When building designers apply a sustainability lens to the creation of a building, they invariably identify efficiencies not previously revealed. A green building is designed with an integrated team approach with a focus on optimizing trade-offs. For example, the building orientation, insulation and glazing may substantially reduce the size of the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system required, saving both capital and operating costs. Similarly, laying the piping out first to minimize angles and maximize diameter can radically reduce the costs associated with pumping compressed air or water.

Making people sick. Indoor air quality is often six to seven times worse than outside, sometimes resulting in sick building syndrome. Carpets, vinyl flooring and plywood cabinets and work surfaces may ‘off-gas’ chemicals into the air. Toxic and fragranced cleaning products may also contribute to allergies and illness. Toxic mould, caused by inadequate ventilation, has forced the closure of many buildings.

Paying twice. Waste can be defined as something you paid for that you pay again to get rid of. Portland State University in Oregon discovered during a waste audit that they were disposing of 1400 paper cups a day. They bought them and then had to pay to dispose of them. Sometimes the waste is not as obvious: a refrigerator near an oven, a return air vent near a heating vent. The executives in one office building were so intolerant to fluctuations in temperature that they set the thermostat for such a narrow range that air conditioning and heating alternated on and off all day.

STRATEGIES YOU CAN USE

To help you identify opportunities for eliminating the waste in your building, we’ve organized this section around the functions a facilities manager typically performs:

• Constructing/remodeling a high-performance building;

• Operating the building;

• Managing waste;

• Providing green cleaning and landscaping services; and

• Managing transportation issues.

Construct/remodel a high-performance building

It still comes as a surprise to many that so-called ‘green building’ practices do not necessarily increase building costs. Furthermore, buildings so constructed typically save 30 per cent or more on energy and related operating expenses. For owner-occupied buildings, green building practices are now a no-brainer. In many markets, it also makes sense for developers to use green building practices even if they intend to lease or sell the structure – tenants and buyers are often willing to pay somewhat more for the improved amenities and there is good evidence that such properties lease faster than their equivalent conventional competitors.

Green building (or high-performance building) is an emerging field, driven largely by the success of the US Green Building Council’s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) scoring system. This system has now been adopted by Australia, Canada, Brazil, India, Mexico and Taiwan. LEED provides a laundry list of things you can do, each with points assigned. A building or remodeling project can be certified at several levels (certified, silver, gold and platinum) based on the number of points the building is able to earn. The intention of the World Green Building Council and its affiliates is to keep pushing building practices toward sustainability as new methods and technologies become available.

The California Department of Finance commissioned a study by the Capital E group and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory to determine whether green building practices paid off.

After studying 100 buildings across the country and other studies, they concluded that the financial benefits of green design are between $50 and $70 per square foot in a LEED building, over ten times the additional cost associated with building green.

Deconstruction and recycling

Building is wasteful, especially if you’re remodeling or redeveloping existing structures. Construction waste represents a significant portion of municipal landfills. Now there are services that deconstruct rather than demolish buildings. This might not satisfy the same destructive urges, but it makes a lot of sense. As does recycling and reusing many materials. In a major renovation, the contractors at the Natural Capital Center in Portland, Oregon reportedly recycled and reused 97 per cent of the materials. In a recent study financed by the Environmental Protection Agency, four house deconstruction projects by RE Store, a non-profit retailer of used building supplies in Seattle, Washington, achieved recycle or reuse rates of 70 to 97 per cent

Resources:

For some examples of green building and an understanding of why it is important, see McDonough, William and Michael Braungart (2001) ‘The Next Industrial Revolution’ (video), Stevenson, MD: Earthome Productions, https://vimeo.com/20372160

Here are several green building standards and tools:

LEED: World Green Building Council, www.worldgbc.org , www.usgbc.org

BREEAM: BRE Environmental Assessment Method, www.breeam.org

BEES: Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability is a software tool for selecting environmentally preferable building materials, www.bfrl.nist.gov.

Day lighting

In principle, day lighting simply involves letting natural light into a building. In practice, it is more complicated, for you want visibility, not glare, and in most commercial buildings, you want light but not heat. Day lighting’s most obvious benefit is energy savings – you don’t need to turn on the lights. But that is often the least of its benefits. In an organizational setting, the highest cost associated with a building is not the building itself but the people in it. With that in mind, minor increases in capital costs to incorporate certain green features can at times provide a healthy return on investment. ‘The biggest benefit of day lighting is the impact it has on the people in the space. If it weren’t for people, we wouldn’t be designing interior environments. Your highest overhead walks into the office on two legs every day.

The cost of loss of productivity is incredible to a corporation,’ says Stefan Graf, principal at Illuminart, based in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Assume the cost to employ a worker is roughly $75,000 per year. If that employee works in approximately 150 square feet of space that originally cost around $15,000 to build, a 20 per cent productivity uptick on a $75,000-per-year worker pays back the entire cost of building construction in the first year ($15,000). ‘These productivity benefits are just huge,’ emphasizes Loveland, ‘and we know that they’re most directly correlated to daylight.’

A 20 per cent increase is not unrealistic. Based on the best research available from Carnegie Mellon University and others, day lighting appears to improve productivity and reduce absenteeism by up to that level. There are benefits beyond the workplace as well. Day lighting improves learning in schools, increases sales in retail environments and helps the elderly in retirement homes sleep better and live longer. In hospitals, people recover faster when they have access to daylight.

Of course, you will still need some lighting systems, but you can choose the most efficient fixtures and use daylight and motion sensors to limit their use. Lighting retrofits can often pay for themselves in just a couple years. Make sure lights can be turned on in sections of the building so that, for example, the entire building doesn’t have to be lit when the janitors are in one area.

Site selection

Where you place the building and what direction you point it can be important factors as well. In most cases, you want to choose a site that can easily be accessed by a variety of transportation modes – public transport, bike and car. This makes alternative transportation a viable option. Portland State University intentionally situated its parking farther away than the transit stop so that people who take the light rail or bus only have to walk one-third as far to reach their destination as drivers do. Industrial ecology involves co-locating properties that make use of one another’s waste products. The most widely cited example is Kalundborg, Denmark where waste heat, biomass, water and other resources are exchanged among synergistic operations. This kind of relationship is easier to achieve when planning new sites, but at least consider who your neighbors are and investigate whether they might be dumping something you need. The orientation of your building can have energy and lighting impacts as well. Combining a sun-facing orientation with an engineered overhang enables you to take best advantage of sunlight and heat. Exterior glazing helps you efficiently manage light and heat. It is also wise to have at least part of your roof facing sunward so that you are positioned to make use of photovoltaic technology when it becomes feasible or so that you can easily add solar thermal systems to preheat water for boilers or hot water heaters.

Material selection

Obviously, buildings use a tremendous amount of the world’s resources. So it is critical to minimize the impact of construction or remodels for the benefit of both the natural world and the building’s users. You can buy low-VOC (volatile organic compound) paint,

recycled and recyclable carpet and certified sustainable timber, often at prices competitive with traditional products. You can further avoid unnecessary materials by, for example, leaving rafters or piping exposed or by coloring a concrete floor instead of covering it with underlay and carpet.

In the building shell, give preference to materials with lower embodied energy (the amount of energy necessary to make them) where possible. For example, wood (which you would want to source from certified or well-managed forests) has a relatively frugal embodied energy of 639 kWh/ton. Brick has 4 times as much, concrete 5 times, glass 14 times and steel 24 times.

Consider also how best to use the materials. Deschutes Brewery, a microbrewery in central Oregon, for example, put the insulation on the outside of their concrete building. This put the thermal mass inside the building. At night, they flush in the cool night air, which is then absorbed into the concrete walls and slowly released during the day. Because of their climate, they only need to use refrigeration to keep their cases of beer cold for two months a year.

Resources:

‘Creating a High Performance Workspace G/Rated Tenant Improvement Guide’ by the City of Portland Office of Sustainable Development. There is a chapter on finishes and furnishings.

LEED Green Building Rating System for New Construction and Major Renovations. Architecture 2030 is a challenge for architects to make buildings climate neutral by 2050. Yudelson, Jerry (2008) The Green Building Revolution. Washington, DC: Island Press. OpenEco is a new global on-line community that provides free, easy-to-use tools to help participants assess, track, and compare energy performance, share proven best practices to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and encourage sustainable innovation, www.openeco.org.

The RETScreen International Clean Energy Decision Support Centre offers software decision-making tools that reduce the cost of pre-feasibility studies. English homepage: www.retscreen.net/ang/home.php.

Mechanical systems

With good design, you may be able to radically reduce or eliminate your HVAC system. The Eastgate office complex in Harare, Zimbabwe requires no air conditioning and almost no heating, despite the fact that the weather oscillates between 35 and 104°F. The architects took a lesson from termites to maintain a comfortable climate inside the building. Termites in Africa build tall, complex structures that must be kept at a narrow temperature range to grow food. They use underground tunnels to draw in cool air from the earth and open and close their ‘windows’ to create air flow and manage the temperature. Similarly, the Eastgate complex is actually two buildings linked by bridges across a shady, glass-roofed atrium open to the air. Fans suck fresh air in from the atrium; blow it upstairs through hollow spaces under the floors and from there into each office through skinting board (baseboard) vents. As the air rises and warms, it is drawn out through ceiling vents. Finally, it exits through 48 round brick chimneys.

To save energy, plan any system that requires piping carefully. The amount of energy needed to move something through a pipe increases geometrically as the pipe diameter shrinks. Bends in the piping also increase energy requirements. Lay out water pipes, compressed air pipes and the like in as straight a line as possible with the largest pipe size feasible. Then consider variable speed drives that can adjust the fan or pumping speed as needed. At the Collins Company mill in Klamath Falls, Oregon, they installed a backpressure steam turbine generator to utilize wasted energy in their compressed air system, providing almost half the power needed to run the plant. They figure the annual savings to be around $250,000.

Construction waste

Construction waste is clogging our landfills. But carpet, concrete, studs, steel, plasterboard and other building materials can often be reused or recycled. Setting up the Natural Capital Center in Portland, Oregon involved turning an old warehouse into office space. They were able to reuse or recycle 97 per cent of their construction debris. So before you begin any construction or remodeling project, set stretch goals for the diversion of waste.

Resources:

Morton, Steven (2002) ‘Business Case for Green Design: Sustainable Design is More than Good Intentions; It’s a Way of Reaching Business Goals’, www.facilitiesnet.com

Yale produces its Journal of Industrial Ecology, which is published by the MIT Press, www.mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=4&tid=32

Graedel, T. E. and B. R. Allenby (1995) Industrial Ecology. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Allenby, B. R. (1999) Industrial Ecology – Policy Framework and Implementation. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.  www.healthybuilding.net  provides information on health impacts.

The Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance has a useful website, www.BetterBricks.com