First let us acknowledge that we aren’t the only ones discussing the emerging role of standards in the green and clean-tech sectors. In fact, the folks at SustainAbility have created an excellent report which clearly describing the strengths and weaknesses of current certification and rating systems in their report titled: Signed, Sealed…Delivered? Behind Certifications and Beyond Labels. The authors present valuable insight and analysis regarding the respective role of standards, certifications and labels, and offer their opinions on the future role these systems will continue to play in our future economy. The role of standards designed to document environmental performance will continue to serve a differentiator for building owners, business organizations, and their processes and products. At evolveEA we not only help our clients implement sustainability best practices across the vectors of People, Process and Place, but help clients determine which third party certification standard(s) best ensure continued progress toward sustainability goals and expanded market recognition. As such, the following sustainability standards are widely recognized as leaders in the field of Organizational Culture and People:

B Corp: Becoming a Benefit Corporation requires organizations to fundamentally restructuring bylaws so that leadership can pursue the complimentary goals associated with growth and social benefit. The structure “allows directors of benefit corporations to consider employees, community, and the environment in addition to shareholder value when making operating decisions.” The B-Corp label has grown quickly with over 450 member organizations and legislation across a number of states supporting the B Corp legal designation.

Global Reporting Initiative: ​GRI has pioneered and developed a comprehensive Sustainability Reporting Framework that is widely used around the world. The Framework enables all organizations to measure and report their economic, environmental, social and governance performance—the four key areas of sustainability.

The Reporting Framework—which includes the Reporting Guidelines, Sector Guidelines and other resources—enables greater organizational transparency about economic, environmental, social and governance performance. This transparency and accountability builds stakeholders’ trust in organizations, and can lead to many other benefits. Thousands of organizations, of all sizes and sectors, use GRI’s Framework in order to understand and communicate their sustainability performance.

Carbon Disclosure Project: The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) works to transform the way the world does business to prevent dangerous climate change and protect our natural resources. They see a world where capital is efficiently allocated to create long-term prosperity rather than short-term gain at the expense of our environment. The CDP has successfully leveraged and incentivized the world’s largest companies to voluntarily report emissions and other environmental data resulting in a cohort of organizations that focus on decisions that are able to mitigate risk and make investment decisions that drive sustainable actions. Currently the CDP works with over 71 institutional investors with over 71 trillion under management and 50 fortune 500 organizations on supply chain issues.

The concept of benchmarking, a term commonly used in the design, construction and building operations industry, involves comparing building performance against industry standards and best practices. Commonly used benchmarking metrics such as square feet of office available, parking spaces available per employee, space ratings (Class A), and cost per square foot are often used to evaluate real estate.

And while all of the aforementioned aspects are certainly important when evaluating a building, to examine only those is to miss a crucial part of a building’s associated operating costs and potential valuation—important considerations for tenants and owners alike. What about a building’s ability to produce fresh air and a high quality indoor environment? How much does a building’s energy cost relative to others available? What is the relative efficiency of mechanical systems? Too often, we forget to evaluate our buildings across these crucial criteria; and as a result tenants, owners, students and even taxpayers pay higher costs for maintenance, operations and reduced productivity.  For Better Buildings, We Need Better Data

The truth is; our understanding of a building’s operational and life cycle costs are rarely considered. This lack of information leads to an inability to manage a building as an asset worthy of investment. To fully understand any commercial scale property owners and operators must use less common, but crucial, metrics such as energy, water or air quality performance while simultaneously comparing the performance of such metrics to other comparable facilities. Those efforts in tandem can provide a plan for the future and allow for actionable improvements. A building or portfolio owner/operator that doesn’t actively monitor energy use can be fairly compared to a car company that’s builds vehicles without ever measuring miles per gallon. Existing Buildings a Promising Investment, Global Firms Say

Event Venue Benchmarking can now be ordered online

evolveEA’s recent study of the David L. Lawrence Convention Center (DLCC), measured the building’s performance across crucial metrics such as energy and water usage, waste management, sustainable purchasing, sustainability communication and marketing  and benchmarked the DLCC against the entire convention center industry.

As a result the evolveEA team was able to deliver an actionable report to the DLCC allowing for immediate investment and facility upgrades (leading to significant energy cost savings) and strategic understanding of relative performance in comparison against peers across the country in a range of important performance characteristics.

Doing so has enabled the DLCC to reduce operating costs and shrink its environmental impact, all the while significantly increasing the number of events hosted and spending generated. evolveEA specializes in building performance measurement and benchmarking. We can help you choose key performance metrics that align with organizational goals and illustrate areas for improvement and performance against potential peers and competitors.

Where to begin? Understanding key metrics
Go ahead and answer the questions that follow; if you can answer yes to any of them then you’re already on your way:

• Do you actively monitor energy usage in your building or portfolio?
• If yes, do you measure using a per square foot or per occupant metric?
• How often or at what level of detail do measure energy?
• Have you ever compared your building’s energy use to others that may be similar (or others within your portfolio)?

If not, now might be a good time to take a closer look. For typical building types, the EPA Portfolio Manager is free and easy to use tool. For less traditional building types, a benchmarking analysis might be the appropriate path. In either case the role of benchmarking cannot be undervalued, and over time will improve your building’s bottom line.

Although not orbital mechanics, we have noticed an interesting phenomenon of gravitational assist with our green building clients. Green building initiatives, the tactile environmental representations of sustainable principles that house their employees round-the-clock, can be used to launch strategic sustainability pursuits and integrate sustainability into corporate culture.

Pittsburgh’s David L Lawrence Convention Center exemplifies how a green building can provide a Gravitational Assist. Built in 2003, the David L. Lawrence Convention Center was the largest green building in the world, and the first LEED Gold Convention Center. It was constructed with public money, and received a $3 million dollar loan from the Heinz Endowments to cover its green design and construction features. evolveEA recently completed a holistic sustainability study of the DLCC that aimed to understand how well it was performing, what the returns were on the initial sustainability investment, and opportunities for improvement.

Owned by the Sports and Exhibition Authority of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, and managed by SMG, the facility successfully leveraged its green design into its corporate culture, operations, and marketing strategy. As a result, evolveEA has shown that this initial $3 million investment has paid for itself many times over, generating over $12 million dollars in revenue from “green seeking” events to the DLCC from 2006 to 2010 (38% of total), and more importantly $143 million in direct spending to the local businesses.

As a result of the green building, sustainability became a core and lucrative part of the DLCC brand. In addition to increased business, this same sustainability mindset, exemplified by the DLCC’s greenfirst (g1) program, has led to more sustainable operations.

energy savings of approximately 25 million kWh resulting in a reduction of over 19,000 tons of CO2 (2005-2010), over 24 milllion gallons of potable water saved (2008-2010), and over 785 tons of waste diverted from the landfill. Increasing business and improving environmental performance at the DLCC are not mutually exclusive, but synergistic goals.

Leveraging Sustainability Beyond the Building
If the DLCC was able to achieve such dramatic economic and environmental results by pursuing sustainability, imagine the impact that this same mindset could have on the region and its businesses. How much energy or water could they save—or–how much more economic growth could they generate?

The DLCC has a tremendous opportunity to further leverage the “gravity” of this recent study into increased business and improved environmental performance, not just internally, but within its local value chain of service providers. After all, the hotels, restaurants and other service providers that DLCC visitors patronize directly benefit from its commitment to sustainability—to the tune of $143 million–and account for a significant portion of each event’s environmental footprint. Given that destination (i.e. location of the facility), and sustainability of operations are key selling points for convention planners when choosing an event location, all stakeholders involved (i.e DLCC, Pittsburgh’s downtown businesses, event planners, and event attendees) stand to benefit from a robust network of local service providers that are able to deliver truly sustainable events and accommodations.

Leveraging Sustainability Beyond the Region
If the DLCC was able to achieve such dramatic economic and environmental results by pursuing sustainability, imagine the impact this same mindset could have on convention centers and their values chains around the country. How many tons of waste or CO2 emission could they reduce—or—how much money could they save?

As the first-mover in green building in the convention industry, the DLCC catalyzed a green building movement among convention centers. Since its inception, more than 20 have been LEED certified and over 50 are pursing certification. Now with this study, it has the opportunity to continue to pull the industry forward with its innovative approach and thought leadership. This study generated the most in-depth benchmarking database of convention center sustainability performance. Tracking and sharing this information on an ongoing basis represents a serious opportunity for the DLCC to not only understand and improve its operations, but to help other convention centers do the same.

Gravitational Assist = Faster Acceleration Toward Sustainability
evolveEA’s study of the DLCC shows how strong commitment to green building can launch effective organizational change that expands market share and profitability while improving the local environment and economy. It can serve as a model for members of DLCC’s local value chain and/or members of the convention industry as a whole to decrease their environmental impact while improving business. After all, who wouldn’t want to make more money faster, cheaper and with less effort.

The event featured stories from planners and city workers on their use of data to track vacancy, foreclosures, and property-to-regional-level statistics in Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and a few other cities. It’s fascinating that such robust data systems in recent years have been developed at local and regional levels, even as funding for such projects is quite limited. There has been little inter-regional coordination among organizations and governments, which made this conference an important networking and sharing opportunity for many attendees. The highlights for me were a workshop called Visual Story-telling with Data led by design professionals to demonstrate the value of data visualization, and the fact that a number of presenters talked about sustainability at a conference where this was not a planned focus.

The graphic below illustrates topics covered at the conference and how they relate to our work at evolveEA. Specific examples are linked to the outer ring of the diagram—just click the buttons.

While the research tells us that people do give up on things they care about, it also shows that when people band together around a topic there is little they are not willing to collaboratively tackle.  The group mentality—which is so often demonized for its ability to deplete our individuality—can actually be helpful when it comes to driving progress.  This new view of the group mentality helps illustrate why conferences can be imperative when pressing forward with a cause.

I went to an Eco-district Summit in Portland recently and came back with the realization that people all over the world are facing the same difficulties we are here in Pittsburgh. There isn’t a successful eco-district out there that didn’t come up against some serious barriers on its way to fruition.  The benefit of gatherings like this summit are immeasurable; people from all over the world are able to come together and hash out what works as well as lessons learned.

evolveEA created the above chart to help community planners gauge the effectiveness of sustainability measures by plotting their scale, from the individual to infrastructural level, in relation to required time commitment.

An inherent theme at any eco-districts gathering is scale. Scale is a prerequisite consideration before attempting to tackle any sustainability problem and can really make or break a project. Innovations of every imaginable size were discussed and their reproducibility was measured based on the difficulties faced. The most glaring example is that of the congestion tax in London. Mark Watts of Arup Corporation discussed how a strong leader could take public opinion with them in the advancement of revolutionary policy if public perception is taken into account when presenting something controversial.  Mark said that when London’s mayor rolled out the groundbreaking program, he phrased the changes in a way that took the emphasis off of the polarizing topic of climate change and environmental protection and focused on the convenience that would come with increased public transportation options and decreased traffic. When the program became a success, Mayor Ken Livingstone asked a group of mayors from around the world if they would do it themselves. Only one outspoken mayor from a southern U.S. city responded, “If it works and you get re-elected, then I’ll consider it.”

While our own eco-districts work in Larimer has yet to be fully instituted, we at evolveEA have a firm understanding of the likely issues on the way to a sustainable eco-district. That understanding coupled with the help of like-minded organizations like the Kingsley Association has brought evolveEA to the cutting edge in eco district design. Our award from the Pittsburgh AIA for our work in Larimer is a testament to our thought leadership in this area and our ability to bring truly sustainable living to the community scale. Because, as the saying goes, attempting to address urban sustainability one building at a time is like trying to address deforestation one tree at a time.