March 22, 2012

How Waste Management Can Earn LEED Points for Existing Buildings

By Anna Munie

The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program is not just for new construction anymore. In fact, the U.S. Green Building Council reported in December 2011 that LEED-certified existing buildings had exceeded LEED-certified new construction for the first time, and by 15 million square feet no less. Economic and environmental improvements are being seen by retrofitting existing building operations to meet the LEED standard, including in the area of waste management.

Following are the ways companies can incorporate waste management practices into gaining LEED certification on existing buildings:

1)      Prerequisite: A Solid Waste Management Policy
Requirements: A company must maintain a written policy detailing the waste streams under their control, and the procedures for reducing the amount of waste that goes to landfill or incineration.
Tips for Achievement: As a prerequisite, this policy must be in place before a company can even begin to apply for waste management credits.

2)      1 Credit: Waste Stream Audit
Requirements: Conduct an audit of all building “ongoing consumables” wastes (low cost per unit items that are regularly ordered and disposed of), and use to create a baseline that will show opportunities for increased recycling/re-use.
Tips for Achievement: If a company has done the work to create a comprehensive solid waste management policy, they’ve probably already come pretty close to doing a full waste stream audit. However, make sure all opportunities are identified and acted upon.

3)      1 Credit: Ongoing Consumables
Requirements: Maintain a waste reduction and recycling program for items regularly used and replaced in the course of business (Ex: cardboard, plastic, glass). 50% of ongoing consumable waste streams must be recycled to qualify for this credit, and 80% of portable dry cell batteries must also be recycled.

Tips for Achievement: The great thing about this credit is how easy it is to set up. Nearly all waste service providers will include consumables recycling programs to some degree, so work with them on recycling containers, employee training, and program development.

4)      1 Credit: Durable Goods
Requirements: Maintain a waste reduction and recycling program for items that are not regularly purchased or require capital expenditure (Ex: electronics and appliances). 75% of durable goods waste streams must be recycled to qualify for this credit.
Tips for Achievement: Consider donation of still functioning electronics or appliances to charity groups, schools, or Habitat for Humanity. For non-functioning items, the growth of electronics waste and recycling has been exponential in the last few years, and plenty of service providers are available to businesses.

5)      1 Credit: Facility Alterations and Additions
Requirements: Divert at least 70% of facility alterations/additions waste from disposal in landfills or incineration.
Tips for Achievement: Having written policies describing construction materials that can be recycled, identifying waste haulers that will incorporate recycling and re-use, and requiring contractors to identify how they will reduce source materials are ways to achieve this credit before a facility alteration is even planned.

Anna Munie is a freelance writer currently working within the fields of sustainability and environmental health and safety management. She has 10 years of experience in hazardous waste management and is a Certified Hazardous Materials Manager (CHMM). When not developing sustainability programs and making sure the Ph.D.’s in her research department don’t blow themselves up, she competes nationally with her horse Lucky in the sport of reining.

Leave a Comment

Filed under green building, waste management

March 20, 2012

Are Sustainability Consultants Underemployed?

The study of the sustainability consulting business we recently released has been very popular. Some key findings are that consultants are upbeat about their business prospects , and that the field has grown with an influx of lots of new consultants over the last three years.

The data allows us to construct a profile of sustainability consultants, with information about consultants’ educational and professional backgrounds, the industries they are working for most, what types of projects are most popular and so on. The report is useful for consultants and the companies that hire them. The data is also very relevant to recruiters, organizations offering education, training and certification to sustainability consultants, and media companies and event producers who are targeting these folks. (You can download a free copy here.)

Misreading the Data

The study got some nice coverage in the media, but some of that coverage took a perspective that may be misleading. One piece, for instance, led off with this statement: “Some 49 percent of sustainability consultants believe business conditions are somewhat or very strong today even though just 26 percent of them work full-time in sustainability, according to a survey by Green Research.” This statement seems to suggest that sustainability consultants are underemployed—only a quarter are really working full time, after all. That’s not my reading of the data, however.

If you’ve worked as a consultant you know that it’s rare to spend 100 percent of your time doing billable work for clients. Senior consultants and managing consultants especially tend to spend a large share of their time on business development. Most consulting companies track the “utilization rate” of their consultants, and successful ones tend to achieve average utilization rates of around 80 percent. In our survey, just 20 percent of respondents reported a utilization rate at their company of 80 percent or more.

Consultants Spend Non Billable Time on Business Development and Internal Projects

How Consultants Spend Non-billable Time

When consultants are not consulting for clients, what are they doing? We asked that question, actually. A majority are working on business development or on internal projects. Some are in training or catching up with administrative work. That’s typical and healthy.

The consulting business is challenged by the fact that clients are often lacking budget, needing education and slow to make decisions. But a growing number of companies are getting serious about defining strategies and are starting to work on improving their environmental performance. This will be create demand for good sustainability consultants for years to come.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Consulting Study, sustainability

Tagged as ,

March 13, 2012

Optimistic About Business Prospects, the Ranks of Sustainability Consultants Swell

As Market Matures, Industry and Functional Specialization to Become More Important

New York City (March 13, 2012) – Green Research, the New York-based corporate sustainability research and advisory firm, today released a new report featuring the results of the world’s first global study of consultants working in sustainability and corporate social responsibility. The study was conducted via an online survey fielded with the support of media partners globally. The survey drew 1548 responses from six continents and 69 countries. The report, “Global Sustainability Consultant Survey, 2012,” finds sustainability consultants optimistic about their business prospects. Forty-nine percent of consultants surveyed say business conditions are somewhat or very strong today and 62 percent expect a strong business environment six months from now. “Sustainability consultants are generally upbeat about business conditions,” said David Schatsky, principal analyst at Green Research and author of the report. “Consultants working in Asia-Pacific countries are the most upbeat of all. But challenges loom as well.”

The study found that many professionals have been drawn to the sustainability consulting field in recent years. The data reveal that 40 percent of the consultants entered the field less than three years ago. According to the report, a combination of factors has contributed to the influx of professionals to the field. These include the dislocations caused by the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing recessions, which prompted some professionals to become independent consultants, and growing awareness of sustainability challenges and interest in helping to solve them.  Of course, the field has well established firms and highly experienced consultants as well. Forty percent of sustainability consultants have been working in the field for at least 5 years; about half of those claim 10 years’ experience.

The report suggests that the influx of new consultants may be putting downward pressure on consulting incomes. Among US-based consultants, the median annual income is $70,000. Three-quarters of consultants earn $97,500 or less annually but incomes as high as $310,000 were reported. In the US the incomes of sustainability consultants are comparable to the salaries reported in 2010 by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics for management or operations research analysts.

The report also examined the industries, business areas, and technical areas consultants were most active in over the prior year. More consultants worked in manufacturing than any other sector. Strategy and planning projects were more common than projects focusing on specific business or operational areas such as supply chain or facilities. Green Research believes that as the field matures, consultants will need to couple strategy expertise with expert industry and functional knowledge.

The research is now available for download at greenresearch.com. For more information, please contact David Schatsky at +1 646-783-8337 or info@greenresearch.com.

8 Comments

Filed under press release

March 8, 2012

Market Research in Sustainable Building Materials

We recently bid on a project in the building materials industry. To prepare our proposal we conducted more than 10 interviews with green building consultants, engineers, architects, construction firms and property management companies. It would have been a great project. Unfortunately, we did not win the bid. But we learned a few things that I thought I’d share. To protect the confidentiality of our dealings with the client, I won’t identify the product category.

The primary objectives of the study were as follows:

  1. Develop a better understanding of deciders and influencers in this category and of thought leaders in the built environment and sustainability.
  2. Learn what key terms such as “sustainability,” “green building” and “high-performance building” mean to this population.
  3. Assess this population’s reactions to a list of potential company sustainability initiatives, including
    • how positively or negatively they would rate them
    • how they affect their views of the company including its offerings and/or its brands
    • how they influence recommendations of the company’s offerings
  4. Prioritize the list of proposed sustainability initiatives based on reactions of target group as well as an analysis of the broader views of thought leaders.

Do you see why I thought it would have been a great project?

Drawing on our background research for the proposal and our prior research in sustainability, we developed some initial hypotheses and perspectives that influenced our proposed approach to the project.

We found, for instance, that the influencers of building materials purchases for any given building project can be numerous and may include facilities VPs, design engineers, architects and specialized consultants. The selection of these products is often based on the prior experience of the specifiers; preferred vendor lists; and design guideline documents that predate a specific project and are often prepared by committees at some organizations.

Degree of Influence Sustainability Executives Have over Various Corporate Functions' Sustainability Policies and Procedures

Meanwhile, a previous Green Research study on the role of corporate sustainability executives revealed that while they play a key role in defining and communicating the company’s position on sustainability, they tend to focus their efforts on a small number of high-leverage initiatives. They are more likely to guide the development of policy than to influence directly the purchase of individual materials and products. And they tend to wield only a moderate degree of influence over policies and procedures related to facilities and procurement, as the above graphic shows.

Our hypothesis is that today sustainability is not a big influencer in the category in question. Specifiers we spoke with are aware of the efforts of building products manufacturers to position their products as green. Their reactions to these claims range from interest to skepticism to the view that the claims are irrelevant. Even among sophisticated buyers and green-building thought leaders, we expected to find that sustainability considerations may not be a primary driver of product selection in this category in the near future.

In this context, we proposed a research design that would allow us to tease out the role of product sustainability versus corporate-level sustainability; to better understand the influence that company reputation may play in the product selection process; and to identify initiatives and claims that can bolster a manufacturer’s reputation without provoking negative reactions to perceived “greenwashing.”

You win some and you lose some. If you have a research need you’d like to discuss with us, please drop us a line.

Leave a Comment

Filed under green building

March 1, 2012

How Can We Make Money Encouraging People to Consume Less?

This was the question someone posted on Quora. In case you are unfamiliar with Quora, it’s a site where people post and answer questions. Sounds simple, but the standards of quality are high and the experience is often very good. I highly recommend you invest a little time getting to know the site.

In any case, that question—”How can we make money encouraging people to consume less?”—caught my eye. It has the ring of despair, doesn’t it? How are we going to save the planet? To do so we have to consume less, but how in the world are we going to do that in a market economy that is driven by increasing consumption?

There’s no need for despair, although some of the answers that people posted were pretty negative. take this one, for instance:

Consumption is all about triggering dopamine. The problem is that multiple psychological factors (including childhood abuse, bullying, chronic stress) predispose certain types to any number of addictive behaviors…

Some folks posted some pretty interesting theoretical comments too. But I felt I had to jump in with some specific, real-world examples of how companies are making money while reducing consumption. Some of them are poster children for “sustainable/collaborative consumption.”  Readers of this blog may be already familiar with these examples, but in case you’re not, I’ve reposted them below. If you have other examples or additional thoughts, I’d love to hear them.

ZipCar and other car sharing services make vehicles available to us for just the hours we need them, and not a whole day. We “consume” less of the car; they make money.

Interface carpet recovers and recycles worn out carpet tiles into new carpet tiles. We get our floors covered, but consume less material in the process. Interface makes money. Armstrong World Industries has a similar story featuring ceiling tiles.

Procter & Gamble is an interesting case, for two reasons. They claim to have formulated Tide so that it works as well in cold water as hot water. They are working to persuade consumers to wash more in cold water–and to do it with Tide. Consumption of fossil fuels goes down, profits to P&G go up. At the urging of Walmart, they are offering an expanded set of concentrated formulations that contain less water. Water consumption goes down, P&G makes money.

My final examples predates the use of the term “sustainability.” Fancy food, tiny portions, less consumption, more profit. High fashion, tiny bikini, less consumption, more profit.

My point is that it’s not that hard to imagine low-consumption ways of making money. But it may be a challenge for companies wedded to wasteful business models.

Other thoughts or examples?

Leave a Comment

Filed under sustainability

February 27, 2012

A Good Year for Ecosystem Services Awareness?

Following the publication of the white paper “Ecosystem Services:  Framing a Corporate Action Plan,”  (free download) David Meyers spoke with Eva Zabey, Assistant Program Manager at the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, about ecosystem services and what drives corporations to take action.

What really drives companies to act responsibly about ecosystem services impacts and dependencies?  According to the World Business Council on Sustainable Development’s (WBCSD) Eva Zabey, there is no one answer.  When looking at the range of member companies that have acted as “Road Testers” for the WBCSD’s Corporate Ecosystem Valuation (CEV) the only unifying point is that the companies realize that ecosystem service (ES) issues will impact them at some point and they want to get ahead of that curve.

Weyerhaeuser for example was generating significant positive externalities from its  management of expansive forest lands but was not capturing revenue for these services.  Its CEV study helped pinpoint and justify new revenue sources.  A CEV study can also identify economic winners and losers with ES issues – a process that helped some companies identify and communicate effectively with key stakeholders.  Other companies have used the Corporate Ecosystem Services Review (ESR) and CEV to identify operating risks and cost savings.

Many of the companies in the WBCSD are aware of the increased attention being given to biodiversity and ecosystem service issues. For example, the 190 countries that are signatories of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) recently agreed to put in national targets for reducing the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services by the end of 2012.  The UK government has produced a whitepaper on integrating ecosystem services into the market economy.  “Governments, financial institutions, NGOs, and consumers will ultimately include ecosystem services values in their assessments of companies and their products,” explains Zabey.  It is becoming clear to leading companies that increasing disclosure, regulation and, eventually, pricing of ecosystem services is on its way.

Although carbon and water have clearly caught the corporate eye, there are major challenges to getting companies on board with other ecosystem services.  Says Zabey, “about half of our members that are interested but the other half are waiting.  It will take several years before corporate ES reporting is required and after carbon and water, it starts to get complicated.  So, one major challenge is to take the complexity of ecosystem services and provide clear useful tools and methods for business.  It is better for businesses to spend their time making changes rather than just reporting.”

Towards the goal of helping companies “get” ecosystem service issues, the WBCSD is developing a Business Ecosystem Training (BET) program to bring sustainability professionals up to speed on the primary ES issues.  This modular program can be experienced by individual modules and as a complete 2 1/2-day training program.

Zabey is hopeful that 2012 will be a good year for ecosystem services awareness.  The WBCSD is a major sponsor of the upcoming World Conservation Conference of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN); there will be a key CBD meeting of parties; and of course there is Rio +20.  Ecosystem services have greatly deteriorated in the 20 years since the first “Earth Summit” but perhaps through better awareness, knowledge, valuations, and reporting requirements, things will look better 20 years from now.

Leave a Comment

Filed under ecosystem services

February 24, 2012

Sustainability and the Hospitality Sector: The Case for Pillows

By Jennifer Moon

As hotels continue to expand their sustainability practices, numerous sustainability products have entered the market.  Many have been embraced by the hospitality industry over the years, such as ozone laundry machines, eco-key cards for guestrooms and bath/tissue products made from bagasse (a byproduct of sugarcane).  More are on the way. Successful products will deliver both cost savings and increased sustainability for hotels in the long run.

The Pillow-Vac® machine from Harris Pillow Supply is such a product. It allows hotels to renovate rather than replace pillows, at significant savings in cost and environmental impact.  Already hotels  like the Hilton Concord hotel in San Francisco and the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs have taken to this product.   I wanted to see how the Pillow-Vac® would fair based on factors in New York City union hotels.

Based on my own research into how often pillows get changed out for NY hotels, I was able to calculate a realistic ROI & payback period between small to large scale hotels.  The price of the pillow was set at $23.00, based on competitive vendor rates at wholesale value.  The number of pillows that need to be replaced per year was estimated based on the sample I took from my own workplace at the InterContinental New York Barclay.  Given those assumptions, mid to larger scale hotels would benefit most from investing in a pillow renovation product.  Your payback period could potentially range from 1.5-3 years with an ROI ranging between 33%-66%.

There are always other factors beyond the cost benefit calculation that should be taken into consideration, especially for hospitality operations.

Operational Factors

It is not easy to pinpoint how soon pillow renovations occur in a hotel.  The typical system in place to change out pillows is simply on an as-needed basis.   For instance at my current workplace, the InterContinental New York Barclay, we replaced roughly 108 pillows in 2011.  But, only 72 pillows were feather-based, the rest were foam.  Our estimated costs for purchasing new feather pillows came out to $1220.  With PillowVac® we would have realized a savings of roughly $503 in 2011.  If we were to assume that we change out less than 100 pillows annually, then our payback period would extend as long as 5 years.  Operationally, this would not be ideal for our use.  However, there are other circumstances where the PillowVac® would be most useful and should be considered for purchase by a property of our size and use—room renovations.  Renovations occur every 7 or so years. If hotels are able to budget for this type of investment during the year the renovation is planned, than the savings can be realized much sooner and would reflect closer to the numbers calculated in the original cost-benefit analysis.

Externalities

This is where New York City hotels differ from many other hotel markets.  If pillow renovations now get incorporated as a standard operating procedure (SOP) then a new system gets established within the duties of the housekeeping department.   Management has to consider the possibility that this could change union labor clauses to an employee’s job description; potentially slowing down the process of being able to renovate pillows.  Some questions to consider—Who will operate this machine?  Will the duties fall onto a union or non-union staff member?  How many people will learn how to operate this machine?    These are the factors to consider that will determine if your investment will be successfully implemented and integrated into your operation.  Considering the externalities will also help you determine if this is the right investment to make.  Every hotel is unique and has very different operating climates.  If you have a team that’s very sensitive to change, then introducing a new technology can be perceived negatively so should be approached with much more caution.  Knowing the heart of your operation can alleviate these potential roadblocks.   Holding conversations with staff and management beforehand is a great method to  prepare, engage and encourage departments for change.  This type of additional planning can ensure a more successful launch of an investment.

Conclusion

The environmental benefits of reducing our waste sent to landfills make for a great case to invest in products like the PillowVac®.  At the same time, we have to make sure that when we invest in new products it will make sense for our operation. Considering carefully how you will implement a new approach like this from start to finish.  For hotels, walking through the logistics of implementation can ensure you achieve the return on investment you expect.

Jennifer Moon is currently pursuing a M.S. of Sustainability Management at Columbia University and holds a B.S. in Hotel Administration from Cornell University.  She is currently the Sustainability Management intern at the InterContinental New York Barclay hotel.

Leave a Comment

Filed under hospitality, sustainability