The Alliance believes in and practices a broad interpretation of a high-performance building. It’s not just about energy and resource use, although minimizing those is of the utmost importance. It’s also about improving lease performance, because that is the key to persuading other owners of existing buildings that going green is not just the right thing to do but can also bring financial rewards as well as public recognition.
Several factors shape lease performance, including operations and maintenance costs, occupancy rates, net cash flow, churn, financing and so on. Crucial to many elements of lease performance are the tenants who work in the building. Ideally, they should be a building owner or manager’s strongest allies in making their workspaces appealing, attractive, safe, healthy, comfortable, pleasurable to occupy, and conducive to high productivity. Tenants who love a building will raise demand for its space, often supporting higher rents and reducing turnover and its associated costs. They can be enlisted to help run the building efficiently and are more likely to be open to such ideas as suite-level (or even desk-level) “dashboards” that display energy consumption amounts and patterns throughout the work day and week—information that can be used to boost efficiency. They can form the core of a “culture of conservation” in the building that supports ongoing efforts save energy, and thus money.
In our case, our tenants are also philosophical and maybe even spiritual allies, because we’re all working in more or less the same broad field of sustainability. When we started thinking seriously about what direction the renovation ought to take, consulting a group of tenants for input from that perspective seemed completely natural. So in September 2010 we gathered more than two dozen current tenants, partners and Alliance staff and invited them to grouse and brainstorm about the building and how to make it better. The result was a potpourri of well over a hundred ideas in six general categories. Here’s a sample:
Transportation—a building-wide EcoPass option (for discounted travel on regional bus system); online car-pooling coordination service; good video-conferencing facilities in the building to eliminate some travel; get an eGo Carshare station nearby.
Communication/education—building campaign to ban bottled water; create a building Green Team; combine happy hour events with updates on energy, water and waste; routine orientation for new employees to the Center’s “culture of conservation.”
Waste and janitorial services—use electric hand dryers rather than paper towels in restrooms and kitchenettes; make composting available, recycling stuff easier, and trashing stuff harder (e.g., require tenants to take their own trash out to the dumpster but put recycling bins by every desk); use the empty elevator shaft (adjacent to the working one) for a waste-to-energy facility.
Energy and water—publicly visible “dashboards” to display everyone’s energy use; a building-wide cap-and-trade program and/or hold energy conservation competitions; use desk lamps and task lighting rather than overhead fixtures; install placebo thermostats (not actually connected to the HVAC system).
Shared services—create tenant buying clubs; install fast and reliable wireless for Internet access; start a communal coffee program; replace cold vending machines with unrefrigerated ones; institute bulk purchasing for office supplies; create a daycare space.
Work space—daylighting for stairwells and basement lunchroom; install windows that can be opened; increase conference room space; reconfigure the roof with spaces for lunch and events.
Most of these suggestions were sensible and many were doable, so the Center began incorporating as many as fit both criteria into the building’s operation, such as the eGo Car Share option, the Green Team, and EcoPasses (in some offices anyway). Other suggestions went into the hopper for later review when the building renovation project reached the design phase, such as daylighting, task lighting, dashboards, internal cap-and-trade, and opening windows. Some, such as using the empty elevator shaft for turning waste into energy, seemed remote possibilities at best.
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