Green Team

The need

The client was interested in creating a “Green Team”, focused on improving environmental sustainability. Since the client was manufacturing goods for the construction industry, questions about environmental sustainability often came from customers who were pursuing LEED certification.

The solution

As the journalist Simon Caulkin wrote in 2008, “what gets measured gets managed,” so establishing a baseline for our current environmental sustainability performance was the obvious first step. With help from our finance department, I assembled the last two years’ worth of invoices from our waste and energy suppliers and entered them into the mightiest of business tools: Microsoft Excel.

Measures led to metrics which led to key performance indicators. Seasonal variability was factored out of the equations using tricks I’d picked up from a VP of Sales with whom I had worked in the past. Reports were updated and shared monthly, and major projects were shared semi-annually at all-hands meetings.

Some highlights include:

• More than 98% of waste diverted from landfill to recycling programs.
• More than 1300 trees saved per year thanks to our cardboard and wood recycling programs. Paper consumption reduced by more than 50%.
• Carbon negative due to avoidance exceeding emissions.

In addition to looking at our waste generation and energy consumption in relation to the amount of product we were producing, I also looked at the associated costs to prioritize our improvement efforts. Energy was our biggest spend and electricity, in particular, represented more than 60% of our total environmental spend. An LED lighting retrofit resulted in savings of more than $50,000 and 320,000 kWh per year.