I do.  

We architects LOVE plans – floor plan, of course! Floor plans reveal all: the flow of space, the order of form, the organization of function. But how about those other plans? Strategic plans? Business plans? Do we love them less?

And what about sustainability action plans?

What is a sustainability action plan? When your architectural firm signs the AIA 2030 Commitment, you will have one year to develop a long range plan that aligns your firm with “the stated 2030 benchmarks for achieving carbon neutrality”.  In other words, you will be asked to tell the AIA what – specifically – your firm will do to help us all get to those 2030 goals. That’s a sustainability action plan. It’s the next big step for us at Bergmeyer.

And on this requirement, the AIA wisely advises “action plans will differ from firm to firm.”  So that means the sky is the limit! Shoot the moon. Go for broke. Have fun with it. It’s an entirely open-ended assignment. Like an extra-credit essay question, you can’t fail.

A famous architect once said “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood . . .”

In my very first blog post about the AIA 2030 Commitment, I recommended avoiding audacious goals. I was just kidding.  Audacity is good. When it comes to sustainability planning, your firm needs what Jerry Portas and Jim Collins described in their very influential business book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies as “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” or BHAGs. A BHAG is an ambitious, compelling, but achievable target that serves to unify firm-wide effort and catalyzes action.

Go ahead. Set audacious goals for your firm. Think five or ten years out. Extend your reach. Strive for national or global leadership. Do research. Create your own design criteria. Be generous. Strive for exemplary performance. Document your findings and publish the results for free on your website so we can all bask in the glow of your success.   

And to help you out with this, the AIA has put links to several completed sustainability action plans on the AIA 2030 Public Reporting Template.

Wanna see ‘em? Sure you do.

Mithun’s sustainable action plan is here. It’s one of the more graphically sophisticated documents. It has a good, clear outline. Their Design Process goals include doing a “payback analysis’ on every one of their projects and a detailed lifecycle cost analysis (LCCA) “on selected projects where fee allows.” I especially like that they have a section of their plan devoted to Advocacy, Policy & Public Education. (You can bet Bergmeyer’s plan will have one of those, too!)

Lake Flato’s plan is here. Full of BHAGs, this firm is going to buy carbon emission offsets, host an office wiki to record sustainable design achievements, do internal “sustainability reviews” of every project, and create a customizable client education kit. The sustainable action plan for one of our Boston firms, KlingStubbins, is here. They’re making sustainable design criteria part of their Quality Assurance process and have a very long list of Staff Training and Education activities. Very good stuff.

Sustainability action planning. It could be the most important, most meaningful, most gratifying part of the whole AIA 2030 program.  Because, as the Cheshire Cat may have said, “if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there!”

I was in my office the other day fuming about Canadian tar sands or something when Bill came busting in with both hands full of paper. He was livid. Since 7 AM that morning, he had been watching unclaimed 8-1/2  x 11 prints pile up in our office printer. The pile in his left hand said “1 PM yesterday” right hand said “7 AM today”. Clearly, some people at Bergmeyer were not taking our AIA 3020 Commitment waste reduction goals seriously.

Without letting me ask why he was at work at 7 AM, he exploded: “We oughta do something about this, Mike! We need a serious all-office e-mail. Or a meeting. Or maybe we can just pin all this wasted paper up somewhere so people will realize what they’re doing?”

In a flash, I saw the genius of Bill’s suggestion. A presentation would be much more effective than another reproachful e-mail. But not a pinup, we needed a bit of performance art. We needed an installation. This called for something . . . spontaneous.

We discussed an idea. Spontaneous behavior authorized, Bill flew into action. Starting at the printer in question, he began to lay sheets of paper on the office floor one at a time like little white carpet tiles. The trail of paper three sheets wide stretched down our main corridor, past the reception desk around the corner to the kitchen, by the bathrooms and into the main conference room. 

We all got the point. The offending parties were served. Printer waste dropped dramatically.

But that’s just one of the many strange goings-on at Bergmeyer since we signed the AIA 2030 Commitment. It’s as if the whole firm has gotten itself behind the idea of reducing our environmental impacts. It’s almost like . . . we have seen the light!

Since that blog post about dumpster-diving, our Twitter feed has been off the hook about how to recycle almost anything. The road warriors are now into it as well. A recent intranet message made this astonishing claim: “more than two million partially used bars of soap are discarded at hotels every day!” The post linked to the Global Soap Project.   Another post began “whenever I stay in a hotel, I always think about all those half-used bottles of shampoo and conditioner that end up in landfills . . . “ and – boom – the warriors have rallied to save soap and shampoo containers from the housekeeping trash by salvaging the stuff.

And this breaking news from our Information Technology department: Bergmeyer’s new external website will be hosted by a company that’s entirely powered by wind energy.

Food for a lunch and learn was brought in the other day by an eco-friendly caterer. I complemented the sales guy doing the presentation, but he confessed. He was required by us to show up with recycled-content paper products. Our Human Resources department now promotes paperless forms. Our accounting department has stopped giving us paper pay statements. We even have yoga lessons twice a month. OK, maybe the AIA 2030 team can’t take credit for the yoga. But still.

So what does all this craziness have to do with architecture and climate change, you may ask? Does salvaging hotel soap reduce greenhouse gas emissions?

Wrong question. Think of it this way: It’s about change management. It’s about organizational transformation.  One of my sustainability gurus, Barbra Batshalom, wrote recently in her blog about Dr. John Kotter’s “8-Step Process for Leading Change”. This theory describes a holistic, systems-thinking approach to making good stuff happen in a corporate setting. Dr. Kotter’s step number five is “Empowering People and Removing Barriers”.  All the funny stories in this post are evidence that this kind of change has started to take hold at Bergmeyer. It can happen in your firm, too.

We architects know that none of us can make our profession carbon-neutral by ourselves. We need empowered, enlightened teams of people with crazy, contagious energy to make it happen. That’s what AIA 2030 fever does for you. When your whole firm gets it, the power – and the ideas – just flows.

Yep. Travel less.

For Bergmeyer, my architectural firm, CO2 emissions from business travel is our second-largest environmental impact by far. In 2011, Bergmeyer staff logged 277,251 miles on airplanes. That translated into 54, 524 kilograms of CO2 emissions. Add to that CO2 from car rental and hotel stays and our 2011 aggregate corporate carbon emissions from business travel was 57,333 kilograms or about 63 tons of CO2 added to the earth’s atmosphere by us. Yes, by us.

But first, allow me to digress. Does anyone really enjoy air travel? I don’t mean being somewhere new and different, but the actual process of getting there. I’m just old enough to remember empty middle seats, free in-flight lunches and strolling casually up to the gate at the last possible minute. Call me a curmudgeon, but now every time I get off of one of those interminable ordeals in an overcrowded airborne tin can I swear I’m ready for the transporter ray. Go ahead, Scotty, scatter my molecules across the galaxy.

So nobody is gallivanting around the country on company time for fun. But architecture is a service industry! When our clients say “get on a plane” we say “how soon”? We practice out of one office in Boston but we have licenses in forty-three states. Last year we bought 210 airplane tickets. We took eighteen trips to Eugene, Oregon, seventeen trips to Denver, Colorado and thirty (!!) trips to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. We are . . . road warriors.

Did we have to take all those trips?

I popped that question to one of our most frequent travelers. On the condition of anonymity, she ‘fessed up. No, not all of those trips were mission-critical. She had examples. Fly 1,400 miles to look at something for an hour then fly back? Insane. Fly 2,500 miles to attend a pre-bid conference and do nothing while bidders sat mutely in strategic silence? Ridiculous. And just once – just once – has a contractor ever had the ingenuity to buy a Flip camera and do a 360-degree video of tricky existing conditions that just may have been useful enough to spare us a trip.

But that one-hour site visit? Probably saved our client $25,000 in construction change orders. They spent a tenth of that on our travel. Besides, they were a good client that really appreciated our attentiveness. And we know that an hour of face-to-face conversation, a handshake and a cup of coffee is worth more than any stack of brochures or marketing materials. That’s how you deal in a service industry, right?

Yes, we’re web conferencing more and more.  Our software vendors sell us new tools that enable teleconferencing and enhanced data transfer. Yes, we attend virtual meetings in which we are all looking at the same amazing Revit model on a shared desktop and we could be in Boston or Oregon or Kuala Lumpur. It’s what we need to do our job and, after all, software vendors are in a service industry, too.

And our travel agents can produce a report with graphs and spread sheets showing exactly how much greenhouse gas we spewed in a year. (Where do you think I got all that emission data from, anyway?) They’re short on suggestions for how to reduce the aforementioned travel, of course, but – hey – they’re in a service industry with the rest of us!

The big question is: exactly who are we all “serving”?

Maybe the only way out of this dilemma is through a new and shared understanding of what we are all trying to accomplish. Dr. David Suzuki urges us towards finding a “sacred balance” between humankind’s activities and the rest of the planet.  By signing the AIA 2030 Commitment, we are saying that we are all – architects, our consultants, our clients, builders, everyone whose projects we affect – working to reduce the environmental degradation caused by greenhouse gas emissions. The Iroquois Nation’s guiding principle was “seventh generation” thinking. William J. Worthen, AIA, LEED, the AIA’s Director & Resource Architect for Sustainability reminds us that our ultimate goal as a profession is the well-being of future generations. Call them our clients’ clients’ clients.   

So perhaps we aren’t truly serving the needs of future generations by designing ever-higher-performing buildings and then jetting around the globe to deliver services. My proposal:  Most of that corporate travel is directly attributable to projects. Let’s try including travel impacts in our projects’ overall emission-reduction goals. Why not? Translate your project’s KBTU/sf/yr into CO2 emissions, add your travel emissions, then do the math backwards. I’m not saying don’t travel at all, just travel less. We have as much control over that as we do over building envelope design or mechanical system selection, don’t we?

What do you think?

The Bergmeyer leadership team was prepared to do what it took. We knew that in order to solve some of our AIA 2030 Commitment operational challenges we’d have to go beyond the call of duty. Sitting at our desks writing e-mails and blog posts wasn’t enough. We were ready to make the leap – into the trash barrels.

This was the problem: the AIA 2030 Commitment asks architectural firms to report on their waste reduction strategies. Unless you know how much waste you produce, you can’t set reduction targets. And the only sure-fire way to measure your waste is to audit it. Sure, you can pay to have someone come in and do a waste-stream audit for you, but what fun would that be? We decided to take matters into our own hands.

We went Dumpster Diving!

How to pull off a good dumpster dive? We were well-prepared. The key was surprise. Surprise and fear. And ruthless efficiency. Seriously, what you want is a representative sample of how much waste your firm produces versus how much material gets recycled. If you tell everyone in the office that you’re inspecting the day’s trash their behavior changes. So don’t put “dumpster dive” on the Outlook calendar.

Special equipment was obtained: heavy-duty gloves (yellow is nice), work clothes, 5 gallon tubs, big plastic bags and tarps, protective eyewear and cold beer. And hand scales, sort of like the ones in the grocery store produce departments only with hooks on the ends. We rented those.  Finally, we gave our property management company a heads-up.

Five-thirty arrived. The gloves went on. (Cue the theme song) Once we intercepted all our trash and recycled materials in the 5 gallon tubs we hauled it to the loading dock and dumped it into separate piles on the tarps. We sorted it into categories of our own choosing (food waste, paper towels, stuff that should’ve been recycled, etc.) then loaded it into plastic bags. We weighed each bag of stuff separately, recorded the data, and drank the beers.

Our data was pretty conclusive. 73.2 pounds of stuff was collected. For a fifty-something person operation, that’s light. Almost 54% of the 73.2 pounds was in recycling bins, and 50% of the recycled stuff was paper. Not bad. And only 3% of our trash by weight came from those annoying little single-serving coffee containers. That was all good news. But 11% of our “trash” could have been recycled and 16% of our trash was paper towel waste from bathrooms. Maybe it’s time to re-visit that paper towel versus high energy-using hand dryer debate again?

But the surprise discovery was this:  Architects have our own insidious way of contributing to landfill waste. A whopping 58% by weight of the stuff that we threw “away” that day was . . . discarded material samples! Stack of stone tiles, pieces of wood with different finishes, binders of flooring materials, half of a store fixture mock-up, and more. Egad!

Our response? Donate samples to the nearby Childrens Museum? Call a “we’ll take anything” recycler?  Better yet: just send the stuff back! Our sample library now has a special rule: if someone brings us a catalog or new sample, they must take the old ones back. Product reps and suppliers are now part of our 2030 plan, too.

So there you have it. Now we have waste reduction strategies. If we go to zero waste from material samples, we will reduce our trash output per person by almost 60%, and if we get to zero recycled materials in the trash, we’ll push it down another 10%. Practical, meaningful goals. Good work, team. We were ready for our next challenge.

I am happy to say I was part of the leadership team that convinced my Boston architectural firm, Bergmeyer, to sign the AIA 2030 Commitment in 2011. And since June I have been blogging about our adventures in compliance reporting in hopes that more AIA and BSA (Boston Society of Architects) member firms will be convinced to join us.

So where are we? What has worked and what has flopped?

Bergmeyer’s leadership team clicked into place pretty easily. It helped that several of the leadership team are Principals. We run the 2030 Commitment like a project with monthly meetings and notes. Our six-month report on operational initiatives has been completed. We did great on “Office Energy Use” and “Waste Reduction” gathering good data and setting measurable baselines. Firm-wide goals for “Travel” and “Meeting Procedures” were a little harder to quantify.  

We have begun to take inventory of our projects’ PEUI (Predicted Energy Use Intensity) and roll the energy use convention (Kbtu/SF/yr) out to our project teams and consultants. It took a little work to get our arms around this metric, especially since a lot of our projects aren’t energy-modeled. But the AIA 2030 Commitment reporting tool and its handy pull-down menus proved to be very helpful in establishing energy use targets.  

The next big steps – creating a sustainability action plan and recording the PEUI for all our projects – are on the screen for early 2012. In June 2012 we will take stock of our successes and shortcomings and apply what we have learned to compliance Year 2. And you’ll be able to read all about it right here.

Have the corporate wheels fallen off? No. Have we been consumed by calculations and paperwork? No. Yes, the Commitment has become part of a couple peoples’ job descriptions. Yes, the whole firm has become involved. Yes, it does take work, and much of the work isn’t billable.

But we are now thinking differently about sustainable design. We have a deeper understanding of the concept and its place in our practice. We no longer have “green building” specialists or consider it an additional service. We know now that we can’t meet radical building energy use reduction targets one project at a time. We understand the necessity to improve our entire firm’s capacity to think sustainably. It’s now an integral part of our strategic plan.

The AIA 2030 Commitment can help your firm do this, too. But only if you sign up. So what are you waiting for?

I’ve heard the arguments. “It’s too paperwork-intensive”. Not true. All the reporting is done online. In fact, we’re becoming less paper-oriented and more streamlined as a result of joining. For LEED Registered projects, the reporting is effortless. “It will take too much non-billable time”. Depends on what you mean by “too much”. If you think of the incremental work needed to do this stuff as an investment in your firm’s capabilities, the payoff is profound. “It’s not really part of our business plan”. Is survival part of your business plan? Should be.

And here’s my favorite reason: “Our firm’s Principals don’t really support it”. Send me an e-mail. We have ways of being persuasive.

So here we are. 2012 is upon us. We have 18 years to go. About 20 BSA Member firms have signed up and are working to reduce the collective environmental impact of their projects. Your firm could sign the AIA 2030 Commitment this year. Come on, join us.

With the AIA 2030 Commitment deadline for reporting on firm operational data approaching, the Bergmeyer leadership team had ideas. To reduce our firm’s paper consumption and waste, we would get help from our Accounting department. Changing our transportation and meeting policies would need input from Human Resources. But what about reducing our office energy consumption?

We did the math. Based on actual electricity use, our office space used 42 KBTU/sf/yr. Not too bad, that was 30% lower than the AIA 2030 comparison baseline of 60. But could we do better? Pushing down our office energy use would mean enlisting the assistance of the folks in our . . . (drum roll) . . . Information Technology department.

Jim Croce warned against tugging on Superman’s cape. Besides space heating and cooling, the most energy-intensive sector of an architectural firm today is its computers. Our space already had compact fluorescent lighting, conference room motion-sensors and Energy Star kitchen appliances. But asking Information Technology to use less power? It sounded dangerous. Poke the mask of the Lone Ranger dangerous.

It didn’t help that our IT department was constantly busy. Not exactly grumpy, but the last people we wanted to ask to do one more thing. We started with a softball e-mail survey about our computers.

Short answers came back. We own zero Cathode Ray Tube monitors. Every printer, plotter and work station in the office is Energy Star rated. We just bought 4 HD web cams so we can do virtual conferencing. Ah, the sound of boxes being checked. Eighty-one percent of the AIA firms reporting did these things, too. Tugging the cape was required. So I asked: what else can we do?

Funny things can happen when you ask good people to do more. Ken, our IT guru, introduced me to “virtualization and consolidation”: the world of “green IT”!

Those big machines in that air conditioned closet over there? Those are your servers. In our case, we had accumulated sixteen towers over many years to handle data, direct e-traffic, and back up our work every night. An astonishing factoid: Worldwide datacenter power use increased by 16% per year between 2000 and 2005.

Our plan? We were consolidating our servers to three super-efficient processors with access to a SAN (Storage Area Network) that gave us virtual offsite data storage. Plus, all our new equipment would meet EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool) standards, an advanced LEED-like measure assuring even greater energy efficiency. And the manufacturer said they would plant a tree for every EPEAT-rated unit we bought. Seriously.

There was more. Ken was on a roll. Next up would be file virtualization. Then access space re-mapping. Replication. Meta-data. He lost me at that point, but I got the concept. Like a smart grid, the key is streamlining data transfer so it flows as needed and isn’t dependent on big heat-producing power-consuming machines. We would use less floor area, less electricity, and reduce our cooling load. Win, win, win.

Amory Lovins had it exactly right. We don’t need to own the thing, we just need the service the thing provides. Ditch the servers, go virtual! Try it. Your firm’s IT Department can be part of the sustainable operations solution, too.

If you have already persuaded your clients to always build high-performing, sustainably-designed buildings: congratulations. We haven’t. We have hold-outs. It’s not that they don’t understand the relationship between building energy use and climate change, the matter just hasn’t been framed for them yet. So here’s another benefit of signing the AIA 2030 Commitment: it creates an opportunity for you to convert the unconverted . . . to bring ALL your clients in under the big AIA 2030 tent.

Our architectural firm, Bergmeyer, signed the AIA 2030 Commitment months ago. We had a leadership team in place. We had several initiatives underway for our Firm Operational Data report. We had a good handle on Energy Use Intensity. Spreadsheets were being prepared. It was beginning to feel like progress.

But we knew this was only half the battle. It was time to hit the road for uncharted territory. It was time to go to . . .Kansas.

Some of our firm’s work is for big-box retailers. We design a spiffy new prototype and adapt it to multiple locations. This has us doing projects all over the country. Bad for our collective vehicle-miles-travelled, but it’s good to meet people who don’t think the same way you do.  So armed with the best intentions, we decided to road-test PEUI. Like early explorers looking for the Northwest Passage, we contacted a very capable and dependable MEP firm in the mid-west with whom we were doing one of these multi-location projects and asked: can you please tell us the Energy Use Intensity in kBtu/sf/yr for these buildings?

Stunned silence.

Day or so later, this reply: We are not familiar with this criterion. It is not part of our design calculations. What program do we need to answer this question? And once we know this, we will (of course) be happy to prepare an additional services request. And (parenthetically) why is this even necessary? The buildings have already been permitted.

Collective sigh. Time to make that tent a little bigger . . .

The fact is, the AIA has bent over backwards to make the AIA 2030 Commitment user-friendly. We all know that not all projects are energy-modeled. That’s not a good thing, but in order for us to get our arms around ALL our projects’ energy use, the Big Tent must be the working metaphor. Our engineers in Kansas only needed to tell us what building code they used. We plug in the code and a drop-down menu on the AIA 2030 Reporting Form automatically produces a “PEUI Reduction from Average” calculation. The stores in question were designed to meet IECC 2003, which translated into their being 10% better than AIA 2030 baseline. Pretty easy, folks. 

But was it good news? No. Evidence of a rigorously integrated design process? Not. Is this the way we should be working in order to reduce carbon emissions from building energy use? Not even close. But as raw data, this information was immensely valuable. Why? Because now we can see the magnitude of the challenge before us. Ten percent better than average would obviously not cut it. But once this kind of reporting was in hand, the transformation could begin . . .

 Within six months of signing the Commitment, firms are asked to do a progress report on four operational categories: Office Energy Use, Waste Reduction, Travel, and Meeting Procedures. The intent is to reduce the environmental impact of running your business. You are probably working on this stuff already. Reporting on what your firm is doing now is easy. But if you take the Commitment seriously, you’ll drive your firm to do more. To change. To improve.  A certain amount of creative organizational disruption, therefore, becomes necessary.

We have these bi-weekly management meetings. All our senior technical staff meets with our accounting, marketing, IT and HR departments to talk about anything and everything. Between meeting notes and lead-generation reports and financial updates it’s a very paper-intensive hour. Or at least it used to be.

One of the Commitment’s strategies under Meeting Procedures suggests mandating paperless technology for agendas and handouts. I knew we could do this. Everyone at Bergmeyer has a handy un-dockable laptop and access to secure wi-fi. So when the last appointment for a management meeting came around, I seized the moment. “Let’s try an AIA 2030 experiment. Let’s se if we can do this meeting paperless.” I hit “reply all”.

The meeting time arrived. It was chaos.

As expected, Accounting was the first in with a stack of printed spreadsheets. “I didn’t see your e-mail!” (Funny, that excuse never works for me.) There was an undercurrent of discomfort. Do we really have to set up a laptop and projector for this meeting every time now? That’s a lot of extra work. IT supported the idea but had doubts. Our laptop batteries might not last an hour. We don’t have enough plugs for everyone. Why can’t we all just look at the projected version?  Someone was using a PDF of the marketing report that had been saved to their desktop, which meant it was already out of date. IT tried to help. If you can get online, you can access the live updated version of the report. But that person’s laptop had been re-imaged recently (whatever that meant) so they needed to re-enter the secure wi-fi password. Can you log in now? Did you log off or just un-dock? Try checking “workstation only”. Someone had smuggled in a stack of printed reports. We’ve been in here fifteen minutes already. Can’t we just get this meeting started?

Any of that sound familiar?

The point was an easy one to make, but the disruption was effective. (No gloating from me, though. Mea culpa. My own desk is currently buried under piles of paper.) Although the enabling technology is available and right at hand, old habits surely die hard.  And the old paper habit has got to go.

Lesson: Sustainability is not about technology. It’s about changing our behavior.

Dee, Bergmeyer’s LEED guru, was at the end of her very long rope. We signed the AIA 2030 Commitment and were beginning to collect Energy Use Intensity (EUI) data for our projects. Her first effort was to compare the energy use metrics of all our LEED Registered projects. But she saw no clear relationship between LEED Energy & Atmosphere points and target EUI. How could this be?

“See what you got us into?” she taunted me.

Remember that TV show “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire”? If you got stuck on a question you could do something they called “phone a friend”. One of the great things about the Boston Society of Architects is our huge network of professional friends. Some of them are engineers, too. We called Chris Schaffner (new LEED Fellow!) The Green Engineer, for help. Chris stopped by the office.

We talked baseline. The AIA 2030 Commitment asks us to compare our projects’ intended energy use to 2003 CBECS data. CBECS, the Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey, prepared by the US Energy Information Agency, is a national sample survey that collects actual energy consumption data on privately owned commercial buildings. The energy use is expressed in kBtu/sf/yr and the AIA 2030 Commitment reporting tool has a pull-down menu with EUI’s by building type built right into it. Easy.

But comparing LEED Energy & Atmosphere points to CBECS Energy Use Intensity data is like comparing apples to pomegranates. LEED E&A points are a relative measure based on energy cost. EUI is an absolute measure based on intended energy use. Sure, there might be a rough correlation between the two, but there will always be “statistical outliers” (I love it when Chris talks like that). LEED E&A points vary depending on the cost of energy. EUI varies by fuel source: natural gas is a far more efficient fuel than electricity. That might be why our all-electric LEED Platinum building bombed when compared to CBECS metrics.

The answer? Use Energy Star “Target Finder”. Target Finder – which can also be used as a reference standard for AIA 2030 Commitment – takes the CBECS data and modifies it based on things like geographic location, hours of operation, and plug & appliance loads. Chris advised us to stick with Target Finder as a baseline and not beat ourselves up trying to reconcile things that were irreconcilable.  

Lesson: there really is a whole lot of variance in different approaches to establishing building energy use metrics. All those calculations are produced by people, and people have different opinions about what should be calculated and how. 

In the end, I think Chris enjoyed the conversation. “It’s good that you guys are doing this!” he said. ”It’s a lot more fun than work!” 

Shh. Don’t tell anyone . . .

There are two approaches to reducing corporate waste: go after the stuff that’s easy and obvious, or go after the stuff that will produce the greatest impact. Or do both. But really, you can’t know where to put your energy until you understand your waste-stream.

The leadership team at Bergmeyer met to talk AIA 2030 Commitment compliance step #2: “operational initiatives”. This part of the Commitment focuses us on running more environmentally responsible architectural firms, not about our design projects.

Of the four corporate initiatives described by the Commitment – improvement to office energy use, waste reduction, travel, and meeting policies – waste reduction drew the most attention in our last meeting. We ticked off the things we were already doing. Yes, we use a lot of paper but we recycle a lot, too, and we purchase recycled-content stock. Nobody printed today’s meeting agenda. Congratulations. Environmentally friendly kitchen supplies? Some. Environmentally friendly office furniture? Maybe. We’d look into it. What else could we be doing?

Then someone mentioned that damned coffee machine and things started to get ugly. 

You know how it works: you drop the little pre-packaged cup into the top of the machine and it squeezes out one cup of fresh coffee per customer. No more half-empty carafes of brown sludge frying on the heating pad. Brilliant, right? Except for when that red light goes on and you have to empty the ugly pile of used cups. I remember my acute disappointment the first time I drew the red light. I was foolishly expecting the machine to dismantle, sort, and compress the cups into little recyclable bundles. But no. All that packaging was just being collected in a bin to be thrown “away”. And you know what William McDonough says about “away”: there is no “away”. It has gone away.

Just as our otherwise mild-mannered AIA 2030 leadership team was about to storm the kitchen and destroy the wasteful coffee machine, I offered a moderating thought: how much trash do we currently produce? And how much of that trash is empty coffee cups? We couldn’t set waste reduction goals until we had something to measure against. Besides, at that point I wanted a cup of French Roast very badly.

But the real goal isn’t waste reduction at all. The real goal is consumption reduction. Just like energy use, efficiency improvements are meaningless if demand reduction doesn’t happen first. Of those three big “R”’s – reduce, reuse, recycle – reduce is by far the most important.

But what WAS in our waste stream?  The hunt for baseline waste stream data had begun . . .