HY-brid/

At a USGBC Board meeting a few years ago, I brought up the idea of LEED for Organizations. It wasn’t as well-received as I would have liked and since I had brought up the idea of LEED for Existing Buildings a few years earlier, it was dismissed as PVP doing his “vision of the future” thing. Now, I am not suggesting for minute that the USGBC run off and create a rating system for organizations, but rather that we begin to focus on organizational sustainability which is much more than just greening your buildings.

Sustainability has emerged as the new organizational metric. When an organization commits to sustainability it effects the entire organization. It starts at the highest levels of the organization and effects the products and services delivered, branding and communications, strategic partners and suppliers, eductaion and training, and especially the physical assets of an organization because that is where resourses are consumed and the energy and environmental footprint is calculated. The challenge is for organizations to grow while consuming less resourses. Sustainability and green is not about hugging trees (although there is nothing wrong with that), but rather, about organizational survival and growth. The reason I use the phrase LEED for Organizations is that similar tools need to be created for organizations, large and small, to navigate sustainability. The reason LEED became the standard for buildings is that it was a road map/recipe/tool that helped manage the process. Similar tools for organizations would be an idea whose time has come.

Categories: Environmental Communications, Paul von Paumgartten