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102 • Green Project Management

a high environmental impact requires much more time to plan than one
that doesn’t have the same requirements.

One Sunday edition of the New York Times consumes as many as
75,000 trees—projects include reducing paper usage by moving
toward electronic media online, electronic document readers, and new
technologies.

After considering the information from the various suppliers, the proj-
ect manager and team can make an informed decision. As a result of that
decision there is generally a contract. We are advocating a “greenality
clause” in the contract. Should the project manager and team decide to go
with a company that has responded with the outline of their green efforts,
we believe not only that the green efforts should be captured in the con-
tact body, but that somehow the supplier should be held accountable for
the efforts they purported to make. While we will not give legal advice or
suggest greenality wording for a contract to make a company accountable
for their green efforts, a damage clause may be added in case the company
does not fulfill the green part of the contract.

greening ProjeCt Costs

We have frequently mentioned cost as a factor to managing projects. It is
certainly an important factor in the company’s decision to undertake a
project. The only caution we have is that at first glance, costs may appear to
be much higher when the greenality factor is considered. However, green
savings may not be fully realized during these project-planning processes.
As we said in Chapter 1, a project with a high greenality score is good for
the bottom line. It may require a “deeper dive” into the financials of the
project and the project’s sustainability to fully realize the real cost savings
to the company. There are ways to add greenality to the project costs, and
some will be included in Chapter 7, “Executing the Project.” However, they
are several green costing methods that can be used in the cost-planning
stage. In general, moving communications from written on paper to elec-
tronic form can save a significant amount of resources. Additionally, doing