Page 106 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

GREEN FROM THE INSIDE OUT 85

what a sustainability department is for—to drive the debate and expand the organiza-
tion’s sustainability practices.

Insufficient budgets and intangible advantages. This issue is nicely illus-
trated by the unfunded government mandate. In Savannah, Georgia, the county jail is
required to house state inmates, but the county is not fully compensated for costs asso-
ciated with feeding, housing, and monitoring them. In the absence of compensation,
the requirement becomes an unfunded mandate, and the financial burden is passed to
the county, and thus to the taxpayers. The county was not provided with the resources
to ensure compliance with the state requirement, but was mandated to act without ade-
quate funding.
This might seem an odd comparison to creating a sustainability program (though
some CFOs could be compared to wardens). However, if the mandate to create sus-
tainability programs is issued, whether the mandate is simple (operate greener) or
more complex (become a net generator of electricity), the program will not succeed if
it is not backed by an adequate budget. Nothing hampers progress more than creating
a directive but not providing adequate resources to implement it.
Many sustainable initiatives deal with energy and water efficiency and offer an
attractive payback for the initial capital expenditure. Replacing old, inefficient lights
in an office with new, high-efficiency fixtures may cost a few thousand dollars up
front, but with a payback of a year or so based in energy cost savings as well as the
environmental benefits, this type of project is usually green-lighted immediately. For
example, a building on which we performed a lighting retrofit in Birmingham,
Alabama required a capital investment of around $35,000. The annual savings in elec-
tricity is at least $30,000. This is just over a one-year payback, with $30,000 of oper-
ational savings every year after (even more if the price of electricity goes up) and the
additional benefit of reduced carbon dioxide emissions.
Similar low-hanging fruit involves water savings. Typical faucet aerators use 2.2
gallons per minute. By spending less than three dollars per faucet, water consumption
can be cut to half a gallon per minute. This is a water use reduction of over 75 per-
cent, with a capital cost of a few dollars per fixture.
However, not every sustainable measure yields immediate financial savings, and at
times, a direct payback is not necessarily realized by the company. For example, cre-
ating an extensive recycling program may involve a monthly collection fee as well as
additional time and effort on the part of staff, but rarely offers any financial payback.
In short, all three projects discussed above—changing out lighting fixtures, install-
ing faucet aerators, and recycling—further the organization’s goal of sustainability.
But if every single program pursued must offer an immediate financial payback in
order to be implemented, the organization would soon run out of initiatives to pursue.
While an organization does not have to budget hundreds of thousands of dollars
toward these initiatives (though some firms have budgets in the millions), funding is
often necessary to truly implement a sustainable vision. The upside is that organiza-
tions can start small and begin to implement low-cost, low-hanging fruit programs
suited to their organization before moving forward with more costly items (alternative