Page 17 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

xvi INTRODUCTION

The chapters build upon one another, much like our various contributions to our
collective work, as author after author adds layers to the story we are trying to tell
about the value of going green. The individual authors range across the political spec-
trum. Each has his or her own particular sense of the challenges we face and the role
business can and should play in that overall effort. Many of us differ philosophically
about the pace of growth for business generally, as well as the specific slow-growth
strategies of Melaver, Inc. Each of us in our own lives walks the talk of sustainable
practices differently. As a company, we try to give voice to these differences, even as
we try to shape a synthesis from them. That is our particular strategy for how a sus-
tainable business is shaped.
Throughout the book, there is a loose use of the terms “green” and “sustainable,”
often with the notion that the two terms are clearly defined and synonymous. They
aren’t. There’s a whole body of literature devoted to the problems associated with each
term and the fact that they have become so widely and uncritically used so as to mean
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most anything these days. For the purposes of this book, “green,” when applied to
specific projects, typically refers to the LEED criteria upon which a green develop-
ment is based. Used more broadly and generically, “green” is used in this book to con-
vey a more systemic approach to sustainable practices having to do with minimizing
our environmental footprint (the environmental bottom line) and optimizing our pos-
itive impacts upon our communities (the social bottom line). These usages reflect
more or less everyday, colloquial understandings of the terms. We felt it was more use-
ful to dig down into the practices underscoring this terminology rather than debate the
fine points of the nomenclature.
Taken as a whole, The Green Building Bottom Line may be viewed as one extended
financial analysis: a discounted cash flow statement that cumulatively tallies all of the
costs our company has expended in the course of becoming a green company and
views those costs in the context of the total return on our investment. The financial
bottom line of this analysis is likely to surprise (and hopefully delight) most readers,
as we show that it makes economic sense not only to develop a specific green project,
but also to develop an entire business around sustainable values.
Because Melaver, Inc. prides itself on a culture of transparency, all of the costs
itemized in the chapters are real dollars that we have expended over the past decade
in our efforts to become a more sustainably oriented company. Having said that, as a
privately held company, there are some sensitivities to providing complete financial
disclosure. As such, we have created a fictionalized company called Green, Inc. that
mirrors—but is not an exact replica of—Melaver, Inc. Green, Inc. is a smaller version
of our own company. Its revenues and profitability understate the performance of our
own company while using our actual cost structure. Such an approach provides a con-
servative and understated picture of the value of a green bottom line, though it does
not provide a precise audited analysis of the value of going green.
Although virtually all of the authors who appear in this book are part of Melaver,
Inc.’s speaker’s bureau—a group of colleagues who devote a portion of each month to
educating, advocating, and in general doing outreach into the community on sustain-
able practices—we rarely (if ever) get together to share what we know. In that sense,