Corporate Environmental Responsibility Tips
Reducing energy waste is a priority for many corporations because it lowers both their environmental impact and their energy bills. Here are some tips for creating healthier buildings and increasing energy efficiency.
What Are Corporate Sustainability Goals?
Sustainability goals are business practices that corporations adopt to reduce their future environmental impact without compromising their ability to meet present needs. While these goals are broadly aimed at benefiting society, they can be advantageous to the enterprise. There are three main corporate sustainability goal categories:
Environmental Pillar
The environmental pillar typically is the subject that receives the most focus. Many corporations have long-term goals of reducing their carbon footprint, managing waste, and increasing energy efficiency. These practices are popular because they help save energy and improve environmental protections while lowering business costs.
However, one of the environmental pillar’s difficulties is that it features external elements that many companies don’t control or are hard to quantify. Details like carbon dioxide, land use, and total waste are challenging to calculate. Creating benchmarks that allow you to track usage is critical for verifying progress.
Social Pillar
The social pillar involves leveraging the right practices to make sure you have the support of key stakeholders, employees, and the public. This includes treating workers well and being valuable contributors to the community. Some engagement ideas for maximizing the benefits of a strong social pillar include:
- Fundraising efforts
- Sponsoring scholarships
- Investing in public works projects
While businesses may not see direct monetary benefits to being productive members of society, having strong social practices can increase employee retention and create a positive public image for your business.
Economic Pillar
Generating and growing profits are essential for the long-term health of a business. However, operating under a business plan that builds profits no matter the cost can negatively impact your environmental performance. Following the economic pillars means remaining upfront and honest about your practices with investors, employees, and the local community. It assures that you’re avoiding any conflicts of interest and extreme measures that create long-term issues.
Some of the ways a business can strengthen its economic pillar include:
- Maintaining compliance with regulatory agencies
- Avoid exchanging political favors
- Using accurate and up-to-date accounting practices
- Listening to insights from employees about updating processes
How Does Reducing Energy Usage Help the Environment?
Most corporations use HVAC systems that provide consistent climate conditions in their facilities throughout the year. While effective at creating comfortable conditions for employees and customers, these HVAC systems require significant amounts of energy and natural resources. Implementing best practices for building system operation optimizes facility comfort, while minimizing the environmental impact of utility useage and lowering utility operating costs.
Some of the benefits of reducing energy usage include the following:
Cleaner Air
The power plants that keep building systems operational use natural gas or coal as their fuel source. . Burning these fossil fuels produces nitrogen, oxides, sulfur dioxide, mercury, and other dangerous toxins that pollute the air. Embracing energy efficiency practices reduces the amount of electricity consumed and therefore lowers the reduces fossil fuel consumption which creates a better environment for everyone!
Improved Health
The air pollutants produced by electrical power generation can contribute to long-term health issues, including asthma and heart disease. Reducing pollution and increasing energy efficiency help create a healthier atmosphere for your employees and the surrounding community.
How To Develop an Environmental Management System
An environmental management system helps business owners identify how they impact the environment and is critical in maintaining corporate environmental responsibility. It enables management teams to deliver continual improvements that reduce environmental impact by increasing energy efficiency.
Developing an environmental management system typically involves the following steps:
Environmental Policy
The first step in developing your new system involves establishing a policy that suits your company’s corporate mission and values.
Planning
Planning involves identifying regulatory standards and processes that must be followed. This helps determine which improvement areas you should focus on later.
Implementation
During the implementation stage, your team defines the structure of your system and individual responsibilities. Creating a communication structure also helps with developing an effective environmental management system.
Follow Up and Adjustments
Without monitoring and reacting to results, you can’t become a more environmentally responsible company. Identifying problems and their causes, and taking corrective actions are critical for reducing energy waste.
Review
Reviewing data and modifications made helps determine if the steps you’re taking are having the desired impact and create accountability to company’s stated goals and objectives.
Are you trying to update your corporate sustainability goals? Contact BuildingLogiX and see how our team can help increase your company’s energy efficiency.
Increase Energy Efficiency and Environmental Sustainability With BuildingLogiX
For many companies, managing their campus of buildings is challenging because their maintenance team lacks the knowledge, expertise, and capacity to proactively evaluate its operating efficiency. This means that many minor problems remain unsolved until they become major failures, all while using excessive energy.
Implementing the Connected Building Services offered by BuildingLogiX enables a maintenance team to proactively monitor a system in real-time and make regular adjustments and small repairs using analytics-based data. Our platform uses the information produced by your building automation systems and generates insights that let you optimize the operations and health of your building.
Some of the features of Connected Building Services include:
Fault Detection and Diagnostics
Your building has multiple systems that enable it to run efficiently. This complex and layered network of interconnected systems makes problem identification challenging. The Fault Detection and Diagnostics software offered by BuildingLogiX is designed to pinpoint improvement opportunities that are often ignored. This helps increase your company’s energy efficiency and enhances your maintenance team’s productivity.
Chiller Plant Optimization
Chiller plants are often the largest consumers of energy, and making sure they’re working properly is critical for creating a corporate environmental responsibility program. Our data analytics platform leverages the information produced by chiller plants and transforms it into actionable solutions. Over and over again small problems identiefied in chiller plant operation are the cause of significant energy waste. Deploying the BuildingLogiX Chiller Plant Optimization allows your team to quickly identify and repair these operational issues and easily track and evaluate plant operations going forward.