Our Insights on Sustainability
“Energy follows attention. Wherever you place your attention, that is where the energy of the system will go. 'Energy follows attention' means that we need to shift our attention from what we are trying to avoid to what we want to bring into reality.”
C. Otto Scharmer, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economics
Energy and Health
Energy is something greater than simply power, heating, cooling and transportation. Energy propels people and organizations. Picture a world where people can live, work, and learn in healthy, thriving, productive spaces that are also good for the planet. This will be the result of making our buildings and our organizations sustainable. We believe that the new emerging future of Energy will revolve around sustainability solutions focused on boosting productivity and quality of life.
Sustainability is Good for Organizations
This is our definition of a green building: Good for people and good for the planet.
In a typical office setting, 90% of costs are for employees, 9% are for overhead and only 0.9% of costs are for energy. Thus, focusing social responsibility initiatives and building retrofit projects on improving people's health, happiness, and productivity can deliver greater benefits compared to saving energy alone, and organizations are waking up to this fact.
Immediate Value of Sustainability
In the modern world, we spend 90% of our time indoors; buildings are people’s living and working environments and they deeply affect people’s satisfaction, health, and work performance.
We have found that improving the health of people's indoor environment is an organization's highest priority in a combined social responsibility and energy efficiency project because it offers immediate benefits:
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healthy and attractive indoor spaces
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increased asset values
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higher occupancy rates for tenants
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and a large boost in people's productivity and quality of life
Sustainable solutions that integrate energy efficiency with healthy environments can be incorporated into an energy retrofit or design/build project to have the largest positive impact on people’s lives as well as an organization’s success.
Growth
As Canada transitions to a low-carbon economy, sustainability is the opportunity that will drive business growth in every sector. There is a great untapped potential for businesses to pursue smart building retrofits and sustainable design projects that boost people's health, productivity, and increase revenues. When businesses take care of their people, the employees take care of the customers and the customers take care of shareholders. Sustainability is no longer only about corporate reputation and corporate social responsibility (CSR) or even reducing operating costs; now sustainability is about business growth.