CBRE Goes Carbon Neutral: Planet Building Is Born!
Very few commercial real estate service firms have ever made a top-down strategic decision that positively impacts the world environmentally, economically, and socially–and even fewer have engaged technology as an enabler of that change. What’s truly amazing is that one of the most significant players in the real estate industry, CBRE, has put their “stake in the ground” on the environment.
CBRE has recently announced their “Planet Building” program, which is an initiative that shifts the traditional paradigm of how we use and operate commercial real estate in order to achieve greater operational efficiency–and ultimately become carbon neutral by 2010. Planet Building is more than a template for LEED points. It’s a holistic approach to environmental responsibility that incorporates the entire spectrum of activities surrounding a commercial real estate asset.
Planet Building is a concept by which CBRE-managed buildings are perceived as living, breathing biospheres of activity that function as an interrelated matrix of smaller ecosystems within a physical environment, similar to our planet. In other words, it’s not just using recyclable building materials and installing bicycle racks. Planet Building looks at each tenant/client and their business processes–are they as efficient and sustainable? It also examines other green activities such as recycling, reducing employee commute times/distances, and implementation of telecommuting programs, where applicable.
It all began when CBRE started examining their business processes and became aware of the massive inefficiencies in their procurement and payables processes. These processes were heavily paper-intensive and painfully slow because of all the manual steps and hand-offs required to go from the order to the payment. CBRE started working with Yardi, SiteStuff and rCash to create an automated, end-to-end procurement/payables process, which resulted in the elimination of virtually thousands of sheets of paper per day. The results rippled out to clients and suppliers and ultimately had a much bigger impact environmentally than just streamlining an internal business process. Full Story>>
Trade Media Contact: Joel Nelson 805.699-2040, ext. 1255