For more information, go to http://www.epa.gov/air/ozonepollution/.

VANCOUVER — The B.C. Ministry of Energy and Mines today announced theGreenhouse Gas Reduction regulation that advances the adoption and deployment of natural gas vehicles (NGVs) in BC.

The regulation permits a utility to spend up to $62 million on vehicle and ferry incentives, up to $12 million on compressed natural gas (CNG) fuelling stations and up to $30.5 million on liquefied natural gas stations, for a total of $104.5 million.

‘It makes sense to develop a market for natural gas transportation here in B.C. by using our abundant natural gas reserves,’ said Rich Coleman, Minister of Energy and Mines.

‘This regulation will help us build on our global leadership in clean transportation, bringing new jobs and more economic opportunities to the province.’

‘Our clean tech sector is a driving factor in the economic growth of British Columbia, generating $2.5 billion in revenue with a combined payroll estimated at $650 million,’ said Pat Bell, Minister of Jobs, Tourism and Innovation.

‘With this regulation, more companies will integrate B.C.’s world-leading natural gas technologies into their operations, increasing their competitiveness and driving innovation.’

GLOBE Advisors in its West Coast Clean Economy Study released in March 2012, recommended to Pacific Coast Collaborative (PCC) member jurisdictions (British Columbia, California, Oregon and Washington) that supporting more environmentally efficient modes of transportation and use of natural gas for long-haul trucking and ferry fleets would not only promote cleaner forms of transportation, but also would stimulate economic growth along the west coast.

Westport Innovations Inc., a leading supplier of natural gas vehicle technologies believes this important program will benefit British Columbia’s economy, environment and transportation options for industry.

‘This is a positive step that will promote the use of domestic BC natural gas as a transportation fuel, and generate both environmental and economic benefits for our province and residents,’ said David Demers, CEO of Westport Innovations.

‘British Columbia is home to world-class companies that both generate and use natural gas transportation technology, and this program will allow the accelerated adoption of natural gas heavy-duty vehicles.’

This regulation allows utility companies to deliver natural gas transportation programs until March 31, 2017, including the opportunity to:

• Offer incentives to transportation fleets that would use natural gas such as  buses, trucks or ferries
• Build, own and operate compressed natural gas fuelling stations or liquefied natural gas fuelling stations
• Upgrade facilities to provide training to safely maintain natural gas vehicles

The Greenhouse Gas Reduction regulation will promote the use of British Columbia’s abundant natural gas resources as a transportation fuel in heavy-duty transport vehicles, such as trucks, transit buses, school buses, refuse trucks and marine vessels.

The program’s objectives include displacing high carbon fuel, reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and increasing natural gas fueling infrastructure. Natural gas vehicles are a proven technology used across the globe.

Natural gas is 25 to 40 per cent cheaper than gasoline and diesel and produces up to 25 per cent fewer GHG emissions compared to a gasoline or diesel vehicle.

In addition, the Province is offering direct grants of up to $2,500 to purchasers of qualifying CNG vehicles. This is being offered through the $14.3 million Clean Energy Vehicle Program, announced in Nov. 2011.

BC has an abundant supply of low cost and low carbon natural gas. This program will allow local governments and businesses to take advantage of the benefits of natural gas, including lower fueling costs and reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

The Province will require annual reporting on the programs being offered to review success and determine if any changes are required.

Find out more about B.C.’s Natural Gas Strategy here.

This is the first in a six part series on building better employee volunteer programs, presented by MicroEdge, the leading provider of software and services to the giving community worldwide. Follow the rest of the series here.

What are the benefits of engaging employees in CSR efforts?

Corporations hold the keys and the resources to solving many of our most pressing problems. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs, including community involvement, charitable giving,volunteering and sustainability initiatives are all ways in which corporations have begun to address societal issues. Such programs have seen tremendous growth in recent years. Getting your employees involved is a key part of maintaining that growth and increasing the impact of your program, and a robust volunteer program is a great place to start.

Successful volunteer programs comprise many elements – a strong tie-in to established corporate values, management commitment, and adequate resources, to name a few. Even the best programs, however, can be undermined by common problems: too much administrative overhead, lack of employee engagement, and difficulty demonstrating return on investment.

Saving time and money with efficient program management

As any event or volunteer program manager can tell you, administrative tasks consume the bulk of employee engagement planning activities. The list is endless: creating promotional materials, designing and building web pages, managing rosters with spreadsheets, tracking t-shirt sizes, adding friends and family members to the list – to name a few.

While many planners do an excellent job at juggling all of these activities, there comes a point when you either have too many employees to effectively manage events using email and spreadsheets, or you want to expand the size and scope of your program (for example, to launch a global day of service across all of your locations), or both.

If you are evaluating how to launch an employee involvement initiative or increase the effectiveness of your current program, it’s important to understand the key role that technology plays in your success. It can significantly streamline the administrative overhead of creating events, managing employees, tracking outputs and outcomes; and enable you to efficiently report on your program results –whether  to management, your employees or the communities you serve – so you can spend your time creating strategic value for your programs.

1) Promote and publicize your events

It seems obvious, but in order to get the greatest involvement from your employees, you need to keep volunteer opportunities top of mind.  Make it easy for them to participate by effectively publicizing opportunities for them to do some good.

2) Provide ample opportunities for staff feedback 

Survey your employees for greater insight into staff motivations so you can tailor your program to further increase involvement.  Surveys are also a great way to collect stories from your events, and bring a personal touch to your internal communications and post-event press releases.

3) Target and promote events to increase turnout

Promoting your events to targeted groups within your company is the most effective way to increase turnout. Target and promote events based on causes your employees care the most about, skill sets your team possesses, geographic areas and more. Send targeted promotional emails to the employees who should be most closely associated with the event.

4) Engage employees with your community initiatives

Leading management teams the world over agree that their number one asset is their people. But what is the key to recruiting and retaining this most valuable resource? Employee engagement.

Human resources research consistently shows that employees are the happiest and most likely to stay at companies that:

• Are innovative
• Align with their personal values
• Offer opportunities for growth and development
• Foster an environment where employees feel they are making an impact
• Cultivate and encourage great teams

While many components of your corporate culture must work together to foster these different criteria, employee volunteer programs are one of the most cost-effective ways to engage your workforce in all of these aspects.

Building a strong program helps you recruit and retain top talent and provide opportunities for skills-based learning, team-building, networking, and fun.

The next five steps are the keys to engagement:

5) Know what employees are interested in and able to do

Instead of gathering only basic information about your employees (such as location), make sure you dive a little deeper so that it’s easier to help match them with the events that fit them best.

6) Make it easy to find events

Be sure to reach out to your employees directly.  Furthermore, make your events easy to find.

7)  Make it easy to sign up for events 

Signing up for events should be as easy as clicking a button.

Customize your program for your employees

The more information you provide to employees, the more likely they will be to sign up for events.  Some important pieces of information and tools to provide include:

• Information about company initiatives
• Information about non-profit partners
• Tools that support your company’s CSR initiatives (e.g. a tool to help you calculate and offset your carbon footprint)
• Posts and links to event pictures
• Volunteer time off policy information
• Links to online giving platforms

9) Reward participation!

Volunteering is a commitment of time and skills, and it is a testament to your employees’ passion for making the world a better place.  Reward them for that participation – it will inspire your employees to participate even more!

The payoff: Enhancing your brand reputation and demonstrating ROI

Volunteer engagements enable your employees to go out in the community, represent your brand, build relationships, and strengthen communities by sharing their skills and passions. Particularly in these difficult times, where the news is dominated by troubling stories, there is perhaps no better way to enhance your image and stand out from the pack than by sharing uplifting stories that demonstrate your company’s social responsibility.

Hilton Worldwide and sustainability consultants BSR have launched a three-year initiative to help procurement professionals make more informed purchasing decisions based on the best available sustainability data and information.

The Center for Sustainable Procurement, or CSP, will publish research and work with companies to integrate sustainability data into the procurement process at the product category level. The initiative will be funded by Hilton Worldwide and managed by BSR.

Buyers now have access to more information on products’ sustainability attributes, but they still lack the knowledge and guidance to use this information alongside existing priorities such as price, quality and delivery, said Eric Olson, senior vice president of advisory services at BSR.

The CSP aims to move beyond product scoring and marketing labels and instead help buyers quantify sustainability as part of overall product quality and cost, said Bill Kornegay, senior vice president of Hilton Supply Management, a division of Hilton Worldwide.

The CSP will research case studies and conduct surveys on topics that include incentives for category managers, key issues for buyers to consider at the product level, the efficiency of third-party labels and certification. The center will produce education guidelines, webinars and web content for companies to share with internal sourcing teams.

The center is offering the one-on-one consulting projects, which will  examine purchasing processes and develop solutions on how to incorporate sustainability into those decisions, to a small group of BSR members. CSP also intends to conduct metric analyses that focus on integrating sustainability into existing approaches.

The idea for CSP arose from BSR’s two-year effort to develop an analysis and comparison tool known as LightStay, which focused on quantifying product sustainability to help Hilton with its buying decisions.

The criteria examined nearly 100 different measures, including core lifecycle-assessment components such as manufacturing, packaging, logistics and end-of-life. BSR collected and assessed nearly 1,700 SKUs across multiple product categories including food and beverage, property operations and rooms, which represented more than $165 million. The sustainability measurement system has saved Hilton Worldwide and its portfolio of 10 hotel brands more than $74 million as of October 2011.

Source:  My Clean Link.com

A survey conducted for The Sustainability Dashboard, a Web-based system that helps organizations measure and monitor their use of fuel, water, energy, etc., finds that 43 percent of facility managers and cleaning professionals would pay more for products made by a company that practices sustainability.*

However, 28 percent of respondents indicated they would not pay more and 30 percent were “not sure.”

The survey was conducted online in January 2012.  Nearly 150 people participated in the survey.

When asked, how much more are you willing to spend for a product produced by a sustainable company, 90 percent answered five to ten percent.

The survey also asked if the respondents would need proof a company is practicing sustainability: seventy-eight percent responded yes; about ten percent would take the company’s “word for it;” and the rest were unsure.

“Transparency and credibility when it comes to sustainable issues are paramount today,” says Elizabeth Steward, marketing manager for Sustainability Dashboard Tools.  “No one wants another Greenwashing experience.”

Nevertheless, the respondents were divided on how this “proof” would be determined.  About 25 percent would accept the company’s published reports.  “But, 57 percent wanted [the reports from] independent, third-party organizations and not just the company’s word for it,” adds Steward.

Finally, the respondents were asked if operating a business or property in a more sustainable manner costs more, less, or about the same as operating in a conventional manner.

Forty-one percent were sure sustainability produced cost savings; 27 percent noted it costs more; and the rest were unsure or believed it was “cost neutral.”

“What we are finding is that cost savings is becoming a prime motivator for organizations operating in a sustainable manner,” says Steward.  “Instead of being on opposing sides, sustainable and cost savings are now on the same team.”

* For purposes of this survey, sustainable companies are defined as those that operate in a socially, environmentally, and economically responsible manner.

Source:  GreenBiz.com (8/10)

Not all energy is created equal. But it goes far beyond the renewable-vs-non-renewable sense that so many already consider.

There are really three kinds of energy:

1. Energy required for site activity, i.e. the purpose for which a business is in business;
2. Energy required for the maintenance of the building, 24-7, regardless of activity, and which makes up the baseline energy use — emergency lighting, stand-by water heaters; and
3. Heating and cooling to keep the buildings at a comfortable temperature.

You can also think of these energies in the context of dependence, for which there are also three categories: Energy is:

1. dependent on business activity,
2. dependent on nothing (i.e. it’s constant), and
3. dependent on weather (and insulation levels . . . and occupancy levels, potentially)

When we look for patterns in energy use, these different energy types become very relevant. If you’re trying to figure out what might be causing excessive energy use, you need to be able to isolate potential causes — whether it’s occupant activity, weather changes, or something else. Ideally, you would have these three energies metered differently.

For example, if all you have is the total energy use on one meter for a site, in the case of energy-intensive industries or facilities, you won’t be able to see any weather variations, since any weather-related energy use will be dwarfed by energy use in normal site activity.

But when you do have these energies isolated by meter, or when your building is dominated by one type of energy, you can then normalize energy use with what’s driving energy use: You can compare activity energy use to the level of activity, compare weather-based energy use to weather, and so on. And then you can see whether there’s a correlation.

If energy doesn’t correlate with its driver, you know you’ve got a problem.

Read the complete article at GreenBiz

Over the past decade, hotel companies have implemented programs to reduce the waste generated and the energy used in their daily operations. Many have been successful in saving both resources and money as well as attracting environmentally conscious guests; however, the industry as a whole has yet to make sustainability an integral part of its strategic plans. The Two Tomorrows sustainability agency’s latest survey, the Tomorrow’s Value Rating (TVR) from 2009, indicates that the world’s ten largest hotel companies “are only just beginning to address the wide range of social and environmental challenges facing the sector.” Climate Counts, which scores corporations on the climate impact of their business, found similar resultswhen researching six major hotel firms. “The world’s largest hotel chains may be seeking practical ways to address a range of broad environmental impacts in their operations . . . however, few appear to be aligning such actions as part of a larger and more comprehensive carbon management strategy. An average sector score of 19 out of a possible 100 suggests the sector has much work ahead.” Now that the low hanging fruit that has enabled hotels to claim they are going green has been picked, it is time for hotel companies to evolve their sustainability programs in order to address the new phase of challenges and opportunities they currently face.

After several years of running environmental programs, hotels need to evaluate if their current organizational structures supporting these projects continue to be effective. Early green programs were often developed in the Environmental, Health, and Safety department. Their initiatives to protect workers and the Earth from dangerous chemicals evolved into projects to reduce waste and operating costs. Other sustainability programs were managed by the social responsibility team, run through the Human Resources department, which focused on giving back to the community. As a result, many sustainability officers now reside in Operations or HR. These alignments made perfect sense ten years ago when changing out light bulbs and cleaning up local parks represented major sustainability programs within a lot of hotels. The benefits of these initiatives are real but, as our world enters a new era where stakeholders are demanding more transparency and third party certifications are evolving and becoming a requirement to conduct business, keeping these programs in their original locations is often limiting.

Read the complete article at Environmental Leader

WASHINGTON, DC – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) WaterSense program announced today that irrigation controllers will soon be the first outdoor product eligible to earn the WaterSense label. The most efficient irrigation controllers, which operate like a thermostat for your sprinkler system by telling it when to turn on and off, may provide home and building owners the ability to save 110 billion gallons of water and roughly $410 million per year on utility bills.

“As much as half of the water we use on our landscapes goes to waste due to evaporation, wind, and improperly scheduled irrigation systems,” said Sheila Frace, Director of EPA’s Office of Water’s Municipal Support Division. “WaterSense labeled irrigation controllers are designed to do the thinking for you and apply water only when needed, to ensure a healthy landscape that doesn’t waste water.”

Residential outdoor watering in the United States accounts for more than 7 billion gallons of water each day, mainly for landscape irrigation. For many homeowners, the practice is “set it and forget it.” When watering schedules for irrigation system are set during the hottest and driest months and not adjusted when the weather changes, the result is overwatering for much of the year. WaterSense labeled irrigation controllers, which monitor watering needs based on local weather data, can use significantly less water by applying water only when plants need it – reducing annual water bills and offering convenience and peace-of-mind while keeping landscapes healthy.

Controllers with the WaterSense label could be available in spring 2012. Like all WaterSense labeled products, WaterSense labeled irrigation controllers must be independently certified to meet EPA’s criteria for water efficiency and performance.

WaterSense, a partnership program sponsored by EPA, seeks to protect the future of our nation’s water supply by offering people a simple way to use less water with water-efficient products, new homes, and services. Since the program’s inception in 2006, WaterSense has helped consumers save 125 billion gallons of water and more than $2 billion in water and energy bills. 

More information on WaterSense: http://www.epa.gov/watersense

TravelAge West speaks  with Richard Edwards, founder and CEO of Ecoism

In researching its cover story on Selling Green Travel, TravelAge West caught up with Richard Edwards, founder Ecoism, an organization that works with travel suppliers to help them develop a more socially responsible approach to travel marketing. Edwards shared a number of insights on developing sustainable program

What got you started on your path to Ecoism?

Over and over again, my first question to organizations has been, “What are your business goals?” When most people begin to consider a sustainability program, they don’t realize it has anything to do with business. They know they want to use it in their marketing, but they see it as separate, and possibly even as a cost of doing business.

There are many top quality marketing firms that focus on the tourism industry. There are also a number of organizations very familiar with helping companies and destinations with their sustainability programs. I didn’t see agencies or organizations that addressed marketing and business planning with sustainability as an integrated piece of the equation, which is where it is most effective in helping to achieve the economic and environmental goals the organization may have its eye on, as well as actually helping to drive revenue.

Economics and ecology meet at a point where sustainability is integrated into a business model that measures and achieves financial goals with sustainability as a contributing factor to that financial success. We see the void in the marketplace around practical, industry-focused and revenue driven sustainable tourism marketing, and ecoism is actively filling that need for travel companies and destinations.
The research we are seeing suggests that the next hurdle for travel suppliers  is finding messaging that effectively communicates their green policies to their clients. Would you agree with this? If not, what are some of the companies you work with doing to communicate green standards/policies.

Read the complete article at Travel Age West