Magazine

Sustainable Facilities Forum 2024 Leadership Award Winners

The importance of these awards lies in their ability to inspire and motivate individuals, organizations, and communities to adopt sustainable practices and technologies. By recognizing and honoring the efforts and achievements of sustainability leaders, the awards create role models and showcase success stories that can drive further progress. The awards also provide a platform for networking, collaboration, and knowledge sharing among stakeholders, fostering a sense of community and shared responsibility for environmental stewardship.

Overall, the Leadership Awards play a vital role in promoting and accelerating the transition towards a more sustainable future.

The High-Tech Landscape: How Expanded WI-FI is Keeping Chico State’s Grounds Watered and Healthy

The story of smart irrigation at Chico State has been one of seizing opportunities when they arise, however unexpectedly. But maybe there’s a different way to look at it, Wunsch suggests.

“You can only recognize an opportunity if you’re open to it,” he says. “So it’s about having that sort of receptive mindset, to learn and adjust and improve all the time. That’s what we try to do, whether that’s through the use of technology like smart irrigation, or in any other way.”

Meet the CCC: Growing the Green Energy Work Force

Blue hats, khaki shirts, big smiles – while attending Green Technology’s signature events you might have run into the recognizable crews from the California Conservation Corps (CCC).

What you might not know is these young adults are part of CCC’s Energy Corps where they train for careers in the clean energy sector through a year of hands-on, paid service to California.

Sustainable Facilities Forum 2023 Leadership Award Winners

The importance of these awards lies in their ability to inspire and motivate individuals, organizations, and communities to adopt sustainable practices and technologies. By recognizing and honoring the efforts and achievements of sustainability leaders, the awards create role models and showcase success stories that can drive further progress. The awards also provide a platform for networking, collaboration, and knowledge sharing among stakeholders, fostering a sense of community and shared responsibility for environmental stewardship.

Overall, the Leadership Awards play a vital role in promoting and accelerating the transition towards a more sustainable future.

The unexpected arboretum: CSUSM benefits from sustainable approach to water and environmental management

Back in 2021, arboretums were very much on the minds of surveyors from the educational facilities organization APPA when they visited California State University San Marcos. The surveyors were on campus to assess CSUSM’s facilities for a prestigious award, and while they were there, they couldn’t help but be impressed by the condition of the CSUSM grounds. They were struck particularly by the quality of the work involved in maintaining the institution’s inventory of trees and plants.

Rethinking Sustainability

In the past, sustainability in furniture manufacturing typically involved using sustainable materials and sustainable processes.

Now, battery power adds another facet to our sustainability story.

The next steps for powering offices and office equipment are both practical and meaningful for the way businesses impact the electrical grid.

Ev-Car

How to Meet Biden’s 2030 climate goals and dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions

Unprecedented forest fires in the drought-stricken western United States. Tropical storms and rising seas threatening the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Sizzling heat across large swaths of the country. As climate change unfolds before our eyes, what can the U.S. do to sharply and rapidly reduce its share of the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing it?

The Biden administration has committed to reduce those emissions 50% by 2030 below 2005 levels. That’s a critical first step of a global energy transition that must achieve net-zero emissions by midcentury to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 F) and thereby avert the worst impacts of climate change.

Technician

Climate change will transform how we live, but these tech and policy experts see reason for optimism

It’s easy to feel pessimistic when scientists around the world are warning that climate change has advanced so far, it’s now inevitable that societies will either transform themselves or be transformed. But as two of the authors of a recent international climate report, we also see reason for optimism.

The latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change discuss changes ahead, but they also describe how existing solutions can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help people adjust to impacts of climate change that can’t be avoided.

To slow climate change and adapt to the damage already underway, the world will have to shift how it generates and uses energy, transports people and goods, designs buildings and grows food. That starts with embracing innovation and change.