New York’s Green Giant. A Blog by Christine Arena
Christine Arena is the author of The High-Purpose Company - The Truly Responsible (and Highly Profitable) Firms that are Changing Business Now. Like what you just read? Get your daily dose of corporate insights.
Perhaps you’ve heard. New York’s iconic landmark, The Empire State Building, is undergoing a radical transformation: a $550 million renovation incorporating a comprehensive energy efficiency retrofit. The highly-publicized project is projected to save 38 percent of the building’s energy, reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 105,000 metric tons over the next 15 years and lower building costs by $4.4 million annually. That makes the building’s tenants happy, and it’s also good for the City of New York.
A whopping 65 to 70 percent of New York City’s carbon emissions are projected to come from buildings, whereas very few examples of pre-war commercial building energy retrofits exist anywhere in the United States. That means the Empire State Building is literally clearing a path for thousands of other buildings to follow. It happens to be doing so with a visible commitment to the principles behind the sustainability movement – people, planet and profit.
In an effort to build stakeholder advocacy and encourage more commercial buildings to initiate similar energy retrofit initiatives, owner Anthony Malkin of Empire State Building Company has made a remarkable commitment to transparency. He has decided that the company will share all of the new processes and technology it develops and lessons it learns during the retrofit with the public. “It is my hope that people will be able to take a look at what we did here and be able to replicate the process,” he says.
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