Taking Green Building to the Next Level - Customizing LEED
By Kelly Shea, Global Sustainability Program Manager, Symantec
Corporate Responsibility in Action
For the past week, the United Nations Climate Change Conference has convened in Warsaw, bringing together delegates from over 190 countries hoping to move closer to a global agreement on GHG emissions reduction.
At Symantec, mitigating our impacts on climate change is central to our environmental strategy.
A key way we continue to reduce our impacts is through our focus on green building practices, specifically achieving Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) facility certifications. Earlier this year, I wrote about our achievements in FY13 -- three new LEED certifications, including our first Platinum certification in Culver City, California. We now have 30 LEED cerfitied facilities representing 80 percent of our eligible real estate square footage, and are closing in on our goal to obtain LEED and Energy Star certifications for 100 percent of our owned or long-leased facilities
What’s Next?
As we near our goal of 100 percent LEED certified buildings – we’ve asked ourselves what’s next?
How can we leverage what we’ve achieved so far to further embed efficiencies across our properties and operations? How can we create a continuous improvement cycle within our green building strategy that goes beyond LEED certification and ensures efficiencies are continually uncovered and managed across our portfolio?
Over the past year, we’ve looked closely at our LEED strategy, conducting a full analysis of our property portfolio and deciding what our next phase in this journey will look like.
What we found is that by picking out the pieces of LEED that have worked the best for us – those that have the biggest impacts on Symantec, create the highest efficiencies, result in cost savings, and have the most successful implementation – we came to three clear focus areas for the future of Green Building at Symantec – energy efficiency, waste audits and purchasing materials with recycled content. Additionally, all new buildings (owned and long-leased) would be LEED certified.
Read the full post on the Symantec CR in Action blog here.
