Jones Lang LaSalle started the new year with 1,075 credentialed energy and sustainability professionals on its staff, the most of any commercial real estate services firm.

In doing so, the company beat its goal of having 1,000 members of its workforce attain green accreditation by the end of 2012.

As the field of sustainability grows, greater numbers of professionals are striving to differentiate themselves by earning credentials from internationally recognized organizations such as the U.S. Green Building Council with its program for LEED Accredited Professionals and BREEAM, based in the United Kingdom.

At the same time, standards organizations have raised the bar for credentials, and companies have come to view employee accreditation not only as an avenue for professional development, but also as a market advantage.

For example, Turner Construction Company, a green building leader, has emphasized its commitment to fostering certification of employees as LEED Accredited Professionals for the past eight years. Turner's population of LEED APs grew from 42 in 2004 to more than 1,000 in 2009. With some 1,200 LEED APs on staff last year, Turner had the most of any company.

Jones Lang LaSalle, which now has a robust sustainability practice, had fewer than 200 employees certified as professionals in the discipline in April 2008, when it set its first target for accreditation among staff members.

"Sustainability is now important to every service we provide," Dan Probst, JLL chairman of energy and sustainability services, said in a statement provided to GreenBiz. "Sustainability accreditation verifies that we understand the strategies for managing energy, water and other aspects of sustainable development and operations."

The firm's tally of certified sustainability professionals rose to 650 in May 2011, and company leaders set a new internal target, called "Accredit 1K." At the time, there was some doubt that the population of credentialed staff could climb by 350 before New Year's Day 2012. So JLL decided to set the close of 2012 as the horizon for its stretch goal, but soon realized it had triggered a surge in the demand for credential-related training among staff.

"The response from our business leaders and on-site professionals around the world, based on rising client demand, was so strong, we had to move quickly," said Lauralee Martin, JLL's chief operating and financial officer, in a statement. The firm stepped up the course offerings in its in-house Sustainability University, and employees hit the books.

JLL's 1,075 accredited staff members, who represent 2.5 percent of the company's 42,000 employees, span 29 countries. The majority of the credentials were earned through the USGBC's LEED AP and LEED Green Associate programs. Other sustainability credentials attained by JLL employees include BREEAM accreditation; membership as an Associate of the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment; certification as a Building Commissioning Professional (CBCP), an Energy Manager (CEM), or a Data Center Energy Practitioner (DCEP); and accreditation through programs operated by Green Globes - Go Green Plus, Green Mark and the National Australian Built Environment Rating System.

The company credits its professionals for enabling 200 buildings and commercial interiors to achieve green building certification, and for installing or serving as advisors on 1,400 MW of wind and biomass energy projects. JLL says its sustainability pros also helped clients save $128 million in energy costs and avoid 563,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2010, according to the firm's most recent annual global figures on its work with customers.

JLL Vice President Craig Bloomfield said many other employees will be taking credentialing exams during the first quarter of 2012, "so I'm sure we will top 1,100 pretty soon."

Photo of green team cutouts via Shutterstock.com.

I recently visited New Orleans for the first time, with the question no doubt asked by most of the Crescent City's visitors: More than six years post-Katrina, is New Orleans back?

The answer is complex, and the story is one of resilience, devastation, rebuilding and sustainability.

The French Quarter is booming, and Bourbon Street is a 24-7 party. Jazz flows on Frenchmen Street in the Faubourg Marigny district. Tourists pack Jackson Square and restaurants and attractions are crowded. In the districts that cater to visitors, you'll likely be told -- as I was -- that New Orleans is "85 to 90 percent back." I predict that you'll have ample reason to agree if you visit New Orleans' most storied spots. (And you should visit, as I'll explain below.)

Enter the east side of town, though, and large swaths of post-Katrina residential and commercial abandonment remain apparent, with blighted areas easily visible from Interstate 10. Eastern New Orleans is estimated at up to 40 percent vacant, and unused properties include not only housing, but diverse commercial sites, including the former Methodist Hospital and Lakeland Medical Center complexes, and the former Six Flags amusement park.

Some good news came on December 21, when Walmart announced its purchase of the Lakeland Medical Center site for a 180,000-square-foot supercenter. The new Walmart will add much-needed retail space to this portion of New Orleans. The city government purchased Methodist Hospital in 2010, and a re-opening is planned for 2013. The redevelopment of the Six Flags site remains uncertain -- two proposals that survived a recent municipal RFP process are an outlet mall and a theme park. But even with these signs of progress, the destruction wreaked by Katrina remains all too evident.

The Lower Ninth Ward is of course the epicenter of Katrina's devastation, inundated in 2005 by stormwaters from the Industrial Canal. The Greater New Orleans Community Development Center, in an analysis of 2000-2010 census data, estimates that the district -- rendered uninhabitable in Katrina's wake -- has recovered only 22 percent of its population (PDF).

Visit the Lower Ninth Ward today, and the effects of Katrina's ravages remain. Most structures remain vacant or boarded up, and some retain the markings left by emergency responders in the first post-hurricane searches for the injured and the dead.

Yet, the Lower Ninth Ward is a hopeful place in that it is the epicenter of advanced sustainable rebuilding efforts. The Make It Right Foundation, founded by actor Brad Pitt, is halfway through the process of constructing 150 LEED Platinum, affordable homes.

Make It Right homes are raised at least two feet above the base flood elevation level (an exception is the Morphosis FLOAT House, which rises on guideposts to float the structure as water levels rise). Structures are designed to be storm resistant and reduce energy and water use as a result of several factors. They include use of closed cell spray foam insulation; daylighting; efficient lighting, plumbing fixtures and appliances; solar panels and tankless water heaters. Homes also incorporate low-VOC and recycled materials as well as sustainable landscaping designed to reduce flooding.

Equally impressive is that Make It Right achieves sustainability on a budget. The average cost of a Make It Right home is approximately $150,000, and costs have been reduced to about $130 per square foot through rigorous value engineering and the careful training of contractors.

Can you help bring New Orleans back faster? Assuredly yes. First, you can support Make It Right's green rebuilding efforts or another Katrina relief activity of your choice.

Second, you can visit this remarkable and resilient city. Tourism is New Orleans' largest industry, accounting for 40 percent of local tax revenues and nearly 70,000 jobs. New Orleans' culture, history, music and cuisine are unique, and your visit will help to ensure a vibrant and expanding economic base. These are great reasons to indulge yourself and, as they say in NOLA: Laissez les bons temps rouler (let the good times roll).

Need more reasons to visit? Eco-tourism venues will be the subject of my next blog.

Photos of French Quarter façade CC licensed by Flickr user Steve Snodgrass. Photos of New Orleans' Ninth Ward, a house tagged by a search team and flooding (shown in index) via Shutterstock.com.
 

Philadelphia, Oakland and six other U.S. cities will get free help this coming year from sustainable building and development experts who'll take a fresh look at the towns through a green lens.

The aim of the free consultations is to accelerate green neighborhood development by helping cities understand how to transform urban communities into places that offer a balanced mix of residential, commercial and recreational areas, which are easily accessible on foot, bikes and public transportation. Ideally, the communities would embody the triple bottom line by being good for the well-being of people, prosperous and kinder to the planet than the existing built environment.

The consultations are being provided by the sustainability-focused nonprofit Global Green USA through funding from the U.S Environmental Protection Agency's Building Blocks for Sustainable Communities Program.

Global Green USA, an arm of Green Cross International, contends cities are responsible for as much as 70 percent of global warming pollution and is working to counter climate change.

Cities vied for inclusion in the organization's consultation program, and the winners were selected based on factors that included the strength of sustainability projects they have planned, the level of community engagement, urgency and need for help.

Philadelphia and Oakland, Calif., both of which have detailed climate action plans, are the two largest cities selected for the Global Green USA program. The others are Dearborn, Mich.; Eden Prairie, Minn.; Greensboro, N.C.; Lafayette, Ind.; Lakewood, Colo.; and Louisville, Ky.

The consultation team begins its work in February and over the next six months will spend three days in each city and then make recommendations on infrastructure and policy changes that are intended to further development of sustainable communities.

The team will be basing its assessments on the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standard for Neighborhood Development. The standard known as LEED-NC formally launched in 2010 after three years of pilot testing.

The standard was established as a national benchmark for sustainable community design, but even in the testing phase it drew international interest. Two-hundred-thirty-nine projects in six countries were registered under LEED-NC during the pilot.

Image CC licensed by Flickr user michaelwm25.

Work to make the U.S Treasury Building more resource efficient has earned the third-oldest federal building in Washington, D.C., gold-level LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

Stretching for more than two city blocks, the Treasury Building was under construction for 33 years from 1836 to 1869. (Only the White House and the U.S. Capitol are older.)

The most recent changes in operations and the latest facility improvements include:

• Increasing daylighting
• Putting in place an advanced control and management system for HVAC
• Auditing the waste stream to identify further opportunities for recycling and reducing waste
• Creating a green procurement program
• Enhanced metering for utilities
• Better use of space

The efforts have resulted in:

• A 7-percent drop in electricity consumption
• A 43-percent decrease in use of potable water
• A 53-percent reduction in the use of steam
• Adding 164 workstations

"We're proud of the improvements we've made around the Treasury Building -- both big and small - to help reduce our environmental footprint and save taxpayer dollars," Assistant Secretary for Management Dan Tangherlini said in a blog post. "They're part of a broader Administration-wide effort, which includes President Obama's recent $2 billion commitment to energy upgrades of federal buildings using long term energy savings to pay for up-front costs, at no cost to taxpayers."

In the first year of his administration, Obama issued an executive order that calls on federal agencies to set a national example for greening their operations and facilities. GSA Administrator Martha Johnson detailed the government's aim and her goal of bring her agency's environmental footprint to zero at the GreenBiz Group's State of Green Business Forum 2011 in Washington, D.C.

Photo of U.S. Treasury Building by Carolyn M Carpenter / Shutterstock.com

The Merced County jail and a nearby juvenile justice facility in California's Central Valley are expected to draw about 70 percent of their electricity from a new 1.4 megawatt solar farm that fans out across 4.5 acres.

The system supplied by Siemens is the first for the firm at a correctional facility, although the company has completed more than 20 solar power projects in nine U.S. states, according to Clark Wiedetz, the head of renewable energy for Siemens USA's Building Technologies Division.

"The economics of the system could not be better," Merced County Board of Supervisors Chairman John Pedrozo said in a statement to mark a recent ribbon-cutting event at the solar farm. "We can expect more than $300,000 in equivalent electricity savings every year and a net positive cash flow that over 25 years will reach, according to projections, nearly $9 million."

The installation at the John Latorraca Correctional Facility and the Iris Garrett Juvenile Justice Correctional Complex consists of 6,272 solar panels laid out in two arrays shaped like triangles, shown here:

In addition to a total positive cash flow of $8,685,000 to the county over 25 years, expected benefits from the installation include:

• Solar incentives totaling $1,578,610 over a five-year period
• Savings on electricity bills totaling $13,892,500 over 25 years
• Eligibility for a PG&E capital improvement rebate

Siemens also completed a lighting upgrade for the county. Taken together, the lighting and solar projects are expected reduce CO2 emissions by about 999.85 tons, according to the company.

GreenBiz first wrote about solar power at jails in 2001, when the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, also in California, was planning to install a system at the county's Santa Rita Jail, in the Bay Area town of Dublin. The system was 1.18 MW, a size seldom seen at the time.

Since then, headlines on green building projects at lockups have highlighted:

• The use of recycled shipping containers to construct cells and shower facilities at a New Zealand prison.
• The first LEED-Gold green building rating awarded to a U.S. jail. The Washington State Department of Corrections earned the certification for its 21-building, medium-security Coyote Ridge Corrections Center in the town of Connell.
• Hong Kong's first jail to be designed according to sustainable building principles. Honored with a green building award, the energy efficient facility for 1,400 female inmates cost about $200 million USD to build and included a green roof, solar panels and system to boost indoor air quality.

That last news item caused an uproar just a year ago when critics complained that Hong Kong, plagued by a severe shortage of affordable residential property, had spent too much on the jail. A spokesman for the Hong Kong Architectural Services responded by saying the green elements of the jail cost less than 1 percent of the project's price tag.

Image courtesy of Siemens.

Sustainability has become a competitive factor among the hospitality industry's biggest brands and several have stepped up their efforts to make their operations and their offerings more environmentally friendly.

For example, Hyatt launched its Thrive program this past summer. Marriott, which is working to make its supply chain and properties greener, has teamed with flooring and fabric companies and other firms to form the Hospitality Sustainable Purchasing Consortium.

Hilton Worldwide developed a sustainability management system about three years ago and recently detailed the latest environmental benefits and savings from its program, called LightStay. They amount to more than $74 million in savings as a result of a 19 percent reduction in waste, a 7.8 percent drop in carbon emissions, a 6.6 percent decrease in energy use and 3.8 percent reduction in water consumption.

Hilton, which is working with other hospitality giants to devise a carbon footprint standard for their industry, is claiming a further environmental achievement that its executives say set the brand apart.

As of this month, the more than 3,750 properties across the 10 brands that make up Hilton Worldwide are participating in the LightStay sustainability management program. The company and its brands have also earned certification for the entire portfolio under the International Standards Organization's guidelines for quality and environmental management systems (known among the standards cognoscenti as ISO 9001 and ISO 14001, respectively).

"To my knowledge, we're still the only major multi-brand hospitality company to mandate measurement and corrective action across all of our brands and hotels," said Christopher Corpuel, Hilton Worldwide's vice president for sustainability. "So that means for us, as brand standard in our business, you must comply or risk losing your flag."

Mandating is one thing and gaining full compliance is quite another. I recently asked Corpuel how Hilton made it happen.

Three factors were core to the process, he said. The first involved rethinking how to manage the business in a resource-constrained world and a realization that it is essential to "focus on sustainability as a discipline of the business," Corpuel said.

"Our ability to achieve this progress came from a grounding, if you will, and an understanding that sustainability isn't a kind of marketing program or any kind of an initiative," he said. "It's really just like legal or finance or sales or IT. It's one of the disciplines we use to support our business of hospitality."

That understanding was fostered by Hilton Worldwide's leaders and the premise was articulated across the brands through the LightStay program, which provides a systemized approach to sustainability for properties to follow, said Corpuel, describing the other two key elements that are at center of the company's approach to sustainability.

LightStay helps the hotel properties measure utility and operational performance across over 200 touch points from purchasing and cleaning to providing meeting services. The system includes a meeting calculator to show customers how they can lessen the environmental impact of their events and track them, if need be.

"It's also got a social network dashboard, which allows our global properties across all brands to communicate, share best practices, track projects, and focus on improvement, as well as a range of reporting and analysis tools to support really helping them maximize the performance of their hotels," Corpuel said.

Here's more about the steps Hilton took to bring LightStay and ISO certification to all the properties under its brands:

Leslie Guevarra: Hilton doesn't own all the properties that are under its brands, right? What did you need to do to get them to comply?

Christopher Corpuel: You're right. It [LightStay] is across our own managed and franchise hotels, so there's no hotel in our system that isn't under this requirement. We took a very, a very methodical approach -- a crawl, walk, run approach.

It started with our learning and making sure we're providing the right mechanism and system for the hotels -- to help them manage performance, to help them reduce their costs, to help them respond to revenue opportunities, to manage local risk -- so that it [the system] would be a benefit for them. It took time to get to that place.

LG: How much time are we talking about?

CC: [It's been] a good three to four years of building up, learning, improving and taking these steps. It was about two and a half years ago, in '09-ish, when we made sustainability a global standard for all our hotels. But that took a lot of learning and global sharing to get to that place. So it's been a long road, and it's just the start of an ongoing road.

LG: What about the next milestone to the next milestone, getting every property under the ISO standards, what did that take?

CC: Ironically, we never set out to achieve certification. We built our business model to have LightStay exceed any global requirements or local demands. We felt we needed to integrate this into our model so we could proactively manage sustainability performance anywhere in the world. Whether it's Asia or Europe or the U.S. or South America. We wanted it to beyond what anybody was doing.

Also we also, on an annual basis, externally validate our performance data, just like a financial statement is validated. And so as part of that process, when we were planning for this year, 2011, the conversation of ISO came up.

LG: Usually, people don't go from, "We're thinking about doing it" to "We've got it done" in such a short period of time ...

CC: Yes, it [ISO certification] is a relatively rigorous process. To your point, this wasn't something that we said, "Hey, let's go out and do this thing.  We think it would be cool." This has been building for many years  And it was really almost a validation, if you will, of the process that we've built.

Here's how Corpuel responded to questions about customer engagement, green messaging and the possibility that some customers might not be interested in hearing it:

CC: it's definitely a line that you walk. It's a balance ... We view sustainability as an internal discipline to support our business, [and] in terms of customer, we take a similar approach -- which is if sustainability is a buy decision for a customer, we want them to know that we've woven it into our business in a way that helps drive our business of hospitality.

Now in terms of directly calling it out, probably the biggest area where that's relevant is in the group and meeting event space. Groups, meeting planners and travel managers who come to book business with us make what's called a request for proposal, an RFP.

They are mandating to know in that RFP document what we do as it relates to sustainability at a company level, at a brand level, at a property level. Part of our LightStay tool is that meeting calculator that I talked about, which allows the properties to create customized reports for those prospective clients about what their travel impact might be and anything that's going on at the property that relates to sustainability. It directly speaks to that customer.

And here's what Corpuel said when asked "What's next for Hilton?":

CC: The challenge is how do you continue to build? And I think one of the areas where we're really focused on now is in strategic partnerships.  How do we build off our platform and reach out to potential partners that might be able to help us achieve objectives, support our hotels, maximize performance, and help our guests have terrific experiences with us?

An example of that would be our recently announced partnership with Global Soap Project [to reprocess used soap into new bars for communities and regions in need]. The other one would be our partnership with Good360 [to give gently used hotel linens and furnishing to charities].

Hilton has goals of reducing waste, energy consumption and carbon emissions by 20 percent and reducing water consumption by 10 percent by 2014.

Photos courtesy of Hilton Worldwide.