Using This Guide
This Guide is a tool to support BMS personnel in achieving sustainable goals for buildings, grounds, and operations. By adopting the best practices detailed in the Guide, BMS staff and locations demonstrate commitment to environmental stewardship in ways that are tangible to our staff, customers, and the communities in which we are based.
The Guide provides guidance and defines strategies for management and staff to collaborate to improve and manage facilities in more sustainable and often more efficient ways. By implementing these guidelines, staff can thereby contribute to BMS’s environmental and financial performance.
The Guide is organized into five chapters based on environmental impact categories: Transportation, Water, Energy, Materials, and Indoor Environment. Each chapter also identifies impact areas that BMS staff can address at home.
The chapters seek to answer the following questions, many of which address challenges that BMS locations face regularly:
- Transportation: How can we manage fleets, air travel, and transportation options to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions?
- Water: How can we reduce annual water consumption and costs while managing stormwater to protect water resources? In addition, what options exist to manage, improve, and demonstrate sustainable landscape and irrigation practices to enhance biodiversity?
- Energy: How can locations reduce annual energy consumption and costs, decrease reliance on fossil fuels, and increase use of renewable sources of energy?
- Materials: What options exist for locations to reduce procurement impacts, reduce waste, and support local and regional business?
- Indoor Environment: How can locations enhance and maintain healthy and productive work environments for their occupants?
Each chapter provides strategies for staff engagement and changing behavior. Many strategies will not be implementable by individual staff alone – but they may be the subject of working groups, referred to as Green Teams (and influencing activity) between staff and location management.