Friday Photo & Idea: Recycle E-waste for Your Tenants?
|
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Most landlords we work with usually talk about the pressure to compete for and retain tenants when they explain why they are greening their buildings. And we see that the more successful landlords are those who go out of their way to find low or no-cost service offerings, which help their tenants to adopt sustainability practices within their own buildings.
Food for thought…helping tenants properly dispose of their e-waste can be one such practice that relieves them of a huge headache and is a big win for all involved.
Example in Photo: Japan
Yesterday while you were probably working away, Life Magazine caught this cool photo of workers at a Panasonic eco technology recycling facility in Kato, Hyogo Japan, processing e-waste.
In 2001, Japan enforced the Home Appliance Recycling Law (HARL), which calls for end-of-life home appliances to be recycled through the cooperation of consumers, retailers, and manufacturers.
At the Panasonic Eco Technology Recycling Facility Centre, approximately 700,000 home appliances such as televisions, air conditioners, washing machines and refrigerators are dismantled each year and 90% of these products are recycled [author's note: wow!].
I wonder what would happen for energy efficiency and community level sustainability, if more real estate developers and investors embedded direct e-waste recycling within their projects and/or neighborhoods? Some landlords here in San Francisco subcontract for this service to help their tenants. However, across the country and around the world, many overlook this particularly green opportunity.
There are lots of landlords that offer the multi-colored recycling office cans to their tenants, but leave tenants to deal with e-waste on their own.
That would be a great service offering for any asset class and market that eases tenants of a big burden and has real positive environmental impact.
Photo credit: Life.com
For Real Estate, Transparency is the New Black
|
|
Did you Read Co-star’s article today about “the state of energy efficient and green buildings” in across the US?
Read all the hand-wringing there about how hard it is to green buildings?
Of course, its a tough time for landlords to navigate their portfolios towards energy efficiency — what with new state energy disclosure regulations, percolating federal building labeling discussion and all breathing down their necks.
Interesting to us is call for more transparency in our industry. Notes Co-Star:
“The issue of tenants, real estate brokers and landlords all having access to more transparent and readily available information to enable them to make better informed decisions remains one of the biggest challenges facing the industry today, noted the panelists”.
This time last year, “getting the plaque” was all the rage. And some firms became a little too good at talking the green talk without necessarily walking the walk.
Experts pointed out that some buildings had obtained LEED-Gold certification, without significantly improving their energy profile beyond code requirements. They were able to achieve certification via sufficient LEED credits from other categories. And this caused a few to raise public doubts about the market strength of third party ratings system to address market transformation to low energy buildings. Those concerns were misplaced.
We hope in the coming months that the voluntary, transparent dislosure of a building’s energy use becomes as trendy as getting a LEED plaque on a trophy office building was last year. That would go a great way toward shifting market perception in favor of a value premium for certified green and energy efficient commercial real estate.
