Consulting Services
Environmental Consulting
Green and sustainability services, environmental compliance support and building condition assessment, documented to a standard that holds up when somebody else reviews it.
Documented rather than assumed
A great deal of environmental exposure in existing buildings is not the result of a decision. It is the result of a building being old enough that materials, systems and practices which were standard at the time are no longer standard, and nobody has systematically established what is present.
The organizations that get into difficulty are rarely the ones that knew about a condition and accepted the risk. They are the ones that never established the position at all, and so could not make a decision about it, and then encountered it during a renovation or a transaction at the least convenient possible moment.
Where we help
- Building condition assessment. A documented view of asset condition and remaining useful life, which is the input every credible capital plan requires and most capital plans do not have.
- Compliance position. Establishing which requirements actually apply to your building and use, which is less obvious than it sounds where jurisdiction, building age and use type interact.
- Green and sustainability services. Practical assessment of where operational and material changes produce a real reduction, distinguished from changes that mainly produce a claim.
- Reporting support. Where an organization has taken on disclosure obligations, building a measurement approach that is defensible and repeatable rather than reconstructed each cycle.
On sustainability claims
We are cautious here, deliberately. The gap between a genuine reduction and a reported reduction can be created entirely by choice of baseline, boundary and accounting method, without anyone stating anything untrue. Organizations that make claims they cannot substantiate at the level of underlying data are taking a risk that grows as disclosure expectations tighten.
Our position is that a smaller, fully substantiated claim is worth considerably more than a larger one that depends on a favorable methodology. That advice occasionally makes us less useful to a marketing department, which we accept.
Before publishing any consumption or emissions figure, confirm you can name the boundary, the baseline year, the data source for each input, and what was estimated rather than measured. If any of the four is unclear internally, the figure is not ready to be external.
Related
The condition assessment side of this work is covered in more depth in what a building condition assessment actually tells you, and the funding argument it supports is the subject of deferred maintenance as a loan you did not agree to.
Start with the numbers you already have
Send us a recent operating budget, a maintenance log or a vendor contract. We will tell you what it says about the way the site is being run.
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