Green Edge, LLC

January 23, 2012  

 

Dear Clients, Friends and Colleagues,

 

I know it may sound corny, but Green Edge has made a New Year's Resolution and I thought I would take a few moments to share it with you. 

 

For us, 2011 was a year of growth and progress that brought our focus back to the future, or in other words, back to real estate and the built environment.     

 

Let me explain, and then I'll share our New Year's Resolution with you. 

 

Full Circle and Back to the Future

 

When I founded Green Edge in 2007, after two decades as a real estate executive and attorney, I knew that the need to reduce the carbon footprint of the built environment would present challenges and opportunities with enormous potential. I believed then, as I do now, that meeting these challenges and harnessing these opportunities would be the basis for competing and winning in the 21st century for both public and private sector organizations. And thus, our Green Edge sustainability lens focused on real estate and the built environment.   

 

We worked on greening new developments and qualifying them for LEED certification. We developed a proprietary green lease strategy and customized it for an organization that occupies over one million square feet as a tenant. We helped a municipality with its green retrofit program for single family homes.

 

Then the Great Recession hit and the real estate world came to a standstill. We used that downtime to expand our sustainability focus to other aspects of organizational sustainabilty including supply chain, transportation and logistical issues that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.

 

We developed Green Edge Workshops to enable our clients to organically create and implement sustainability initiatives across departmental lines and engage their internal teams around climate change solutions. We established the Green Edge Network of Preferred Providers to give our clients the benefits of a broad range of experts on an as-needed basis and we began publishing the Green Edge Newsletter.  

 

A Big, Hairy, Audacious Opportunity 

 

But somehow we always came back to real estate and the built environment. Our supply chain assignments revolved around facilities procurement. Our public sector clients asked us to create programs to scale the greening of existing buildings. Our work in transforming vague CSR mandates into specific, measurable and time-oriented goals evolved into greening a new headquarters location.

 

When we reflected on this, we realized that our work over the past five years brought us full circle back to the future. And the skills, expertise and perspective that we gained reaffirmed the significance of our original vision:

 

Real estate and the built environment is where we can
make the biggest, hairiest and most audacious contribution
 
to climate change solutions.

 

And that's our New Year's Resolution! We are bringing our focus back to greening real estate and the built environment as the key to giving you ----- our clients, colleagues and friends ----- the tools to transform the products and services you sell, the way you do business, and ultimately your organizations, as the basis for competing and winning in the 21st century and as the basis for a more sustainable world.

 

Please contact me to discuss how Green Edge can help you green your built environment and harness the greatest opportunity of our time ----- sustainability.   

 

And let us know what your New Year's Resolution is!

 

Happy New Year, 


Ellen Sinreich Signature 
Ellen Sinreich
President

greenedgellc.com

[email protected]

212 828 3840

 

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