It is one thing to green your company's building or even a whole campus, but what about when you are one company among many sharing a space?  At the recent Sustainability Leaders Forum Yahoo! raised the issue of how to achieve a sustainable environment in just such situations--which is the case for many of their offices around the world.  LEED does not offer a framework for leased multi-tenant spaces, but an organization called Green Globes does, and Yahoo! decided to pursue certification as a Green Tenant using that benchmarking process at their office in Taipei.  The framework Green Globes offers walks the tenant through extensive questions in an online database and it took about one year for Yahoo! to go from the proposal stage to certification, covering topics of energy use, transportation, air quality, water, and recycling.  Individual company spaces can achieve a rating and there is a portfolio capability to compare sites.  Wrapping up the presentation, though, the questions were raised about what other frameworks might exist to meet the need of multi-tenant space certification, what should the ideal goals be, what lessons have been learned so far by others in this situation, and could there be such a thing as "green leasing"?  These are great questions not only for business, but could extend to the multi-family residence domain as well.  It is a notoriously difficult undertaking to achieve high-participation recycling in multi-family spaces, and utilities may be included in the rent, making usage invisible to the renter.  The high turnover rate in rental spaces makes compliance with any organized effort.  So, just as Yahoo! suggested, frameworks and certifications to address such spaces must be easy to implement, have an acceptable time frame, be scalable across a portfolio, be reasonable and cost efficient, enable benchmarking, produces actionable recommendations, and allow for ongoing assessment.

Sustainability in Multi-Tenant Spaces