Greening Federal Facilities: An Energy, Environmental, and Economic Resource Guide for Federal Facility Managers

Greening Federal Facilities:

U.S. Department of Energy, 1997. 146 pages, softcover. Single copies available free, while supplies last, by calling 800/DOE-EREC. Copies may also be purchased by calling 800/553-NTIS.

What is perhaps most surprising about

Greening Federal Facilities is the book’s readability. We had expected this book—like many government documents—to be dry and almost impenetrable, but that was not at all the case.

Greening Federal Facilities is a clear, concise volume of strategies that federal building managers can use to improve the energy and environmental performance of the 500,000 buildings and facilities they manage. That’s right, 500,000 facilities occupying in excess of 3.1 billion square feet (288 million square meters) and costing taxpayers $3.5 billion in energy each year!

Following a discussion of sustainability and the important role facility managers can play in improving our building stock, the book presents a highly useful summary of all the federal regulations that have been adopted to reduce the energy use and environmental impacts of federal facilities. Simply having all of these federal laws, Executive Orders, and Executive Memoranda—16 of them—in one place and clearly summarized is a tremendous benefit and should go a long way toward ensuring that these regulations will be understood and implemented.

There are a few pages devoted to economic issues and a fairly complex “criteria weighting method” to help facility managers make decisions about new building systems or equipment. Most of the rest of the book is a collection of several hundred highly specific strategies for reducing energy use and other environmental impacts of federal facilities. There is a great deal of attention paid to energy—roughly half the book—with a primary focus on commercial building applications. Each of these topics, such as “boilers” or “steam traps,” is given one to several pages of coverage, including a very useful discussion of “action moment” (

when it makes sense to consider this strategy). Nine different icons call attention to such items as “technical information,” “cautionary note,” and “environmental issues.” Following Energy, the book addresses: Water and Wastewater; Materials, Waste Management, and Recycling; Site and Landscape Issues; Indoor Environmental Quality;

Operations and Maintenance Opportunities; and Management Actions.

There are a few missed opportunities in here (nothing on waterless urinals in the section “Toilets and Urinals,” for example), but overall the information is extremely useful and very comprehensive. Not only will federal facility managers find

Greening Federal Facilities highly useful, but so too will managers of any large buildings.

Greening Federal Facilities was written by Sustainable Systems, Inc., a consulting team led by Dr. Charles Kibert, under contract to the nonprofit foundation Greening America, which was working under the Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) of the Department of Energy. A large group of outside experts, including two

EBN Advisory Board members, reviewed drafts of the book, which no doubt helped to improve its overall usefulness. In addition to the book being available in hard copy, it can be accessed on-line by looking under “Greening Initiatives” on the FEMP website at www.eren.doe.gov/femp. In fact, the on-line version has more comprehensive reference listings than the hard-copy edition.