“I came to work for the EPA
because I believe in what it stands for.”
--Tiffany Schermerhorn
As federal entities go, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, established in 1970, is a relative newcomer. The Department of Energy traces its start to World War II, the National Safety Council to 1913, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency has roots dating back to 1803. Nevertheless, at 37, the Washington, D.C.-based EPA has proven one of the most active agencies of all, and its most recent move continues a record of initiating highly influential change.
On May 1 of this year, in an effort to green its meetings and put some muscle behind its name and mission, the EPA rolled out a new agencywide acquisition rule requiring that any employee responsible for securing a meeting facility should evaluate the venue against a 14-point environmental checklist.
“We want to encourage venues to start going green, but we also want to reward those that have already made advances,” says Tiffany Schermerhorn, procurement analyst, Policy, Training and Oversight Division, Office of Acquisition Management at the EPA, one of the key players in developing the agency’s green meetings policy. “We are motivated because we are the EPA.”
The checklist is unique within the federal government, and not only because it is the first of its kind, or because of the immediate financial implications -- the EPA has an annual travel and meetings spend of $50 million -- but because of the unexpected recognition it has garnered in government and the wheels of change it already has put in motion.
On July 12, Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D.-Pa.) introduced bill H.R. 3037 in the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Cited as the Green Meetings Act, the measure’s stated purpose is “to ensure that all federal agencies consider the environmentally preferable features and practices of a vendor in purchases of meeting and conference services.”
If that bill passes and is enacted this coming January, it will require the Office of Federal Procurement Policy to mandate that a green meetings plan is instituted by every federal agency “in a manner substantially similar to that required of the Environmental Protection Agency.” Considering that the federal government generates $14 billion a year in travel and meetings spend, the consequences of H.R. 3037 could be far-reaching.
Schermerhorn, a five-year veteran at the EPA who spoke at length with M&C on the development of the new green meetings policy, says the official introduction of the bill was sweet validation of the years of work she and fellow colleagues spent researching and developing it. “I came to work for the EPA because I believe in what it stands for,” she says. “This is very exciting, because I feel I have a direct link to this particular environmental program.”
The EPA’s Green Checklist
The following 14 points comprise the EPA’s new agencywide acquisition rule that gives priority to hotels and conference centers that can demonstrate environmental progress and achievement.
1. Do you have a recycling program? If so, please describe.
Just as millions of American households now routinely recycle items such as aluminum, glass, plastic and newspaper, it is incumbent on the hospitality industry as well to recycle to help reduce consumption of natural resources and the production of waste.
According to the EPA, hotels that implement recycling programs stand to reap significant cost savings. “One hotel told us that in the first year of implementing a cardboard-recycling program, they had cost savings in the tens of thousands of dollars,” says Harry Lewis, attorney advisor for the EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxic Pollution Prevention Division, who helped develop the agency’s green meetings policy.
2. Do you have a linen/towel reuse option that is communicated to guests?
More and more hotels, resorts and even cruise lines are getting the message out: Reusing linens and towels saves water and the energy used to operate the laundry machinery.
3. Do guests have easy access to public transportation or shuttle services at your facility?
“The availability of shuttle buses, or easy access to public transportation, reduces a guest’s dependency on needing a car to get around,” says Lewis. “That in turn reduces greenhouse gasses.”
4. Are lights and air conditioning turned off when rooms are not in use? If so, how do you ensure this?
The U.S. hospitality industry spends an estimated $3.7 billion a year on energy, with electricity accounting for up to 70 percent of a hotel’s typical utility costs. So-called smart lights (which turn on and off when a person enters a room), timer-activated lights, and electronic guest room cards that activate lights and central air are all energy-efficient products that increasingly are being used to cut down on electricity output.
5. Do you provide bulk dispensers or reusable containers for beverages, food and condiments?
Using items such as glass pitchers and tumblers in place of bottled water in plastic containers helps ease the volume of waste that would otherwise have to be recycled or disposed of.
6. Do you provide reusable serving utensils, napkins and tablecloths when food and beverages are served?
Like bulk dispensers in point number 5 above, employing reusable diningware greatly reduces the volume of waste ending up in dumpsters and landfills.
7. Do you have an energy efficiency program? Please describe.
A company that simply switches from using incandescent lightbulbs to compact fluorescent bulbs immediately can save 75 percent in the amount of energy needed for lighting, notes Tiffany Schermerhorn.
To draw attention to the issue, the EPA created Energy Star, a program that offers energy-efficient operating solutions to consumers and businesses. As of June, 3,200 buildings were awarded the Energy Star certification for their efforts; among them were 150 hotels. By EPA estimates, these star winners prevented about 11 billion pounds of greenhouse gas emissions from polluting the atmosphere.
8. Do you have a water conservation program? Please describe.
According to California’s Green Lodging Program, a typical hotel uses 218 gallons of water per day, per occupied room. The GLP estimates that using water-efficient systems such as low-flow showerheads, low-flush toilets and laundry facilities that recycle water can reduce water and sewage bills by as much as 25-30 percent per year.
In January of this year, Washington, D.C.-based Marriott International announced it had installed 400,000 new showerheads in its properties, which will reduce hot water usage by 10 percent each year.
9. Does your hotel provide guests with paperless check-in and checkout?
“This is one of those items that is actually a major source of savings for hotels in terms of paper purchases and solid-waste disposal,” says Schermerhorn. She notes that many U.S. hotel chains, including Hilton, Hyatt, Omni and Starwood, already offer this option at their properties.
10. Does your facility use recycled or recyclable products? Please describe.
“In terms of conference facilities, this is an important key in reducing the substantial environmental impact of an enterprise devoted to serving the needs of hundreds or even thousands of people a week,” notes Schermerhorn.
11. Do you source food from local growers or take into account the growing practices of farmers that provide the food? Please describe.
“Sourcing food from local producers not only supports local economies, it reduces transportation energy,” says Schermerhorn. “Even if the food is not classified as organic, by buying locally, the hotel is reducing the environmental impact of shipping large quantities of food long distances.”
12. Do you use bio-based or biodegradable products, including bio-based cafeteria ware? Please describe.
Without too much effort, facilities can find affordable products that fit this category, including bed and bath items, fuel additives, lubricants, etc. A list of bio-preferred products can be found at bio
based.oce.usda.gov/fb4p/Catalog.aspx.
13. Do you train your employees on green initiatives? Please describe.
“If a hotel actually is investing money and time in training its employees on any environmental initiatives it is undertaking, that tells us they are not just ‘greenwashing’ themselves,” says Lewis.
14. What other environmental initiatives have you undertaken, including any environment-related certifications you possess, EPA voluntary partnerships in which you participate, support of a green suppliers network or other initiatives? Include green meeting information in your quotation so that we may consider environmental preferability in selection of our meeting venue.
“This was a bonus question,” says Schermerhorn. “It lets them tell us about initiatives they are taking that we hadn’t considered, and it also gives us information on programs we might not have known about.”
Genesis of the listWhen it was publicly announced in May, the EPA’s green meetings policy seemed to come out of nowhere. How did a huge federal agency -- 17,000 employees spread over a sprawling headquarters, 10 regional offices and roughly a dozen labs -- manage to pull off what corporations, associations and state agencies had not?
The initiative, it turns out, had been in the works since 1998, when President Bill Clinton signed into law Executive Order 13101, Greening the Government Through Waste Prevention, Recycling and Federal Acquisition. To implement that order, the EPA’s office of Pollution Prevention set about identifying internal areas that needed an environmental overhaul, including office supplies, electronics and general recycling. When it finally turned its attention to meetings, the EPA realized it was in uncharted waters.
On one hand, there already existed guidelines from various organizations in the areas of waste management, recycling, water savings and energy use. But obtaining a blueprint for a green meeting proved elusive.
To create a workable platform, Tiffany Schermerhorn, Harry Lewis and others from various agency offices conducted research on the environmental efforts of private and public organizations such as the nonprofit Washington, D.C.-based National Recycling Coalition and the Portland, Ore.-based Green Meetings Industry Council. (For a profile of GMIC, go here.) They also looked at two highly successful state environmental lodging programs in California and Florida.
From all that research, the team identified a dozen key points, developed a proposal and published it in the Federal Register, the official daily governmental publication for rules, proposed rules, executive orders and presidential documents. The proposal read: “The intent of this rule is to ensure that environmental preferability is considered in each purchase of commercial meeting and conference services, which furthers the EPA mission to protect human health and the environment.”
“When we issued the proposed rule, all of our EPA offices, as well as the public, had an opportunity to comment, which is what we wanted,” says Schermerhorn. “We got several comments from different agencies and ended up including two in the final rule, which made it a 14-point directive.”
While the rule is still too new to generate much feedback from the EPA’s rank and file, Schermerhorn says she is confident the agency’s employees will find it a workable policy rather than another bureaucratic layer bogging down the meeting planning process. The linchpin, she says, is the rule’s built-in flexibility.
“The only thing that is required is that environmental factors must be taken into consideration,” says Schermerhorn. “If a planner is choosing between three venues, and all things are equal between them environmentally, and if the meeting is price-sensitive, then price would win out in the final selection. On the flip side, you also could pay a little more for a venue because the tie-breaker was it had a great recycling program.”
Looking ahead
The next step for the EPA, says Schermerhorn, is establishing actual environmental standards and criteria to measure venues against. To do it, she notes, the EPA will need to solicit input from the meetings industry at large, as well as from hotels and conference centers, which are the primary stakeholders, and from various standards-development organizations.
“It is going to be a huge effort, and we are only just getting started on that now,” Schermerhorn says. “But once we have standards, the next logical step would be a list of preferred providers.”
Two areas Schermerhorn and her colleagues already are addressing are training and adherence. Shortly after the policy rollout date of May 1, the EPA’s internal training and oversight division began including the requirements in its regular courses.
“Now, before anyone can be issued an EPA purchasing card, they must take our course and be familiar with the green policy,” says Schermerhorn, who adds that monitoring adherence to the program will fall to the agency’s acquisition division. “That’s actually the easy part. We will be looking at purchase records and reviewing them to ensure buyers are following the policy,” she says.
For more information about the EPA’s green meetings initiative, visit epa.gov/oppt/greenmeetings.