AAAOM’s Go Green Campaign

By Stephanie Parent, Sustainability Consultant

AAAOM is going “green!” The Sacramento, California, headquarters launched their “go green” campaign early in 2009. For the headquarters’ employees this means:

• conserving resources
• increasing resource efficiency
• improving human health and social well-being
• saving money

These are the tenants of sustainability – having a positive impact on the environment, humans, and the economy. This will benefit the headquarters and its employees as well as the local community, the larger world, and future generations. It is also in line with part of AAAOM’s mission to enhance public health and well-being and the value of compassion to care for each other, the community, and the planet.

Periodically, I will publish articles on various topics such as electricity, natural gas, and waste to identify the headquarters’ resource use over the last year or more. This will help the headquarters’ employees understand their usage, their accomplishments toward resource conservation and efficiency, and identify areas where they may make improvements to save resources and money and improve health and the environment. As you read these articles, you may pick up tips to help you make positive changes in your local practice.

Here are some highlights of the AAAOM headquarters’ employees’ successes to date:

• The office is located in a very walkable neighborhood close to public transit
• Three of the six employees use alternative transportation to commute to work, thus improving their health by using active transportation, improving air quality and reducing traffic congestion
• Bekah, AAAOM’s executive director, and her husband, Keith, put in hundreds of hours of work to renovate the office building inside and out, thus preserving a historical landmark and enhancing the local mid-town community which was not doing very well about 10 years ago
• One office uses compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), thus conserving energy and saving money
• The employees recycle paper, cardboard, glass, plastic, and aluminum
• The employees have switched to a photocopier that stores electronic archives of documents thus conserving paper
• The employees have committed to paying $6 more per month for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District’s (SMUD) renewable energy option
• For the past three years, employees have implemented a policy that Expo conference binders are distributed in CD version with hard-bound binders produced for pre-orders only + a 10% margin for onsite use. This has reduced hard-copy production by at least 75%. With binders that sometimes exceed 400 pages, this saves countless trees

Join me in congratulating the employees at AAAOM’s headquarters on their accomplishments and commitments thus far by taking steps to conserve resources, increase resource efficiency, improve health and well-being, save money and help the environment. There are many expansions planned for AAAOM’s go-green campaign that include not only in-house conservation measures, but also in the near term guidelines will be provided to enhance go-green campaigns for practitioner offices, schools, and the AOM business community.

Stephanie Parent has a master’s degree in environmental science and policy from Clark University and is serving as AAAOM’s Sustainability Consultant in their quest to go green.