Last week, the EPA released its list of the top 50 organizations using the most renewable electricity. The organizations are part of the Green Power Partnership, a voluntary program in which participants meet significant portions of their energy needs from renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, and low-impact hydro.
The list presents further evidence that more and more organizations are seeking sustainable solutions to meet their production needs…and not just Fortune 500 companies.
While heavyweights like Intel, Kohl’s, Whole Foods, and Starbucks occupied the top spots on the 2010 list, a surprising number of municipalities and school districts rounded out the top 50 (out of 1300 participating organizations), including the Chicago Public Schools, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pennsylvania, and the cities of Chicago, Huston, and Dallas.
According the EPA’s Green Power Partnership’s website, organizations can meet EPA green purchase requirements “using any combination of three different product options (1) Renewable Energy Certificates, (2) On-site generation, and (3) Utility green power products.”
With top green power purchasers using “more than 12 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of green power annually,” the reduction in emissions is “equivalent to avoiding the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the electricity use of more than 1 million average American homes.”
At MSDSonline, we’ve observed this trend towards all things sustainable by a growing number of our customers, many of whom cite sustainability as one of the main reasons for choosing an online MSDS management solution. In fact, it was the significant number of MSDSonline customers, i.e., Kohl’s, Chicago Public Schools, Pearson, Montgomery County Clean Energy Buyers among others, making the Green Power top 50 that brought the list to our attention.
Energy use is one of the largest expenditures for many companies, and as the EPA points out, investing in green energy is one of the easiest ways to improve their environmental footprint. Another tactic, being employed by a growing number of industries is to green the supply chain.
On this latter point, MSDSonline’s new chemical management platform, debuting in early 2011, was inspired by and created in response to the large number of MSDSonline customers looking to make chemical inventory management (the identifying and tracking of hazardous chemicals/ingredients across their facilities) an integral part of their sustainability initiatives.
The MSDSonline Team
