Pittsburgh is leading the way once again in raising healthy building standards through the 2030 District.
The initiative of the Green Building Alliance supports building owners and managers in their goal to achieve 50% reductions in energy use, water consumption and transportation emissions of buildings, while improving indoor air quality, by the year 2030.
In 2017, all buildings combined in the Pittsburgh 2030 District “avoided 1.1 billion kBtu of energy and nearly doubled their water use reduction, leading to combined $26.7 million dollars in savings,” the group announced yesterday at a reception in Nova Place.
In its sixth year, the Pittsburgh 2030 District has 506 buildings on board and is now welcoming all property owners and managers in Western PA to join the challenge. Six partners have already committed to the new District Affiliate program, including Hazelwood Green, Chatham University, Community College of Allegheny College, Hill House Association, Huth Technologies and Oxford Development.
The Pittsburgh 2030 District leads all 19 international Districts in committed square feet with 506 buildings.
“Pittsburgh continues to be at the forefront of everything we’re doing,” says Anna Siefken of Carnegie Mellon University, who serves on the national board of 2030 Districts and formerly led the local initiative. “Everybody’s looking at Pittsburgh with the model we created here and we continue to lead the way.”
The District just launched the city’s first indoor air quality survey with the University of Pittsburgh’s Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation. The goal is to create a measurable indoor air quality metric in 2018 and beyond.
The 2030 District continues to challenge businesses to do better and supports them with best practices. said County Executive Rich Fitzgerald who spoke at the reception,
In addition, he noted that there are 70,000 clean energy jobs in the state of PA and that Allegheny County is the leader with 8,100. “It’s a growing part of our economy that we want to continue to grow not just because of the jobs but of all the savings and profitability that these companies who have employed this can benefit from.”
Businesses from more than 25 sectors are involved in the District to advocate for healthy places, said Angelica Ciranni, senior director of the 2030 District. “By combining measurable goals with extensive resources and financial opportunities, the District Affiliate program leverages six years of progress, and provides an avenue for everyone to improve their impact.”
