Does your organization need to better coordinate sustainability efforts? Would you prefer to fund the highest impact and priority sustainability efforts first? Need better collaboration and tracking of sustainability success in your organization?

A sustainability plan is a guiding document based on a reporting framework of sustainability indicators that incorporates triple bottom line and life-cycle thinking. It establishes your organization’s sustainability goals, provides a plan for how to work towards those goals and sets the foundation for a system of reporting sustainability performance.

Good Company can help you establish sustainability indicators and a baseline of your organization’s current sustainability practices is the first step and the foundation of a good sustainability plan. This allows your organization to identify improvements you would like to work towards and what you need to do to achieve higher performance. Action areas for your organization may involve energy and fuel use, water consumption, modes of transportation, materials use and management, purchasing and specification practices, waste management, habitat conservation and many more that are specific to your practices.

Some keys to successful implementation of a sustainability plan are enlisting executive support for the plan; open reporting and conversations with stakeholders about the strategies, goals and accomplishments; assigning accountability to relevant staff; and establishing a committee or board to oversee the plan and to propose improvements and new initiatives as your organization becomes more sustainable in its operations over time.

Highlighted Projects:

Good Company supported the Oregon Department of Transportation with the development of the first comprehensive and strategic sustainability plan and program for a transportation agency including integration of existing initiatives and efforts, establishment of an internal work plan, capacity building for executives and staff and formation of a Sustainability Council for planning and oversight. View Volume 1 of the Sustainability Plan, a multi-year document that provides the overall vision and rationale for ODOT’s sustainability efforts and provides background for the other volumes. View Volume 2 of the Sustainability Plan which focuses on ODOT internal goals, operations and strategies for achieving sustainability. Volume 3, focuses on ODOT’s management of the statewide transportation system for sustainability and is not yet in the public domain.

Good Company, in partnership with Felsburg, Holt & Ullevig and CH2M HILL, provided a series of 6 workshops for the Colorado Department of Transportation and 20 other partner agencies to facilitate the evolution of their sustainability principles into a workable cross-agency sustainability framework and performance metrics for agency-wide management and capital projects that can provide a point of shared thinking between the 20 agencies. Frameworks and rating systems evaluated for incorporation in this work include the Global Reporting Initiative, Reliable Prosperity, The Natural Step, CERES, LEED, Environmental Performance Index, STARS, Greenroads, GreenLITES, I-LAST, Sustainable Sites, STEED, CEEQUAL and Greenpave. Our team developed multiple working templates and recommendations to support the implementation of a sustainability program and shared platform to support the needs and missions of numerous state and federal agencies.