EMT #70 with Brandie Townsend - Sustainability Starts with Simple Solutions

Yeah.

I mean, and I guess we all have to level up.

You know, you, you see, like, I guess when I...

Gosh, I got into green building design when I was-

Mm-hmm

...

in college at SCAD.

Um, shout out to SCAD.

They are in a historic district, so they wanted to preserve their buildings because the most sustainable building is one that's already built.

And then you really dive into, what does sustainability look like, and it's like this massive entire green building industry.

Greenbuild's next week, um, i- at the Javits Center, and that's really where I was like, "Oh, you know, there's really cool stuff in this dumpster, and this is really cool building materials that can be reused and diverted." And, you know, y- the United States Green Building Council really started in 1999, two, early 2000, of saying-

Mm-hmm

... "Okay, we have to, like, level up.

We have to raise the standard of building- And then really build to not the minimum, but build to a better standard.

And what does that mean for energy, waste, water, um, the environment, the planet? How does it affect all of us?

Yeah.

Because you've got the planet Earth, and then you've got, you know, this built environment that is, has been really just siloed on top of the Earth, and then it's like, well, wait a minute.

Everything is connected together [laughs].

So, you know, that's really where this idea of the triple bottom line came into play for me, because I was in architecture and people were saying, "Okay, let's build green." Oh, okay.

Well, how much more is that gonna cost me? In the early 2000s, it was 10- typically 10% more of building cost to go green, to source better materials, to do all of these kinds of things.

Now in 2026, it's a good standard.

It's a good baseline.

It's really out there if you ask the questions and say, "Okay, where am I...

You know, where's my stuff coming from?" And that's kind of when, uh, most recently, uh, I was, I was at my old position, and, um, Apple has their, their standard, sustainability standard.

So they have it for phones, but they also have it for their brick-and-mortar stores, and they wanted to deconstruct all of their renovations.