Who's doing energy efficiency right? EPA's corporate leaders
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? With that in mind, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has released its latest list of businesses in the Energy Star program that have managed particular advances or milestones in energy efficiency during the past year. The list recognizes the following categories, which are pretty self-explanatory: Sustained Excellence, Partner of the Year (contrary to the title of this award, there are actually more than one), and Excellence.
In my mind, the companies to look at most closely are the ones that have done this over time and that continue to improve. The Sustained Excellence list (46 companies in all) includes these familiar corporate names:
- 3M
- Bosch Home Appliances
- Food Lion Family, Bloom and Bottom Dollar Food
- Ford
- GE Appliances & Lighting
- Hines
- J.C. Penney
- Lowe's
- Merck
- New York-Presbyterian Hospital
- Pella
- PepsiCo
- Raytheon
- Toyota Motor & Manufacturing North America
- Whirlpool
The links will lead you to little vignettes with statistics about how the company has approved its energy efficiency over time (and by how much). If you're not on the list, does it mean that you're not doing anything extraordinary? Not really, it's just that these companies have submitted to some scrutiny of their efforts. The EPA figures that companies in its Energy Star program helped save about $18 billion in energy in 2010, along with diverting greenhouse gas emissions roughly equivalent to taking 33 million vehicles off the road. Since 2000, approximately 3.5 billion products with the Energy Star label have been sold.
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com