Brad Collins
Property Manager
CommonWealth Partners
Brad Collins, RPA, knows California. With 29 years’ worth of knowledge in commercial office, industrial, and residential property in the San Francisco Bay Area, his experience in tenant and operating engineer interactions, recycling/composting programs, environmental sustainability measures, energy reduction programs, and LEED EBOM certification gave him the insider understanding it took to bring 560 Mission from good to great.
How do you improve on an ENERGY STAR score of 92 in one of the most sustainable cities on Earth? Attack waste from every angle.
Determined that a LEED Platinum designation wouldn’t mean resting on their laurels, Brad Collins and the team at 560 Mission were determined to leave no stone unturned in their search for efficiency improvements. Taking an early approach to sustainability, this 14-year-old building now boasts offsetting 100% of its energy use through the purchase of energy credits—the equivalent of taking over 2,000 cars off the road.
They’ve also found a variety of ways to cut waste—from simple approaches like bathroom signage to make sure receptacles only get used for paper towels, to a “Go Green” event to promote recycling, composting, and more. Weekly audits were used to measure success, and a green iPod was even raffled off to the floors that did the best job keeping their waste and recyclables separated.
Finally, as one EBie juror put it, 560 Mission “went beyond energy reduction to help their tenants live lower-carbon lives” by encouraging alternative transportation. In addition to enthusiastic promotion of mass transit, the building dedicates parking spaces for ZipCars to encourage car sharing and offers ample bicycling parking that is regularly monitored to assure there’s enough room for every tenant.
WHAT THEY DID:
- Offset energy use through purchase of energy credits
- Encouraged smart transportation through car-sharing, bicycle parking, and promoting mass transit
- Managed demand by engaging tenants to turn off unused equipment and to use shades to avoid heat gain in summer, and worked with utility providers to curtail power use by reducing lighting levels and turning off restroom heaters periodically
- Engaged tenants to reduce waste across the board, including the addition of trash “saddle baskets” to existing recycle bins to make separation easier—and cut waste in half