Cushman's Eleni Reed

Cushman & Wakefield began the new year with the announcement of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Environmental Protection Agency in order to promote sustainability in the commercial real estate industry. The real estate services firm, which manages 70 million square feet in New York City alone, will work directly with clients to lessen the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted in buildings. By the firm’s count, commercial buildings account for 17% of all greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere. Eleni Reed, Cushman’s director of sustainability services, recently spoke with GlobeSt.com about the MOU’s importance.

GlobeSt.com: How did your relationship with the EPA get started?

Reed: The whole MOU initiative really looks back at what we’ve been doing as a company in the past, and it really was kind of timing in a sense. Cushman & Wakefield has been a partner in the EPA’s EnergyStar partnership program since 1999. So we’ve worked with the EPA since then and have been involved in bench marking the properties under management for energy performance. We’ve also recently issued some green practice policies that we’re rolling out to the field for properties under management. We’ve been involved with LEED projects in supporting individual clients, and now we’re in a pilot program with USGBC (United States Green Building Council). All of this was building up a lot of momentum. We were looking to explore other partnership programs with the EPA, so the opportunity presented itself to talk to the EPA about how we could synergize that relationship and enter into additional partnership programs with them, and that’s how the whole process started.