“Tackling climate change is one of America’s greatest economic opportunities of the 21st Century (and it’s simply the right thing to do).” - BICEP Climate Declaration
Today is the first anniversary of the Business for Innovative Climate & Energy Policy (BICEP)’s Climate Declaration – a call to action from leading American businesses, urging the public, policy makers and business leaders to seize the economic opportunity in tackling climate change.
At Symantec, we are convinced that a strong, international coalition of governments, businesses, and civil society organizations is required to effectively address climate challenges. We are therefore proud to be signatories of the Climate Declaration, joining approximately 500 companies nationwide to demonstrate our commitment to combatting climate change and advocating for all in the corporate community to do the same. In honor of the Climate Declaration’s first anniversary, we present a two-part series focusing on one of our primary efforts to reduce our climate change impacts – green building – as well as a deeper look at what the Climate Declaration means to us at Symantec.
What Does LEED Platinum Certified Look Like? Take a Peek Inside…
As mentioned above, mitigating our impacts on climate change is central to our environmental strategy, and a key part of this is green building where we have set a goal to obtain LEED and Energy Star certifications for 100 percent of our owned or long-leased facilities.
This past year was another success for green building at Symantec and we continued to move closer to our green building goal. We’ve reached 22 LEED certified buildings which has brought our certified facilities to 82% of our eligible real estate square footage. And recently, we wrote about how we are leveraging our current efforts to take green building at Symantec to the next level.
A highlight this year was the development of two LEED Platinum certified facilities in Pune, India bringing the number of our LEED Platinum facilities to a total of three! The Platinum certification, which recognizes the highest level of performance, is not easy to come by, however, our two offices performed strong across the board.
Due to the hard work and expertise of the project development team lead by Karminder Singh (Senior Manager, Global Space Planning and Projects, Workplace Solutions), the offices scored 88 and 89 out of 100 and received “notable achievements”in key areas such as alternative transportation, water efficiency, aligning with regional green building priorities and reducing building energy consumption. To achieve this level of performance and optimize our efficiencies, we leveraged subject matter experts and best practices in green building throughout the design and building process. For example, at one site we reduced potable water usage by 53.74% from the calculated baseline design, and 95.81% of construction waste was diverted from landfill.
LEEDing Design
Have you ever wondered what LEED Platinum looks like? While past posts have focused on the technical aspects of LEED, today we are excited to share some visuals – through a peek into our new LEED Platinum certified campus in Pune.
Enjoy the tour!
