Arlington County Government, VA Environmental Services, 20 Oct 2010

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From YouTube: Green Games Kickoff

Description

The Arlington Green Games is a friendly competition for commercial property owners/managers and office tenants to
reduce costs while reducing their emissions. The year-long competition pits buildings against buildings and offices
against offices in the race for business gold. The highly interactive program incorporates trainings, best practices, and
technical assistance along the way. Top performers and most improved scores will be recognized by the County and
local media.
The Arlington Green Games is modeled after the highly-successful Green Office Challenge launched by ICLEI-Local
Governments for Sustainability and the City of Chicago in 2009. In its first year, more than 160 downtown office
tenants and 45 enrolled in the program. Their combined accomplishments resulted in a reduction of more than 70
million kilowatt-hours of electricity and 54,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide -- equal to removing more than 10,000
cars off Chicago streets.
The Arlington Green Games will officially launch in October 2010, in time for National Energy Awareness Month. Preregistration
is now open at www.arlingtongreengames.com.

A

On October 19th Arlington County's fresh air program, along with County Board Chairman Jeff Fassett, kicked off the new Green games, a friendly competition for commercial property owners and managers to reduce costs while reducing their emissions. The year-long highly interactive program incorporates trainings best practices and technical assistance along the way so that each participant can reach for business goal. The.

B

Green games is a friendly competition for commercial property owners and managers, as well as their office, tenants to work towards reducing their emissions within their building operations and office operations and reduce their energy costs ultimately leading to financial savings on their bottom line. We have a couple different areas set up right behind me.

B

Are a couple of soccer field set up as well as some putting greens ping-pong tug-of-war, some just sort of fun games to get a fun aspects of this competition again trying to keep it fun and enjoyable, and all the posters that are stationed around the space today have some sort of gaming aspect to them so, for example, with energy savings we have marketed this as the energy saving sprint and with innovation is another category on our scorecard, and so with that it's assist innovation getting at the feel of the game of soccer and assisting innovation.

B

So that story sort of played off some of those marketing posters. With some of the games that are here today, it's.

C

The green games here in Arlington, the idea is to have fun, as you can see by looking around. The idea is to have some fun but to actually provide some information, provide some support to give a little motivation or impetus for the property owners in the building owners and the managers and the tenants to look into how they can reduce their costs.

C

Your costs and, at the same time provide a benefit to the broader environment and in our inventory, of energy use and greenhouse gases shows that the primary source forty-four percent of greenhouse gases come from our buildings are commercial buildings. Our goal is to reduce that significantly over 40 years. This is the first step about three years ago, Arlington initiated the an effort of our own to look at the county government footprint. The fresh air initiative you've heard about it. You've been involved with it at some level, maybe before today Arlington's initiative to reduce emissions.

C

We are working on our own County footprint and how to reduce energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions from county buildings. So we've got three years working at this moving towards our goal and trying to lead by example. Several.

A

Partner organizations also participated in the event, handing out free information and resources. We.

D

Put together an initiative that really showed tremendous results in just one year and that prompted us to really want to look toward inviting other local governments to participate in this initiative right off the bat Chicago found a hundred companies and forty property managers to join the initiative and in the in the first year, some of the results that they garnered was was eight percent reduction in energy.

D

In that amount of 272 million kilowatt hour reduction for those companies, it reduced that they generated a savings of 5.1 million dollars. Again all in the first year, five percent of the award uses was reduced and they reduce the tonnage going to landfills by 1,200 1,200 tons over the course of that year.

D

All of that rolled up constitutes to about a fifty-four thousand metric tonne reduction in carbon dioxide equivalents and that's equivalent to removing 10,000 cars off of the roadways for the period of a year, so very substantial reductions and savings both in dollars, as well as in environmental improvements again over the course of one year. In.

A

Addition, the fresh air team members were on hand to help, recruits and competitors get started with energy sustainability strategy and inning. Some.

B

Of the initial conversations we've had with property managers and businesses so far, based on existing relationships, we've had at the business community have been very positive and folks were eager to participate in pre-register actually for the competition. So we had about a dozen folks that were registered before today's event, but today was really the more formal announcement to the broader community that the games are here. Let.

C

The games begin all.

B

Right. Thank you.