George Denise, general manager of facilities for Cushman & Wakefield at Adobe Systems Incorporated for Northern California

George Denise is a highly accomplished green building manager. He has been a commercial property manager with Cushman & Wakefield for 17 years and a facilities manager for seven.   Currently, his portfolio includes the three Adobe Towers in downtown San Jose, Calif. plus two mid-rise buildings in San Francisco. Together they total 1.3 million square feet. 

In 1999, Cushman & Wakefield and its client, Adobe, formed a partnership that has resulted in enormous cost savings and energy related efficiencies at Adobe Towers, the three-building Adobe headquarters in downtown San Jose. This month, the Association of Energy Engineers (AEE) named Cushman & Wakefield the 2006 recipient of the prestigious Environmental Project of the Year award, for its energy-efficient accomplishments at Adobe Systems Incorporated (Adobe) headquarters in San Jose.

During the past six years, Cushman & Wakefield, the world’s largest third-party manager of corporate real estate, has been systematically testing the energy-efficient management of buildings and grounds in a number of its managed office properties. The two firms have undertaken several dozen distinct conservation measures, primarily in the areas of lighting, climate control, indoor and outdoor water conservation, waste management, and support for workers who arrive by means other than automobile.

The Adobe buildings in San Jose are Energy Star labeled and together were one of three sites out of over 600 considered that were recognized by California’s Flex Your Power program for “Best Overall” in energy management. The two buildings in San Francisco are still in the process of establishing their base year for Energy Star.  One of the San Jose buildings, West Tower, just became the first building in the new permanent LEED Green Building program for existing buildings to be certified at the Platinum level. The other four buildings also are applicants for LEED certification.

At Adobe Towers, electricity use per employee has decreased by 35 percent and natural gas use by 41 percent.  Domestic water use is down by 22 percent and water use for landscape irrigation is down by 76 percent. Up to 85 percent of all solid waste is diverted from landfill through a combination of recycling and composting.  Of the entire Adobe workforce, 20 percent use public transit – five times the San Jose average. According to an independent engineering consultant, Adobe has reduced pollution from all sources generated through their total operations by 26 percent.

The effect on cash flow has been equally dramatic: $1.1 million invested in energy conservation and other sustainability projects, instantly offset by $353,000 in utility and government rebates, has yielded a savings of approximately $1 million per year (a 122 percent return on investment).

Adobe is currently seeking the U.S. Green Building Council’s (USGBC’s) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building certification for Adobe Towers at the platinum level, the highest possible. Its application achieved a full 67 points; it takes 64 or higher to earn platinum. As a result, Adobe Tower will be the first platinum level certified USGBC in their new LEED-EB (for existing buildings) program.

ManagingGreen recently sat down with Denise and asked him about his experiences and insights on managing award-winning green facilities and achieving LEED certification for a building.

ManagingGreen: How did your career in green building management come about?

Denise: We didn’t start out wanting to create a green building. We were really trying to manage the property efficiently and provide the highest quality of service at the lowest cost. Along the way, Cushman & Wakefield decided it made sense for all of its properties to benchmark with the EPA Energy Star Program.

ManagingGreen: What are the points a facility manager needs to understand about managing a green building and achieving LEED certification?

Denise: It’s really about managing efficiently in all areas. It’s about doing all the things we are doing correctly and having a third, outside party validate the work.

The key areas are energy, Green Cleaning, water conservation and solid waste management.

You can do a lot in-house for water conservation -- low water heads on faucets and low flush toilets and urinals. You don’t have to go to waterless urinals like we did. 

Fortunately, we are an urban facility with a very small landscape so the cost was nominal to convert our landscape that wasn’t already drought tolerant. Our watering system was a subsurface drip irrigation system that is 90-95 percent efficient, whereas a spray system is about 70 percent efficient.

A good facility should already be recycling 40-50 percent of its solid waste. It is not that difficult to do. In our case, we were up in the 70-80 percent range already (before seeking LEED certification) and we are now at 85 percent of our solid waste being diverted from landfill sites and being either composted or recycled. We are making a modification now that will result in us getting to 90 percent diversion and that is probably as high as a property can get because restroom waste cannot be recycled by law.

ManagingGreen: What was your biggest challenge?

Denise: The biggest challenge was recommissioning the buildings (verifying that the efficiency of a building’s electro-mechanical systems is saving energy and reducing operating expenses). Commissioning a building is like tuning up a car. If you don’t do it, occasionally it will start but run very poorly, and soon it won’t run at all. All the central systems of a building must be tuned up periodically. For us, it was a lot of work.  But once we had it all done, the reports completed, and subsequently tracked for three months, we came to the conclusion that rather than let it all go down hill and then go through this huge amount of work again in three years, it made more sense to maintain these reports and do “continuous commissioning.”

It was a tremendous amount of work, but I am really glad we did it. We learned so much, got our buildings to a more efficient state and our return on investment was extremely good.

ManagingGreen: How did you convince the ownership to invest in your recommended improvements?

Denise: To just walk in with the big programs probably isn’t going to work. You have to start with what I call the “low hanging fruit”, the inexpensive fixes, and you tell them what the annual savings are and what the payback is and what the ROI is. You then send them a note letting them know it is complete and all the cost-savings. You maintain a cumulative list of these so they can see the cumulative numbers. Then, when you present them with the larger projects that have a longer payback time, you show them the numbers for each project, but you also show them averaged in with all the others so that bottom line of annual savings continues to present very well to senior management.

There’s green to be made in green buildings. In our own experience, over a period of about 4.5 years, we spent $1.1 million on all these various projects and improvements. We received rebates back from our local utility company, the state of California and the City of San Jose totaling $353,000.

We are now saving in operating costs about $1 million a year which means we also have increased the value of the building about $10 million and that’s a direct effect of the reduced operating costs.  It has turned out to be an exceptional investment for Adobe.

Also, for a publicly traded company, it demonstrates corporate environmental and social responsibility. There are many organizations that rate publicly traded businesses for their environmental responsibility and there are many investment firms that only invest in companies that demonstrate strong social and environmental responsibility, so it has been of value to Adobe in that way as well.

ManagingGreen: What is your most important insight on managing green facilities?

Denise: The most important thing is that it’s easy.

A good facilities manager shouldn’t be satisfied with just good enough. They should always be looking at how they can improve their system. Those facilities managers that don’t get on board and start managing this way are ultimately going to be left behind. As energy costs continue rising, as properties become more competitive, this is the way we need to manage.

Even if you are not going to certify your building, you should start operating as if you were. It is only a matter of time before you are going to have to certify your building or find yourself managing a building that has been certified.

The job of facilities management is to provide a clean, safe, healthy, productive, and uninterrupted work environment at the lowest cost possible. It turns out that managing a building to achieve all those things also is achieving sustainability.

ManagingGreen: What’s next?

Denise: With all the things we’ve done there is still a lot we haven’t done.

I am sitting here looking at my office wastebasket. It has a tiny little wastebasket clipped to the side. This manufacturer calls it a sidekick and allows me to separate my food waste from all my recycling waste. Anything organic, my orange peel, my sandwich wrapper, can go in the small wastebasket. By implementing this, we are going to increase our recycling percentages by another 5-10 percent.

Overall, from an owner’s standpoint and an environmental standpoint, the changes we’ve made are spectacular. It really is the future of building management.