Real Estate and Construction
Green living
How Jon Ratner is making the real estate industry more earth-friendly
By Megan Tackett
Smart Business Akron/Canton | September 2008
Jon Ratner is leading the charge for
Forest City Enterprises to focus on
its ecological impact.
It all started in Denver in 2004. Forest
City Enterprises took on a 4,700-acre
mixed-use renovations project, transforming the former Denver International
Airport into the Northfield Stapleton development. Ratner used the Stapleton project
as a chance to incorporate some of his
environmental interests, not knowing the
initiative would shake up the entire company culture and eventually make sustainability a corporate core value.
Two years later, Forest City created a
department of sustainability, and Ratner
found himself the first vice president of
sustainability initiatives at the 88-year-old
family business. Now, the company had a
“triple bottom line” to meet — financial,
social and environmental.
The company works to improve the ecological footprint of its managed portfolio.
Forest City claims more than 35 million square feet of commercial space and 40,000
residential units, and now developments
receive a retail tenant handbook that
offers sustainability guidelines
and requirements. Last year, it
completed 27 retro-commissioning projects, which represented
more than $500,000 in savings.
Additionally, Ratner wanted to
promote employee ownership of
sustainability, so he launched
WorkGreen, a program that incorporates internal sustainability as
an underlying theme to Forest City’s corporate culture. In order to make an otherwise vague concept — sustainability —
immediately relevant to employees,
WorkGreen outlines seven specific areas
of impact: energy, water conservation,
waste and recycling, procurement, transportation, health and wellness, and community involvement.
By taking measures such as installing
low-flow bathroom fixtures, putting in energy-saving bulbs and instituting a
power management program for office
computers, the $10.5 billion commercial
and residential real estate giant is
saving big — both for the planet
and the company’s bottom line.
The benefits are almost immediate. Within the first year of
implementing the power management program for Forest City’s
2,400 computers, the company
projected both financial savings
of $140,000 and environmental
savings of 3,000 tons of carbon dioxide
emissions. Every office is contributing to
the cause. For example, in Boston, a shuttle service now reduces vehicle trips by
600 per week, and in Denver, the office’s
used printer cartridges are donated to a
local school, which recycles them for a
fund-raiser.
HOW TO REACH: Forest City Enterprises, (216) 621-6060 or
www.forestcity.net
