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Blogs Home > Greg Zimmerman's Profile

Greg Zimmerman Executive Editor Email the editor
Greg Zimmerman's Recent Blogs:
Time Magazines's Best Inventions Point To Ingenuity on the Facility Front Time’s Best Inventions of 2008 – its annual list of all that’s new and cool – includes several facility-related entries. Two actual buildings made the list as inventions ... continue reading>> Date posted: 12/10/2008 Google's Latest Attempt to Make Data Centers More Efficient Data centers are expensive. Not only are they energy hogs, but they’re a serious drain on real estate budgets as well. For that reason, many companies have begun moving data ... continue reading>> Date posted: 9/17/2008 The Ongoing Debate: Privacy vs. Security Recently, at a manufacturer’s media event, I learned about an emerging technology called CFAIRS (pronounced “sea-fairs,” it stands for combined face and iris recognition) that can scan irises of people ... continue reading>> Date posted: 7/16/2008 A Slight Miscalculation on Energy Prices While the stories themselves may not exactly be what you’d call “good news,” the timing of the stories may wind up as a nice touch of serendipity. That’s because they ... continue reading>> Date posted: 7/9/2008 Green E-Mail Resources You may not have thought of it as such, but email is inherently a green technology – it saves a lot of paper (well, assuming you don't print your e-mails, ... continue reading>> Date posted: 6/25/2008 Carbon Dioxide Emissions: Too Much Hot Air First, the facts: A report released this week by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) stated that carbon dioxide emissions released from fossil fuels increased 1.6 percent from 5,888 ... continue reading>> Date posted: 5/21/2008 Green Collar Jobs on the Rise Does your organization have a Director of Sustainability or a Vice President of Environmental Practice, or maybe just a Green Guru? If not, your organization may be in the minority. ... continue reading>> Date posted: 5/6/2008 Energy Efficiency: More Talk than Action A survey of more than 1,150 executives and facility managers released this week reveals some fairly interesting details about how the industry is dealing (or plans to deal) with the ... continue reading>> Date posted: 4/16/2008 Six Sigma: Not Just For Corporate Mathletes If your boss said the words “Six Sigma” in the course of a conversation, would you run screaming in the other direction? Does Six Sigma conjure up images from ... continue reading>> Date posted: 3/19/2008 It's All Greenwash To Me There’s greenwashing, and then there’s GREENWASHING, and sadly, it’s often hard to tell the difference. Sometimes greenwashing is a purposeful and blatant distortion of the truth. Often, it takes the ... continue reading>> Date posted: 2/13/2008 Are You a Numbers Freak? If you’re a stats/metrics/numbers person, and you haven’t yet found your way to the Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) Web site, created by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), ... continue reading>> Date posted: 12/11/2007 Green Paying for Green Green success stories are coming in fast and furious these days, but here’s one that definitely stands out from the crowd. The Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas, a ... continue reading>> Date posted: 11/5/2007 How Do You Deal With Disruption? We’re under construction – literally! Part of our headquarters building here at Trade Press Publishing is finally getting a bit of a makeover. That’s the good news. The bad news ... continue reading>> Date posted: 10/9/2007 Is Deregulation a Failed Experiment? There’s a fascinating article in the NY Times today that reports that electricity prices in deregulated markets – where competition is supposed to benefit the consumer and keep prices ... continue reading>> Date posted: 9/4/2007 Have You Heard of Green Globes? How familiar are you with LEED? At the very least, you probably understand that it’s a rating system that is supposed to tell you how environmentally responsible your building really ... continue reading>> Date posted: 8/22/2007 Carbon Offsets: Scam or Salvation? Al Gore uses them to justify his Tennessee mansion’s enormous annual energy use. Planners for both the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards used them to declare the events carbon ... continue reading>> Date posted: 7/23/2007 The Sustainable Swiss I recently had the pleasure of spending a week in Switzerland with about 30 other journalists from all over the world. We spent the week touring Swiss renewable energy companies ... continue reading>> Date posted: 7/16/2007 LEED�s Latest Update Kills Several Birds With One Stone If you checked FacilitiesNet within the past few days, you may have noticed the news that USGBC members voted overwhelmingly to make a pretty significant change to LEED. ... continue reading>> Date posted: 6/27/2007 Covering Green in the Mainstream Media I don’t know about you, but whenever I find an article about our industry in the mainstream media, the emotions are a bit mixed. This ... continue reading>> Date posted: 6/18/2007 Forced To Go Green Last week, the Illinois state Senate voted 52-5 to mandate green cleaning in the state’s schools. While seemingly innocuous on its own, this law is emblematic of ... continue reading>> Date posted: 5/23/2007 How The Battle For Green Is Won A few weeks ago, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a lengthy, and rather convincing piece, about why America needs to go green. His central ... continue reading>> Date posted: 5/9/2007 Chicago: A-Spire-ing To Greatness Last week was a pretty phenomenal week for the city of Chicago. For one, the U.S. Olympic Committee chose Chicago as the U.S.’s candidate to host the 2016 Summer Olympic ... continue reading>> Date posted: 4/25/2007 Methods to Combat Climate Change: It�s Only Crazy Until It Works They say there’s a fine line between genius and insanity. And when desperate times require desperate measures, that line can become much blurrier. Thankfully, in the case of climate change, ... continue reading>> Date posted: 4/4/2007 Supreme Court Says Bad Gas Isn't Just a Personal Problem Anymore A few interesting notes about this week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Mass. vs. EPA case: It is another strong indicator of how politicized the debate over ... continue reading>> Date posted: 4/3/2007 Has Wal-Mart Pushed People Over the Edge? The recent International Roofing Expo in Las Vegas didn’t provide much in the way of new technology or brand new products – of course, that show rarely does; the roofing ... continue reading>> Date posted: 3/21/2007 It's Hard To Beat a BIM A few weeks ago, I flew cross-country to attend a major software company’s press day. Events like these are all pretty similar: near-breathless and usually over-caffeinated product managers run through ... continue reading>> Date posted: 2/28/2007 Super Bowl, Super Emissions With apologies to Chicago Bears fans, Super Bowl XLI was one of the most entertaining Super Bowls in recent memory. (As a huge Colts fan, I may be a bit ... continue reading>> Date posted: 2/13/2007 Evaluating Cool Roofs February may seem like an odd time to bring up the subject of cool roofs and their AC-savings, but the reality is that in many northern cities (like here in ... continue reading>> Date posted: 2/1/2007 Debating the Use of Vinyl in Green Buildings Is Vinyl Green? It’s kind of fun to ask that question to persons of various industry affiliation. You never get the same answers (or justification /rationalization) twice. It’s a ... continue reading>> Date posted: 1/22/2007 Green Building: The Chicken or the Egg? Green building advocates have long argued that the “magic key” to unlocking the chains of skepticism is proving that green buildings are better at attracting tenants at higher lease rates ... continue reading>> Date posted: 1/16/2007 "Inventions of the Year" Spotlight an Opportunity for Facility Executives A veritable smorgasbord of gadgety gadgets, Time Magazine's 2006 list of Best Inventions even includes a few items that may pique the interest of the technology-tuned facility executives. For ... continue reading>> Date posted: 1/3/2007 How �bout Them Cowboys� New Stadium? There are few single-building construction projects that tip the scales at more than a billion dollars. A few examples include ultramodern skyscrapers, like The Freedom Tower ($2 billion), power plants, ... continue reading>> Date posted: 12/27/2006 Global War�ming One side paints gloomy portraits such as frequent Katrina-like hurricanes, a thousand-fold increase in incidence of malaria, and extinction of hundreds of species of animals (including our own, potentially). The ... continue reading>> Date posted: 12/13/2006 Wal-Mart�s Sustainable Experiment If you look up “oxymoron” in the dictionary, you might find the following as an example: Environmentally friendly Wal-Mart. But, incredibly, that description is true – at least in respect ... continue reading>> Date posted: 12/6/2006 Greenbuild 2006 � Focusing on Emissions Another successful Greenbuild (with more than 13,000 attendees!) concluded recently in Denver, and arguably the most significant piece of news to emerge from the conference was USGBC’s announcement that, pending ... continue reading>> Date posted: 11/27/2006 Is Productivity a Stupid Argument? The cover story for the December issue of Building Operating Management is an article about how corporate culture influences facility interior design and vice versa, and how both may influence ... continue reading>> Date posted: 11/17/2006 Mazel Tov, indeed! Salvaged brick, low-flow toilets, a reflective roof, and energy efficient boilers are just a few of the green technologies Evanston, Ill.’s Jewish Reconstructionist Congregration is using on its new $6.5 ... continue reading>> Date posted: 11/8/2006 Putzing Around Ever needed to send a small car (or anything that weighs about 3,000 pounds) to the top of a half-built skyscraper in under a minute? If so, you’re in luck ... continue reading>> Date posted: 10/26/2006 Reading Up on Global Warming With news that “the Governator” Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law California’s AB 32 — the California Global Warming Solutions Act — the first piece of U.S. legislation aimed at reducing ... continue reading>> Date posted: 10/19/2006 Cracking Down on Greenhouse Gases With recent news that California Assembly Bill 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act, passed the State Senate, California is once again setting an environmental precedent many ... continue reading>> Date posted: 10/17/2006

Greg Zimmerman's Recent Blogs: