Real Estate Firm Turns to Air Cycle for Recycling Solution

It is easy to comply with environmental regulations when fluorescent bulb recycling efforts are automatically updated and quantified, but this wasn’t always the case for CB Richard Ellis (CBRE), a leader in commercial real estate services.

In the past the California-based company, which manages more than 1.7 billion square feet of buildings around the world, was challenged by complex tangle of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and local jurisdictional rules for ballast, battery and lamp recycling. The firm relied on a network of waste management suppliers that made it difficult to standardize and replicate services in various locales.

Mark Aaron Polhemus, director of engineering for CBRE’s Washington, D.C., market, remembers those not-so-long-ago days. “It was a lot more difficult. You were never sure you were up to speed with all EPA standards. And we were looking through the yellow pages to find services,” he says.

Polhemus oversees engineering staff and operations for 400 locations, a total of 42 million square feet of assets. Thanks to an innovative, custom-built, user-friendly Web site, Polhemus can quickly procure services for new and existing assets, access a summary of universal waste recycling results and research recycling advances and new programs that might interest clients. Also, new staff engineers are immediately enrolled into the record-keeping system when they join the firm.

The Web site has also morphed into a marketing and presentation tool that CBRE uses when pitching to prospective clients as proof of CBRE’s sustainability commitment.    Polhemus joined CBRE when the firm acquired his previous employer, the Trammell Crow Co. His initial assignment was daunting: find better methods for recycling fluorescent bulbs and other waste for all CBRE assets. Fortunately, Polhemus had already championed a successful recycling program for Trammell Crow, with the help of Rod Kincaid, vice president of Virginia-based Esquire Environmental Services, a consulting firm.

Kincaid introduced Polhemus and Trammell Crow to Air Cycle Corp.. Air Cycle is an Illinois-based firm that offers Web based programs, such as the EasyPak Pre-Paid Recycling Program, which allows companies to ship spent fluorescent lamps and batteries to recycling facilities in UN approved containers. The company also invented the Bulb Eater for large facilities that prefer crushing their lamps on site prior to having them recycled.  

Polhemus began using Air Cycle’s various programs and found success. But the size of the CBRE portfolio, which includes about 4,500 properties in the U.S., presented a whole new logistical hurdle, which Kincaid would answer in the form of a dedicated Web-based program that allowed corporations to manage their waste management needs.

The old practice of a firm sending prospective clients to the URL of its waste management provider provided no marketing advantage, in Kincaid’s opinion, so he thought the site should be specific to CBRE.

“When you can go to your own dedicated website with your own corporate branding and you can demonstrate your own programs, we think it’s far more powerful,” he says. “America wants to be green and do business with other businesses that are green.”

Kincaid presented his idea to Air Cycle CEO Scott Beierwaltes, whose staff began to brainstorm and develop the idea.

While such an initiative would be an investment, for CBRE it far outweighed the price of possible environmental damage and potentially falling short of EPA laws concerning mercury content in fluorescent lamps.

“We have a huge variety of different tenants and customers. This program allows our real estate managers to have at their fingertips the local laws to make sure tenants properly dispose of hazardous waste and keep mercury out of our nation’s landfills,” Polhemus says. “It costs a little bit. But we assume as environmental sensitivity continues to grow, you would see the cost stabilize as this becomes mainstream. It’s just like any new product.”

The program began with just 50 properties and will eventually serve the 4,500 properties that CBRE manages in the U.S.

More information about the EasyPak Recycling Program, the Bulb Eater and Air Cycle Corp.’s other services is available at www.aircycle.com.