Why Support Green Star?
Green Star’s mission is to assist, certify, and recognize Alaskan businesses committed to fully integrating resource efficiency and environmental leadership initiatives into their business plans and practices. Our vision is an environmentally sustainable and economically viable business community.
To fulfill our mission, Green Star offers pollution prevention and recycling assistance to numerous sectors within the community, including businesses and organizations of all kinds, schools and universities, native communities, special events, and individuals. In addition, we provide technical assistance materials in several languages to ensure that all everyone benefits.
We are a dependable, valued, Alaska-specific resource for information geared toward educating the community about the comprehensive benefits of green business practices.
We hope to inspire lasting change and heightened future environmental goals within our Green Star Award certified businesses.
Green Star provides tailored site assessments for an average of thirty businesses each year, providing energy efficiency, pollution prevention, air quality, hazardous materials use reduction, and recycling assistance to each business. Ten to fifteen businesses each year earn Green Star Award certification, joining an elite group of fewer than 200 businesses and organizations that have earned this status since Green Star’s inception in 1990. These organizations are highlighted as models within the community.
We are active in the community, sponsoring, hosting, and participating in numerous events, including the annual Plug@20 engine block heater timer giveaway (last year, 400 timers were distributed free of charge to Anchorage residents), Safe Schools activities, Bike to Work Day, Renewable Energy Fair, Alaska Forum on the Environment, Winter Bike Festival, Western Sustainability Conference, and many more.
Here is just a sampling of the financial and environmental benefits realized by our award-certified business members:
- Providence Medical Center (500+ employees) reduced its waste management bills by $65,000 in one year by incorporating recycling and streamlining existing trash handling practices.
- Alaska Neighborhood Health Center (130 employees) saved $9,000 during the first year of a lighting retrofit in one of its facilities.
- Princess Tours (25 employees) realized a 40% reduction in electricity costs, saving $4,500 the first year after a fluorescent lighting retrofit.
- Driven Auto Body (9 employees) reduced energy costs by $20,000/year with an initial investment of just $10,000 – a six-month payback period.
- Arctic Wire Rope & Supply reduced its electricity use by 58% and increased employee production through improved warehouse lighting at an average value of $1820 per month.
- Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium saved $5,168 in energy costs in its administrative building
- The Anchorage School District reduced its waste management costs by $23,000 during the 2009-2010 school year by increasing mixed-paper recycling and carefully monitoring trash pick-ups.
- Pike’s Waterfront Lodge installed solar panels that are now producing 21,000 kW and it grows its own produce hydroponically.
- Lewis & Lewis Computer Store reduced its trash bill by $960/year, reduced paper use by 40%, and decreased its heating bill by 18%.
- Wal-Mart in Fairbanks diverted almost 1.5 million pounds of cardboard to recycling.