Utility Tracking and Benchmarking Blog | WegoBlog

Whether you want to be a more informed citizen or just want to kill some time before 5 on a Friday afternoon, WegoWise has got you covered. We tend to spend a lot of time indoors this time of year, and having a clean home goes a long way toward making it a nice place to curl up during the "indoor months".  Make sure that you're not bringing nasty chemicals into your life with some of these green-cleaning resources.  So peruse our best links, give us some feedback and be sure to share some of the info you just gleaned with other interested parties at the parties you are hopefully attending this weekend. Brought to you by Dan, Nate, Lily, Catherine, Casey, Joanna, Sam and Adam.

Corporate environmentalism has been a focus of organizations since the 1980s.  Following the first wave of environmentalism that began in the 1970s, corporations, particularly the executive branch, began to realize the business value of sustainability.  Since the 1980s, a third wave of corporate environmentalism has emerged.  Businesses now recognize that their value increases not just by greening their products and operations, but by engaging employees in this corprate environmentalism as well.  According to a National Geographic survey in 2008, more than 80% of U.S. workers said that they believed it was important to work for a company that makes sustainability a top priority. 

Whether you want to be a more informed citizen or just want to kill some time before 5 on a Friday afternoon, WegoWise has got you covered. It's been 14 days since Black Friday, so chances are your neighbors have had their lights up for...about 14 days.  Show them up this year with an energy-efficient light display.  Not only will you dazzle them with your impeccable taste, but you'll have some extra gift money lying around at the end of the month!  So peruse our best links, give us some feedback and be sure to share some of the info you just gleaned with other interested parties at the parties you are hopefully attending this weekend. Brought to you by Dan, Nate, Lily, Catherine, Casey, and Joanna.

The EPA’s building benchmarking tool, Portfolio Manager, will make a fully featured expansion into Canada this spring. 

Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) committed to expanding the EPA’s Portfolio Manager software to Canada this June. As it stands now, any building in the world can use the tool, but it will ultimately be benchmarked against buildings in the USA. With this development, Canadian buildings will now be compared against actual Canadian building stock and the analysis will incorporate Canadian source energy and greenhouse gas figures.

Whether you want to be a more informed citizen or just want to kill some time before 5 on a Friday afternoon, WegoWise has got you covered. Many of you may have spent the week since Thanksgiving acquiring presents for the holidays.  We've noticed a steady stream of deliveries in the office this week as our Black Friday bargains have been arriving.  Here are some environmentally friendly ways to wrap those for your friends and family.  So peruse our best links, give us some feedback and be sure to share some of the info you just gleaned with other interested parties at the parties you are hopefully attending this weekend. Brought to you by Dan, Nate, Lily, Catherine, Casey, and Joanna.

2013 has been declared the International Year of Quinoa by the United Nations. Good news for some of us quinoa lovers here in the WegoWise office. Yet, this decision by the UN is surprising for some due to last year’s contentious New York Times article exposing the negative social impacts from increased global quinoa consumption on the Andean indigenous people who grow the crop. Due to quinoa’s soaring popularity, fewer indigenous people in top producing countries, such as Bolivia and Peru, can afford to eat the native grain, consequently switching their diet to cheaper processed foods. However, public discussion about the issue has brought to light the complexity of the situation and put forth some ideas on how to address the issue.

There are innumerable blogs out there that post articles claiming to debunk common misconceptions about sustainability (we should know, you’re reading one right now!).  A blog post is a great way to introduce a topic and get some discussion going, but is almost never going to serve as a definitive answer to a complex question. 

Upon hearing the terms "zero energy" or "net zero", one usually assumes that the amount of energy used by a house/building is equal to or less than the amount of energy produced by that house/building.