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cooling towers typically use 28 percent of their daily water for cooling

The Building Water Efficiency toolkit is the result of data and lessons from pilot projects that ran across the US during the summer and fall of 2012.

For its own operations, AT&T says it identified water savings opportunities of 14 percent to 40 percent per pilot facility and did so in a way that also made business sense.

Net zero energy business models are financially attractive to investors because the large capital investments in solar PV, district heating and cooling, and energy efficiency are repaid over time on utility bills, generating a steady return that benefits from enhanced credit because of the utility-customer relationship.

Interface reconstituted its Dream Team, “a collection of experts and friends who have joined with me to remake Interface into a leader of sustainability,” as Anderson wrote in the company’s 1997 sustainability report.The original team included Sierra Club executive director David Brower; Buckminster Fuller devotee Bill Browning, then with the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI); community and social activist Bernadette Cozart; author and entrepreneur Hawken; Amory Lovins, RMI co-founder and chief scientist; L. Hunter Lovins, RMI’s other co-founder; architect and designer William McDonough; John Picard, a pioneering consultant in green building and sustainability; Jonathan Porritt, co-founder of Forum for the Future; Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael; Karl-Henrik Robèrt, founder of The Natural Step, a sustainability framework; and Walter Stahel a resource efficiency expert. (Additional members would be added over the years, including Biomimicry author Janine Benyus.)

One example is Net-Works. Launched in 2012, it helps turn discarded fishing nets into the raw materials for nylon carpeting in some of the world’s most impoverished communities.

But Ray Anderson’s sustainability vision was always about more than just a “green manufacturing plant.” He wanted Interface to be a shining example, an ideal to which other companies could aspire, a test bed for new ideas that stood to upend how business is done — and, not incidentally, an opportunity to stand above the crowd in the world of commercial flooring.Climate Take Back is the noise the company wanted to make.

6 ways Apple's new mothership will be ultra green

1. Fruit trees

The new plan will transform an existing site almost entirely covered with buildings and asphalt into a landscape featuring almost 7,000 trees – including the apple, apricot, cherry and plum fruit trees that made San Jose's orchards thrive long before silicon was invented.

The app is designed to inspire, empower and motivate a generation of global citizens to take positive action around the world

lighting retrofits [PDF] can save upwards of 30 to 50 percent of lighting energy, as well as 10 to 20 percent of cooling energy. Intelligent controls with sensors at each fixture can lead to even greater saving

The store in Raleigh, N.C., achieved total energy savings [PDF] of 25 percent over a baseline store, and nearly 50 percent savings in lighting energ