Share this on

Federal Award Recognizes Eco-Savvy Manufacturing

Evergreen Awards Honor GSA’s top partners.

Meaghan O'Neill -- Interior Design, 1/27/2006 12:00:00 AM

Sometimes greening the planet comes down to the bottom line. This is a full-time job for one governmental agency. The U.S. General Services Administration, a centralized federal procurement and property management agency created by Congress, is charged with improving government efficiency and ensuring that executive agencies incorporate waste prevention and recycling into their daily operations. GSA must also work to expand the markets for recovered materials by implementing increased usage of recycled products.

That’s a large undertaking, considering GSA provides more than one million federal workers in 8,000 buildings with office space, equipment, telecommunications, information technology, supplies, and services. This is good news for manufacturers in the design-build industry with a bent toward environmentalism—after all, that eco-smart equipment has to come from somewhere.

To honor and support those manufacturers, GSA’s National Furniture Center established the Evergreen Award, which supports an agency executive order titled "Greening the Government through Waste Prevention, Recycling and Federal Acquisition.” The award recognizes the efforts of GSA's corporate partners in recycling, identifies environmentally preferable products and services, denotes waste reduction, and honors firms as an example for other to follow.

The 2005 Evergreen Award winners are floor covering manufacturer Shaw Industries for the Furnishings category, office furniture manufacturer Watson Furniture Group for Furniture, and electronics manufacturer Kyocera Mita America in the Technologies & Electronics category. Awards were presented last month at a GSA National Furniture Center meeting.

Firms are evaluated in five categories, including waste prevention, recycling, affirmative procurement of recycled and reused materials, environmental preferability of products, and the condition of the facility. To be considered, a firm may submit information detailing the positive changes it has made in relation to these categories. The deadline for the 2006 awards is August 24. Applications and further instructions are available at the GSA website.