In 2012, Pittsburgh was one of four cities nationwide to launch the 2030 Challenge. The challenge is a voluntary, private-public initiative with the goal of reducing the environmental impact of buildings, by reducing energy and water use as well as transmission emissions.
Sean Luther, Pittsburgh 2030 District Director for the Green Building Alliance said, ““The interesting thing that we’ve been working on is actually tracking what the building’s have been doing. The past couple of years we’ve been talking about the buildings committed. Now we’re actually able to report out the progress that they’ve made. So we feel like this program has really inspired a lot of property owners and managers to look at their energy consumption, to look at their water consumption and really to put a plan into place to improve those numbers for net benefit for the entire region.”
And the 2030 Challenge may have additional benefits, according to Luther.
“This has a direct impact on the cost of doing business in downtown Pittsburgh. There’s a lot of jobs tied up in this very small area. And if we can’t reduce the operating expenses for folks like PNC and Highmark and US Steel and BNY Mellon and all of these great corporate sponsors, they’re going to move somewhere else. They have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to operate as efficiently as possible. So cutting operating expenses out of these buildings has a direct correlation to the economic competitiveness of the region.”
