At Compass we believe that business has the potential to have a deeper purpose.
Every day we learn something new about our business, ourselves, each other, our vendors, our clients and our decisions. We have built our business on the foundation of quality and exceptional service and our goal is to expand and grow with a new attitude toward sustainability. Our success in the future will be measured by the phenomenal experience we provide our guests, not how big we are.
We started our journey by asking ourselves the following questions:
- How do we inspire our employees, clients, partners and vendors to embrace a model of sustainable living?
What can we do as a company to get involved in community efforts to further or goal of being a good corporate citizen?
How do we best measure our goals?
What does the world need most that we are uniquely able to provide?
We’ve come a long way.
Just a short few years ago we started our company with little thought into how our company decisions would impact our environment, clients, employees and vendors. Our focus was on controlling costs while minimizing risk. We were buying and managing our products and services based on quality and price without taking into consideration how these products were being made or the philosophies of the vendors that we purchased them from. We cleaned our offices, apartments and linens with common household products without considering the dangerous chemicals and long-term health risks associated with these products. We purchased vehicles based on their utility use, not considering their gas mileage and other efficiency factors. We provided employees health insurance based on tenure without providing the tools for living a healthy life. We passed up countless opportunities to educate our clients on the evolution of our sustainable philosophy. We underestimated the role we could play in our community to advance our cause to be a good corporate citizen thinking that this job would be best handled by the big business.
We’ve chose the road less traveled by.
Baby steps. That’s what it sometimes takes to go down a road less traveled or never traveled at all. We started by sharing our ambitions to be a company that could make a difference. We started by taking baby steps in implementing products into our apartment that would send a message. We started with simple green solutions that would lead us down a path toward sustainability. We never realized that these baby steps would take us further down this road then we could possibly imagine. We didn’t realize that simple green solutions would challenge our company and ourselves beyond our imaginations and change the direction of our company. We didn’t realize that baby steps would become the core philosophy of our company and define who we are and where we are going.
What we have accomplished.
So where have far have we come? We are certainly proud of the things we have accomplished over the last few years but also realized that we have just scratched the surface of our sustainability efforts. Most importantly however, we have come to the realization that we made tremendous strides in understanding where we are going. Our simple green solutions campaign is the foundation of our sustainability program. We started with compacted fluorescent light bulbs, biodegradable cleaning products, and recycling bins. We introduced literature about recycling into our welcome binders. We developed a tenant card to educate our residents about sustainability issues and how they can help. We entered into a partnership with Seventh Generation and began using 100% recycled household paper products. We’ve eliminated bleach and other harsh chemicals to clean our linens. We’ve installed programmable thermostats in our apartment where possible and implemented a strict policy of controlling our apartment utilities during down time. We’ve taken our message of awareness to our industry through our leadership efforts in the CHPA and guest speakers such as Josh Dorfman, the Lazy Environmentalist. We purchased hybrid vehicles for our quality control staff and worked diligently on operational logistics to further reduce our fossil fuel consumption.
In 2009, Compass sustainable business practices helped save:
- 140 Trees, 1.2 acres filled with trees
500 Gallons of Water, enough to supply 4 families for a year
1 million BTUs, a years worth of energy for 1 household
14 gallons of Petroleum, the equivalent of taking 1 car off the road
