State of Sustainability Report 2023

Purposefully coinciding with Earth Day, our release of this report celebrates the progress we’ve made over the last year and highlights where we’re headed to meet our goals over the next 12 months.

Within our Human by Design ethos, this mission extends across our work, operations, and culture; the report covers our strides in each category:

Culture

• We encouraged studio-led sustainability activities, including community trash clean-up days, plant swaps, daylight hours, and composting.
• Our Executive Committee created a PEople Culture Manager role, promoting Perkins Eastman Senior Associate Emily Pierson-Brown to help lead the firm’s DE&I initiatives.
• Dozens of our colleagues participated in sustainability and diversity-oriented organizations to increase the diversity of our pipeline, including AIA Women’s Leadership, the National Organization of Minority Architects; Architecture, Construction, and Engineering Mentorship programs; and outreach to Historically Black Colleges & Universities.

Perkins Eastman staff participate in a variety of culture and knowledge-building
activities throughout the year.

Operations

• We conducted our first-ever firmwide waste audit to track the trash, recycling, and compost in each of our offices, and we tracked employee commuting habits to inform our Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions reporting.
• We engaged with Verdis Group for third-party verified reporting on our GHG emissions.
  You can read the full report here, which grades our emissions across a variety of scopes.
• Our studios’ recycling efforts saved an average of 124 cubic yards of landfill waste.

Our new Guayaquil studio in Ecuador meets LEED Gold standards in a country where LEED is not the norm. A green screen on the wall at the office entrance communicates in real time our sustainability initiatives for the benefit of visitors, clients, and staff.

Work

• We certified and/or registered 342 projects through sustainability rating systems such as LEED, WELL, and others.
• 47.7% of our projects last year completed an energy model to inform and advance their design’s performance.
• Of all projects in active design last year, our portfolio averages a 49.8% predicted Energy Use Intensity (EUI) reduction from 2003 levels.
• We launched a firmwide competition prioritizing decarbonization: an emphasis on carbon reduction and carbon neutrality through passive design, more efficient systems and materials, and adaptive reuse within our designs.

Perkins Eastman been a signatory of the AIA Commitment since 2014. We are committed to comprehensively and transparently representing the data from our portfolio with the public. We still have a steep climb to reach 2030 goals, but we are very proud of the progress we’ve made in under ten years.

Our report provides an honest assessment of where we stand, with the understanding that we still need to make significant improvements to meet our goals.

Please take the time to read and absorb this report, and feel free to share it with your colleagues, clients, and friends. We would also love your feedback! Email us here to let us know your thoughts.

A recent awardee of the prestigious AIA Committee on Architecture for Education Award (AIA CAE), The Boston Arts Academy building features strategies to improve Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) with a focus on improved daylight and reduced CO2 levels. These measures are not only good for the environment, but also improve cognitive function for the users—students, faculty, visitors, and staff—of the school. Copyright Robert Benson/Courtesy Perkins Eastman

It’s encouraging to see our progress, and to realize the potential our holistic design approach has to elevate every component of our work. Exceptional design is sustainable design; and sustainable design is, after all, Human by Design.

Read the report here