Message From Jeff Witherell, Chairman and CEO
All of us at Plymouth are proud to share with you our Environment – Social – Governance (ESG) efforts. We have historically always pursued responsible ESG practices pragmatically and informally – indeed “integrity” is one of our three founding pillars. But beginning this year, we are embarking on a more formal ESG journey. We are working to carefully understand the expectations of our key stakeholders, conduct benchmarking, and build solid, programmatic ESG initiatives. We have made significant progress already, which we are sharing in this report, and we are excited about advancing even further in the years ahead.
Our most material challenge and number one commitment on the environmental side is to reduce our energy consumption and decrease our use of non-renewable energy. To that end, we are tracking and reducing our own energy use, important in its own right. We are targeting to reduce our energy consumption every year, and to be fully carbon neutral by 2025. But the lion’s share of our energy footprint comes from the energy our tenants consume – so we are also working hard on three fronts there: (1) developing a measurement system by the end of 2023 that will allow us to track all the Scope 3 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that derive from our tenants’ energy consumption, (2) making our entire portfolio more energy efficient beginning immediately, and (3) helping our tenants better understand how they can reduce their energy use through an education and communication program. Our goal is to have our entire portfolio achieve Net-Zero carbon emissions by 2040 – including all of our Scope 3 GHG emissions.
To begin our effort at reducing energy usage in our buildings, in 2022 we have been aggressively converting our older traditional lighting systems to highly efficient LED lighting, and offering inducements to encourage our tenants to upgrade their lighting systems. We now have 44% of our entire portfolio converted, reducing our tenants’ total energy consumption by an estimated 8%. We have also been actively pursuing installation of “cool roofs”, silicone roof renewals, and rooftop solar arrays throughout our portfolio, all of which are creating significant reductions in energy consumption and in the use of non-renewable energy. Nearly half of our properties now have these roofing innovations installed. And beginning this year, all our new landlord-controlled tenant improvement projects have criteria and requirements that incorporate green building considerations.