Over the past three years Old Town Plaza has invested nearly $500,000 to dramatically reduce the building's energy consumption. Using less energy saves our customers money and trims our carbon footprint. Justin and I thought we had tackled almost every area of energy waste until we discovered paper towels. Old Town Plaza currently uses an astonishing 288,000 paper towels per year! That is the annual equivalent of 24 trees and is responsible for 1,270 lbs of garbage that must be bagged, handled and driven to a landfill.To combat this problem we have started to install Xlerator hand dryers in the Old Town Plaza bathrooms. The first pair were successfully installed on the first floor of Building A and will yield exceptional savings. These two hand dryers alone will save 317 lbs of paper towel waste, 6 trees, 745 kg of CO2 and 7,000 gallons of water every year! Operating these dryers is also over 80% cheaper than purchasing an equivalent amount of paper towels.
Over the next year we will continue this project throughout the building so as to eliminate paper towel use by 2012.
