1450 10th Street, 2nd Floor
Santa Monica, CA 90401
(310) 319-8208
The team at Kaiser Permanente’s Santa Monica Medical Offices commitment to adopting an ambitious set of green practices was recognized by Santa Monica’s Certified Green Business program in December 2018.
The first step was creating a “Green Team” dedicated to this effort. Green Team KP staff members include; Joanna Bialy, Keren Shvarz and Elene Hamilton. They focused on areas of energy efficiency, waste reduction, sustainable procurement and employee training.
“We engaged and trained the staff around recycling and reuse of items, added more recycling bins, found ways to reduce and reuse paper, adjusted water flow in our sinks, found ecofriendly cleaning products, replaced disposable lunchroom items with reusable items, and much more,” says Joanna Bialy, department administrator of the Santa Monica Medical Offices. Some of the Green Team’s accomplishments in achieving Santa Monica’s Green Business Certification include:
- Setting computer settings to turn off after a period of inactivity
- Conservation of resources by adding Green Seal and Ecologo certified cleaning supplies to their purchasing policy
- Training of employees on reduce, reuse and recycling business practices
- Purchase of office/copy paper that contains 100% post-consumer recycled content or is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council containing minimum 30% post-consumer content recycled
- Elimination of individual, single-use bottles of water for employees and guests
- Making two-sided printing and copying a standard practice office-wide
- Switching from individual condiment packets to bulk size containers
The adoption of these practices allows Kaiser Permanente to achieve the following annual savings:
- 665 lbs of greenhouse gas emissions
- 1115 Kwh of Energy
- 1968 gallons of Water
Congratulations to KP Santa Monica on this wonderful achievement!
