2016 Sustainability Report
Building a Sustainable Future
About Thornton Tomasetti Thornton Tomasetti provides engineering design, investigation and analysis services to clients worldwide on projects of every size and level of complexity. Through our 10 complementary practices, we address the full life cycle of a structure. We are an organization of engineers, architects, sustainability practitioners and support professionals collaborating from offices across the United States, Canada and in Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. As a leader in engineering innovation, we aspire to be one of the most sustainable firms in our industry – in the way we design our projects and in how we operate as a responsible business.
Employees in Chicago mentored students during the Construction Industry Round Table’s national competition in partnership with the ACE Mentor Program of America. For the competition, the students were asked to design the Barack Obama Presidential Library.
On the Cover
Contents Overview 2 Executive Message 4 Where Are We? 6 Our Services 8 Social Responsibility 20 Business Operations 32 Financial Responsibility 40 Where Are We Going? 44
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Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
Practices Structural Engineering Weidlinger Protective Design Façade Engineering Weidlinger Transportation Construction Engineering Sustainability Weidlinger Applied Science Forensics Property Loss Consulting Renewal
1949
Founded in:
Long-Term Goal To be the global driver of change and innovation in our industry.
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates Albuquerque, New Mexico Austin, Texas Beijing, China Boston, Massachusetts Bristol, England Chicago, Illinois Christchurch, New Zealand Cupertino, California Dallas, Texas Denver, Colorado Dubai, United Arab Emirates Edinburgh, Scotland Fort Lauderdale, Florida Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Hong Kong, China Irvine, California
Number of Employees
1,161
Kansas City, Missouri
Offices
London, England – Farringdon London, England – Lloyd’s Avenue Los Angeles, California Miami, Florida Milwaukee, Wisconsin Mississauga, Canada Moscow, Russia Mumbai, India New York, New York – Madison Avenue New York, New York – Wall Street
Aviation Commercial Cultural & Institutional Education (k–12) Government Healthcare Higher Education Hospitality & Gaming Industrial Mission Critical Residential Sports Transportation (non-aviation)
Newark, New Jersey Ottawa, Canada Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Portland, Maine San Diego, California San Francisco, California São Paulo, Brazil Seattle, Washington Shanghai, China Toronto, Canada Washington, DC Wellington, New Zealand West Hartford, Connecticut
Market Sectors Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
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Executive Message
“To bolster our industry’s ability to recruit and retain the most talented individuals, we must lead by example, actively promoting diversity in AEC careers. This is our call to action.”
O
ur highly skilled and educated people are our firm’s greatest asset. We strive to recruit the most promising candidates and retain our best employees by creating a stimulating, welcoming and inclusive environment. We enjoy working with a mosaic of people throughout our offices and encourage greater diversity across our industry. Since our beginnings as a firm, diversity has been part of who we are. When I joined Thornton Tomasetti, we were about 40 employees in just one office, yet we were a diverse group, with technical staff from India, Thailand, South Korea, Russia, China, South America, the Middle East, the Caribbean and Europe. That early diversity gave us the resilience and creativity that led to our growth. Today we are actively engaged in projects around the world and have offices in China, Russia, Vietnam, New Zealand, India, Europe and other locations thanks to our employees from these countries who encouraged our exploration to serve new clients. Statistics reveal generally low gender and race diversity among science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) professions. To bolster our industry’s ability to recruit and retain the most talented individuals, we must lead by example, actively promoting diversity in AEC careers. This is our call to action.
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Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
— Tom Scarangello
We are guided by our long-term goal to be the global driver of change and innovation in our industry. As we pursue this goal, we are informed by research showing that socially diverse groups are more innovative than homogeneous groups. Since the opening of our headquarters in New York, where our employee diversity mirrors that of the Empire City, we’ve grown into many new communities. Now we are more thoughtful about how we can encourage diversity in all its forms. Wherever we are, we want our workforce to reflect the best possible diversity of the communities we serve. In 2016, we launched an inclusion and diversity committee (I+D2) to build out our strategy for refining our culture so that skilled people of all backgrounds and interests can achieve their full potential at Thornton Tomasetti. In our 2016/2017 annual report we explore the value of diversity and the challenges in achieving it, and in our sustainability reports, we will track progress toward our diversity and inclusion goals. We ask our clients, colleagues and communities to support us on this journey. Read in these pages about Women@TT, our flagship affinity group for employees who wish to support each other on issues related to gender disparity in the workplace. Learn the latest about our efforts to build a forum for knowledge sharing and collaboration across offices, practices and social groups through our Communities of Practice initiative. And discover how we are reimagining our employee benefits to contribute to a more inclusive work environment.
A Lasting Legacy
I
t was no surprise this year when then Co-President Robert DeScenza received a City & State Reports Corporate Social Responsibility award; Bob’s support for Thornton Tomasetti’s corporate sustainability programs has been unwavering since the origin of the program in 2012. Upon his retirement at the end of 2016, Bob declared his fondness for this work in his farewell interview: “Sustainability is especially near and dear to my heart.” Bob believes that the triple bottom line framework of sustainability creates long-term value for a firm, its employees and its clients by taking into account how a business operates on social, environmental and economic levels. He advocated for the creation of a corporate sustainability department and sustainability goals for the firm, and for measuring our progress and sharing that progress in the pages of this report. Thank you, Bob, for helping build a strong foundation for our future success.
This report highlights how we are pursuing all of our corporate sustainability goals, both social and environmental. I look forward to hearing your thoughts, and welcome your participation in this endeavor -- because it’s not just the right thing for our business, it’s the right thing for all of us to do.
Tom Scarangello Chairman and CEO
Tom Scarangello with Gunnar Hubbard, principal and sustainability practice leader, and Lynn Simon, senior vice president in sustainability.
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Where Are We?
2016
In last year’s report, we asked, “Where are we going?” as we were looking ahead to 2016. We have gone in the right direction, but gradually – the sudden increase in the number of employees following our 2015 merger with Weidlinger Associates has modified our pace toward achieving our targets, though we still have forward momentum. 2016 Targets Achieving our five-year target for CO2 emissions per employee.
Last year we predicted that we would still be on target to meet our five-year carbon footprint goal of an average of 4.0 tons of CO2e per employee by 2018. This year’s carbon footprint assessment is the first accounting of emissions we have made since we acquired 300 additional employees from the 2015 merger. The good news is that, although our total emissions have increased with the rise in the number of employees and office locations, our per capita footprint has decreased. We have a smaller per capita footprint than we did in 2015 and have already met and exceeded our 2018 target for the average emissions per employee when accounting for offsets.
At least a 43% reduction from our 2011 baseline for embodied carbon in our structural projects.
Since our first embodied carbon count in 2011, the average amount of embodied carbon in our projects has declined by 44 percent, from 54 kgCO2e to 30 kgCO2e per square foot. For the first three years of our annual embodied carbon count, we found that the amount of embodied carbon in our projects had decreased by about 20 percent per year – for reasons most likely associated with the greater embodied carbon efficiencies of steel and concrete. We expected a 5 percent reduction in average embodied carbon per square foot from last year, but we only realized about a 1 percent reduction; we have yet to implement new training programs on embodied carbon for our engineers or revise our project standards.
A 20% increase in the number of employees who see opportunities to connect their community with their role in the firm.
An employee survey conducted in 2015 indicated that more than half of our employees see opportunities to connect their community with their role in the firm. A follow-up survey in 2016 shows 52 percent of respondents feel there are “opportunities for me to connect with my community (i.e., volunteerism) while using my skills.” Although the firm allows eight hours of paid time per year for volunteering and more than 10 hours for participating in the ACE Mentor Program, only about half of our employees are aware of these opportunities, and only 15 percent are making use of their volunteer benefit.
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Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
We approach sustainability through the lens of the triple bottom line, or the “three Ps�: people, planet, and profit. Our three-year plan for 2016–2019 sets these corporate sustainability goals and objectives.
We aim to reduce our average carbon footprint to 4.0 tons of CO2e per person by 2018 and achieve carbon-neutral business operations by 2030.
We will work toward 100 percent employee awareness of our corporate sustainability programs and more than half of employees believing they receive a direct benefit from these programs.
Increase employee engagement in corporate sustainability.
We will build upon the success of existing programs to improve employee wellness and comfort, and create new programs in response to employee feedback.
Improve the daily experience for all employees.
Increase employee volunteerism in our communities. Within three years, we aim to increase the percentage of employees who see opportunities to connect their community and their role to 75 percent.
Achieve carbon-neutral business operations.
People Planet & Profit
Explore opportunities to support a lifestyle-friendly workplace.
As an adopter of the Architecture 2030 Challenge, we are working toward reducing fossil fuel use in buildings by 70 percent by 2018 to achieve carbon-neutral buildings by 2030.
Realize sustainable engineering in practice.
Innovate structural design by reducing embodied carbon.
Working with our partners, we seek to increase the accuracy of embodied carbon measurement and make embodied carbon a critical consideration in sustainable design.
Foster workforce diversity and inclusion. We aim to celebrate our diverse workforce and build a strategy for increasing inclusion and diversity at Thornton Tomasetti.
As part of our quest for inclusion and diversity, we will investigate the opportunities that contribute to a lifestyle-friendly workplace, including flexible schedules and telecommuting.
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
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Our Services 8
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
As a large engineering services company, we have a tremendous opportunity to innovate the process of building design around the world to achieve higher performance and greater sustainability. According to the U.S. Green Building Council, the built environment accounts for more than two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions. We are striving to reduce the carbon footprint of buildings and other environmental and health impacts through the work of our Sustainability practice and cross-practice collaboration. We are also researching new strategies for sustainable engineering and pioneering these strategies in our projects.
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
Š James Steinkamp Photography
Zurich Insurance Group’s new North American Headquarters is the largest LEED (v2009) Core & Shell project to achieve Platinum certification in the United States; Thornton Tomasetti served as the sustainability consultant on this project designed by Goettsch Partners with developer Clayco.
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Our Services
Achieving Comfort Through Design
62%
energy cost savings
33%
energy savings, space adjacent to double wall façade
I
magine sipping your morning coffee in a 35-foot-high café, looking out through an 180-foot-long south-facing double wall glass façade at an expansive 40-acre vista of beautiful landscaping. You feel at ease and perfectly comfortable, not through the use of a large mechanical system but because of creative façade design and a calibrated system of dynamic blinds. For employees at Zurich Insurance Group’s North American Headquarters, this cozy image is a reality. One thing we love about sustainable design is that simply by using the laws of nature and a bit of rigorous analysis, we can achieve comfort through good design. This project, a 784,000-square-foot office building outside Chicago – designed by Goettsch Partners with developer Clayco – involved a unique design solution guided by our sustainability team that resulted in a glass wall system that maximizes daylighting, thermal comfort and the view without any compromise. This is one of the few buildings in the United States that incorporates a 4.5-footwide double wall cavity, allowing for an unconventional but idyllic building solution. Here’s how it works: Operable blinds that hang in the cavity between the walls can go up and down and tilt, blocking the heat and glare of the sun. In the summertime, when the blinds are closed, heat is captured between the glass walls and then released to the outside as the heat rises through openings in the cavity. In the wintertime, the blinds can be opened to allow direct sunlight to enter and louvers closed to trap heat in the cavity to act as a thermal buffer. Hired to provide energy and daylighting analysis as well as LEED design assistance, our team explored how to optimally design and control this system. We used computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling and Energy Plus to learn about the airflow through the wall cavity and to determine how hot the cavity could get. These questions are important, for example, for understanding how to effectively vent the cavity of heat and avoid the breakdown of sealants at high temperatures. Our team developed a series of control sequences that regulate how the double wall system would operate and how it communicates with the mechanical systems. 10
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
“All glass buildings offer very low thermal performance and require an extensive amount of heating to maintain comfort around the perimeter of the building,” said Michael Pulaski, vice president. “To keep a glass building cool, one solution is larger ductwork, larger air handling units, and more chiller capacity – all of which cost a lot of money and use a high amount of energy. This solution controls comfort and energy through the architectural design.” We get starry-eyed thinking about geeky ways to solve comfort challenges, but this project has received numerous accolades – in addition to sporting a unique wall system. This expansive office building includes multiple green roofs, energy-efficient technologies and other sustainability features on which our team played a key role.
Š James Steinkamp Photography
(Above) The energy-saving south-facing double wall system seen from the exterior; employees sitting beyond the double wall look out through the glass onto the patio and extensive gardens.
Š James Steinkamp Photography
(Right) The building comprises three bars that are stacked to maximize views of the landscape and optimize solar orientation, an ideal arrangement for multiple green roofs.
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
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Our Services
Ultra-Low-Energy Design
95%
tighter envelope than standard construction
60%
more energy efficient than a typical apartment building
P
assive House certification, the ultra-low energy standard that focuses on passive heating and cooling, is often associated with small residential projects. Village Centre in Brewer, Maine, demonstrates the effectiveness of the standard on large projects. At 54,000 square feet, this 48-unit affordable-housing project is the second-largest Passive House (PHIUS+) certified building in the U.S. and the largest to be built in a cold climate. As the Passive House consultants on this project, we were delighted that Village Centre was voted the “Best Multifamily” and “Best Affordable Housing” project by the U.S. Passive House Institute. The owner, Community Housing of Maine, was required to submit a design prior to receiving project funding, and therefore we faced the interesting challenge of bringing a design that was 75 percent complete up to Passive House standards on a budget typical of publicly funded affordable housing. We worked with the architect, CWS, to determine the types of walls, roof, windows and mechanicals needed to achieve the certification. This was a particularly satisfying project because we followed it all the way through to construction, including training contractors on how to make airtight details and reduce thermal bridging. Working to achieve a new and ambitious green building certification can involve moments of experimentation. For this project, we needed a 160 CFM energy recovery unit, but in 2014, when we started the project, the only sizes available were either for small residences or for large commercial projects. We opted for the larger unit but reduced the fan speed with a potentiometer – a device also used in electric guitars for volume control. This solution improved energy recovery efficiency by about 10 percent. Passive House design is a good choice for any multifamily or student housing project, with benefits to both owners and residents. The design can be accomplished on a low budget (the Village Centre project cost only 2.5 percent more than standard construction). And, owners reap the benefits of a passive design with lower operating and maintenance costs and minimal dependence on mechanicals. This project resulted in a very low space heating demand of 3.97 kBtu per square foot per year and low site energy use intensity (EUI) of 23 kBtu per square foot per year, thanks to R-40 wall insulation, triple-glazed windows and
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Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
other key building features. Residents experience a very comfortable building, with few air leaks – Passive House construction typically boasts 85 percent less infiltration than standard construction – and a pleasant surface temperature that makes warm walls but cold windows a thing of the past. “Passive House is still considered a high-performance standard,” said Colin Schless, associate in our Sustainability practice. “But after working with it, I wouldn’t be surprised if it became a norm in construction, as it provides affordable high performance and is both logical and tested.”
Village Centre Cost Analysis 500
Construction Cost ($ in thousands)
400 Total Cost
300
100
-100
T
he San Francisco Public Safety Building is the first San Francisco city project to be designed for its operation to continue up to 96 hours after an earthquake disrupts access to public water and electricity. Thornton Tomasetti worked closely with the owner and design team, led by HOK and Mark Cavagnero Associates, to facilitate the LEED certification process that helped the project to achieve resiliency.
76%
reduction in demand for potable water for toilet flushing
200
0
A Model of Resiliency
Base Budget
Slab & Roof
Exterior Wall
Windows
Solar Shades
HVAC
-200 -300
500 400 300 Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report 200
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Our Services
Building Reuse through a Feat of Artistry and Engineering
T
he Wrightwood Art Gallery achieves both exquisite form and high-performance function. Thornton Tomasetti’s Renewal practice was hired to transform a run-of-the-mill 1920s apartment building into a cutting-edge modern art gallery in which the exposed concrete interior itself is among the items on display. This project shows structural engineering to be an important partner in sustainable design, both through the reuse of existing materials and in efficiently achieving a stringently climate-controlled space. Zoning restrictions drove a decision to reuse the existing masonry bearing walls rather than demolish them and build new ones. Preserving the existing walls during construction was accomplished by inserting a steel skeleton within the existing interior footprint. What was temporary was made permanent when the skeleton was cast in concrete to serve as the new structure for the gallery floors. Ken Maschke, vice president, said, “The best moment of the project came after we dropped in the steel frame, connected it to the exterior walls and then demolished the interior walls. It became a four-story open space with steel braces.” At each connection of the skeleton to the existing masonry wall, thermal bridging – the flow of heat through building materials via conduction – was a concern. Sensitive artwork must be protected from even minor fluctuations in temperature and humidity, so the building enclosures had to work together to achieve tight tolerances, even on Chicago’s most extreme weather days. We developed a custom thermal break using a Fabreeka TIMs pad and stainless steel masonry adhesive anchors. The TIMs pad was sandwiched between the wall and a steel plate with tabs to connect the floor beams. We worked closely with the adhesive supplier to field-verify anchor capacity. The mechanical engineer, Affiliated Engineers, Inc. (AEI), developed thermal analysis models to help us size the thickness of the TIMs pad. We ultimately determined that our detail represented an improvement in the steel temperature of 47oF on the coldest day considered. In addition, we researched best practices for insulating the original walls with spray-applied insulation to improve thermal performance.
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Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
Additional structural innovations included the implementation of push piles to support the existing wall, the excavation of a new basement four feet beneath the existing foundation, a 10-foot thermally broken cantilever at the roof level and the conversion of a portion of the building into a 40-foot-high atrium. Significant challenges can yield the greatest rewards. This project was doubly challenging in that it required installing a new structure within existing walls and maintaining a climate suitable for a valuable art collection. The Wrightwood Art Gallery, designed by Tadao Ando of Japan, received three awards from ASCE’s Architectural Engineering Institute (AEI): two awards of excellence for Structural System and Renovation and one award of merit for Architectural and Engineering Integration.
2 million pounds of brick preserved
4%
envelope heat loss reduction by minimizing thermal bridging
(Right)“This was the coolest moment in the project,” said Ken Maschke, vice president and project manager. A steel frame was dropped between the existing walls.
© Gensler
(Below) An architect’s rendering shows how the existing brick walls of the old apartment building integrate with the exposed concrete interior, creating the space for a modern and minimalist art gallery.
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
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Our Services
In Pursuit of Sustainable Engineering
We provided structural engineering services for this unique 44-story sloped building on West 57th Street in New York City, designed by BIG and SLCE Architects. The building’s efficient structure of flatplate concrete below the 34th floor may help to reduce the embodied-carbon footprint.
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Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
We envision Thornton Tomasetti as a sustainable engineering firm. The firm has ten areas of practice, and one of which is Sustainability. When sustainability strategies are employed throughout all our practices, we will celebrate the achievement of having become a truly sustainable firm. We’ve made important progress: in 2016, we launched “Sustainability 2.0,” an initiative that turns our sustainability consulting expertise inward to the education and training of our engineers and to the development of new sustainability integration tools. In the first year of this initiative, we’ve successfully introduced sustainable design strategies into 21 projects in our Façade Engineering practice and eight projects in our Renewal practice. We have developed training materials for our structural engineers on sustainability best practices, completing white papers on embodied carbon, sustainable concrete and thermal bridging. We continue to engage in research on embodied carbon and to play an industry-leading role in analyzing embodied carbon in our own structural projects.
Our Services
Why embodied carbon? Building structures incorporate substantial amounts of steel and reinforced concrete. These materials contribute to climate change through their embodied energy and carbon, the energy used and carbon dioxide emitted during raw material extraction, refining, manufacturing and transportation. In a typical building, structural materials account for 50 percent of the embodied energy and carbon. Efforts to reduce building-related emissions have mainly focused on operational energy from building use, but the building sector has brought increased attention to embodied energy because the reduced operational energy demands of new and retrofitted high-performance buildings mean carbon dioxide emissions from the production of building materials and products represent a larger portion of a building’s total lifetime energy use.
Image by BIG & Glessner
In our fifth year of calculating the embodied carbon and energy in our structural projects, we find the average amount of embodied carbon in our projects to be holding steady at around 30 kgCO2e per square foot, although there was a slight decline in 2016 from the last two years. We continue to see less embodied carbon in our projects than we had calculated in the earliest years of this assessment, which may reflect a wider use of cementitious replacements in concrete along with other mitigating factors. A recent embodied carbon benchmark study conducted by the Carbon Leadership Forum and supported by the Pankow Foundation enables us to compare our projects to benchmarks for various project types, and we find our projects to be below the average for embodied carbon in the commercial and hospitality sectors, but higher than average for residential projects. As a Platinum-level sponsor of the Carbon Leadership Forum, we served as an advisor to this research and contributed an extensive collection of data from our structural projects to the body of data analyzed in this landmark study. With the Carbon Leadership Forum, we are working to enlarge the collection of structural material quantities and to engage structural engineers in a challenge to meet embodied-carbon benchmarks and increasingly higher reduction targets in a “race toward the most efficient building.� In 2016, we also continued to collaborate with a research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create a global online database of structural embodied carbon (DeQo); we have contributed data on more than 400 projects to this database.
Average Embodied Carbon per Square Foot 60
Thornton Tomasetti Projects
kgCO2e/ft2
50 40 30 20 10 2011
2012
2013-14
2014-15
2015-16
Average Embodied Carbon 2016 by Market Sector 40
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Pankow Study
30 kgCO2e/ft2
A
s an adopter of the Architecture 2030 Challenge, we recognize that since most of our technical staff are structural engineers, our best opportunity to realize the 2030 vision of carbon-neutral buildings is in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions related to structural materials. Since 2012, we have annually reported the quantity of embodied carbon and embodied energy in our structural projects to the American Institute of Architects (AIA), demonstrating our commitment in this unique way as a member of the AIA 2030 Commitment.
20
10
Commercial
Hospitality
Residential
Carbon Tools
F
ive years ago we developed an Embodied Carbon Calculator, a Revit plug-in that extracts raw material quantities from our BIM models. We are now updating the calculator. Hosted by Dynamo, it will enable us to more efficiently extract material information and to examine more data from BIM environments. The tool will be accessed by a web-based platform and will provide our design teams with live information on the embodied carbon of their designs and improve our annual embodied carbon count and associated research.
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
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We remain among the top green design firms in the engineering sector and are growing our sustainable design expertise through our Sustainability practice and cross-practice collaboration. We continue to save our clients more than $4 million in energy costs annually. Though the number of employees with LEED accreditation is declining because our engineers are not finding sustainable design credentials to be required for their work, credentials in other green building certification programs such as WELL and Living Building Challenge are on the rise among our sustainability consultants.
Embodied (Life Cycle) Carbon in Our Structural Projects (kgCO2 per ft2)
#17
#16
50%
#18
30
32
40
34
33
Ranking By Engineering News-Record Among Top Green Design Firms
#34
Our Services
Progress Report
increase in our ranking among other green design firms since 2013 by Engineering News-Record
0
2013 2014 2015 2016
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Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
2013 2014 2015 2016
Average $ Saved per Project from Sustainability Consulting
LEED Projects (Cumulative) for which We Provided Sustainability Consulting
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
100
122
158
171
217
237
237
194
119587
$119,587
7,956
$114,718
8,619
8619
Employees with LEED Accreditation
188
CO2 Saved (Tons) from Sustainability Consulting
0
2013 2014 2015 2016
2013 2014 2015 2016
0
0
2013 2014 2015 2016
2013 2014 2015 2016
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
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Social Responsibility At Thornton Tomasetti, we invest in our people and our communities. We strive to recruit the most promising people and retain our best employees by creating a stimulating, welcoming and inclusive environment. In our communities, we build on our legacy of service, supporting employee volunteerism and proudly contributing time and money to support STEM education for children. 20
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
Chicago staffers enjoy volunteering with Habitat for Humanity. They worked on several projects in the city’s West Pullman neighborhood, which included assembling interior and exterior walls for a new home. In at least four cities, this year our employees contributed their construction know-how to Habitat for Humanity.
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
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Social Responsibility
Community Engagement
(Top right) Our Portland, Maine, staffers, with colleagues from Lavallee Brensinger Architects, take a break after a day of laying hardwood, installing drywall (at left), and staining at Carpenter Court, a Habitat for Humanity project comprising 13 singlefamily homes. (Bottom right) Our Washington, DC, employees organized a booth at the 2016 Science and Engineering Festival, touted as the largest science festival in the United States. Dana Naderi, project engineer, taught children visiting the booth how to build their own earthquake-proof structures.
Volunteerism Thornton Tomasetti has a long history of supporting our communities. Our employees are passionate about sharing their skills with those in need, giving of their personal time and engaging in service through the firm’s volunteer release time. The firm’s founders established organizations that support STEM education, to which our employees devote time as mentors, judges and committee members. We continue to donate to educational and humanitarian organizations, with more contributions made in 2016 than in any previously reported year.
Our ACE Mentors Our involvement with the ACE Mentor Program began 24 years ago, when the organization was established by Charles Thornton, one of our founding principals. ACE mentors high school students and awards scholarships, inspiring young people to pursue careers in building design and construction. In 2016, more than 50 Thornton Tomasetti employees in 12 cities served as ACE mentors to groups of high school students, many from underresourced schools and communities.
In our third year of offering a volunteer day benefit that allows all regular employees eight hours of paid time per year for volunteering, we saw a rise in employee hours dedicated to service in communities, accompanied by an increase in partnerships with other firms that augmented our impact on volunteer projects. In 2016, employees in 12 office locations used their volunteer day benefit. Several office teams rolled up their sleeves to build homes with Habitat for Humanity; cycled, walked or ran to raise money for medical cures; or supported charities such as Big Brothers Big Sisters through the donation of time and needed items. Company policy also allows employees to use more than 10 hours of paid time each year for mentoring high school students through the ACE Mentor Program.
Employees who find the mentoring experience rewarding often look for other opportunities to support ACE. Jennifer Flanders, senior engineer, was mentoring 30 students from Boston-area schools when she decided to join the Boston ACE fundraising committee. She and a colleague raised over $7,000 to fund student scholarships during a raffle at the March 2016 Boston ACE Networking Night. This event was sponsored by Thornton Tomasetti and in total raised $100,000 for STEM education.
62%
growth in charitable contributions over four years
55%
increase in use of volunteer day benefit since its inception
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Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
Jennifer Kearney, engineer, presents a Washington, DC, ACE Mentor Program scholarship to Emily Flynn, a high school senior with whom Jennifer worked when serving as an ACE mentor to students at Washington Lee High School.
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
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Community Engagement (continued) ACE Mentor Program
Salvadori Center
Scholarships
Philanthropy
3% 5%
We continue to provide philanthropic support to our communities and to organizations that advance science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education and career pathways for school children. Our philanthropic giving has increased by more than $100,000 since we began tracking charitable contributions for this report in 2013. We regularly donate to the ACE Mentor Program of America and to its local chapters. We also provide annual support to the Salvadori Center, which offers STEM education to middle school students from underserved New York communities. In 2016, we contributed to scholarships in memory of long-time employees and leaders at the firm, Abe Gutman and Dan Cuoco, and our offices made charitable contributions to local organizations supporting students and communities. The firm annually supports the Thornton Tomasetti Foundation.
9%
44%
Local Charities
39% Thornton Tomasetti Foundation
2016 Charitable Contributions
Thornton Tomasetti Foundation Report
I
n 2016, the Thornton Tomasetti Foundation, an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, distributed $151,644 in scholarships, support of charitable projects and other efforts aligned with its mission. Since its inception in 2008, the foundation has distributed more than $800,000 in grants and scholarships to over 30 organizations. 2016 grantees include: • Bridges to Prosperity, Messiah College Chapter • Engineers Without Borders, Milwaukee School of Engineering • Engineers Without Borders, University of Wisconsin – Madison • Engineers Without Borders, University of Wisconsin – Platteville • Build Change • GeoHazards International • The Urban Assembly
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Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
New this year! • The first-ever UK scholarship was awarded; in total, four scholarships were awarded to engineering students in the U.S. and UK. • The new Student Innovation Fellowship was offered to two doctoral students. • A digital site is under development with Trilogy Publications that will help elementary and middle school students understand what engineers do. See more at ThorntonTomasettiFoundation.org.
Building Bridges, Transforming Lives
A
ishling Browne, an engineer in our London office, puts it simply: “It happened to us; we transformed lives in Rwanda.” Aishling organized a memorable volunteer experience for a group of employees from her office and a group from Grimshaw Architects. They headed off to Africa together to volunteer as a team for Bridges to Prosperity and build a life-sustaining bridge between an isolated community and crucial resources that could improve the lives of the local people. “When my company director mentioned the charity Bridges to Prosperity in an internal meeting last year, I knew immediately that I wanted to get involved in some way,” said Aishling in an interview with Stellar Magazine. The group visited Coko, a rural community in the south of Rwanda. A river separated Coko from marketplaces and schools, and the dangerous makeshift crossing had recently taken the life of a child. The team, although proficient in designing projects of all types, was challenged in new ways. While very physically demanding, the work was immensely rewarding in two ways:
It enabled the team to witness the step-by-step development of the structure and to see the local residents using it for the first time, at the inauguration ceremony. In addition to providing essential infrastructure, the team contributed to the community in some unexpected ways. Local residents were involved from start to finish, as is typical in Bridges to Prosperity projects, and everyone learned from one another. Aishling and other female volunteers challenged the local stereotype that construction is only for men and empowered women from the village to join in the work. “It was amazing to be able to drive this kind of change, even in a small way,” said Aishling. Other Thornton Tomasetti employees accompanying Aishling on this project included Colm Breenan, engineer; Daisy Harvey, office operations; Harry Crofton, engineer; and Rupert Price, engineer. The team was supported in large part by the London office, others at the firm, and by Grimshaw. Grimshaw participants included Uwe Frohmader, Catherine Howe, Henry Turner, Brooke Francis, and John Leimbach.
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25
Social Responsibility
Employee Engagement
Inclusion and Diversity
T
o meet Thornton Tomasetti’s long-term goal of becoming a driver of change and innovation, we are committed to creating an inclusive and diverse culture where we engage, empower, and release everyone’s full potential to effect positive business outcomes. In 2016, we focused our attention on issues of diversity and inclusion. The firm’s board of directors established a committee to determine goals and create a plan. This original committee has broadened to include a working group that leads initiatives, a larger committee that defines objectives and oversees the working group, and a still larger advisory group that provides feedback on direction and priorities.
6% 5%
23% 16.7%
Although still early in our inclusion and diversity work, we have for several years maintained an affinity group for women employees called “Women@TT.” We created this employee resource group to educate, support and elevate women working at Thornton Tomasetti. Beginning with a group originally founded at our New York headquarters by Vice Chairman Aine Brazil, Women@TT now has active branches in 11 office locations.
77% 83%
Female Hispanic, Latino 16% 25%
.6% 2%
Male
Over 50
Asian
Black, African
White, Caucasian
Under 35 20%
66% 74% Industry Average Thornton Tomasetti
52%
45% 17%
Our Communities of Practice initiative has given affinity groups like Women@TT a forum for communication and better access to all employees across the firm’s many locations. Communities of Practice is assisted by our new internal social networking platform, Spark, which furnishes the virtual infrastructure through which individuals can gather in “communities” around topics of common interest and form relationships, share knowledge, develop best practices and cultivate innovation. The Women@TT community of practice is connecting women across offices and encouraging new local groups to form. More than 100 women are members of this growing community. A mentorship program provides women with career guidance and social support, and a $90,000 budget supports Women@TT activities. These activities, in addition to mentorship, include internal and external networking events, skill-building seminars and community service – such as outreach to school children to build STEM literacy among young women and girls.
“ Look around the room during your next project meeting, and odds are the women are greatly outnumbered,” said Vice Chairman Aine Brazil. “The fact of the matter is there are far more men than women in our industry. Yet firms like ours recognize the value of a diverse workforce.”
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Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
Health and Wellness One of the greatest occupational hazards of the computerdependent work we do as engineers and designers is simply sitting too long, which is associated with an increase in the risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer and death. To prevent what is commonly called “sitting disease,” we established a policy in late 2015 to enable our people to use adjustable-height standing desks. In 2016, we tested standing desks at many of our offices in preparation for the 2017 implementation of the policy, which states: “Thornton Tomasetti will provide a standing desk to any regular employee who works 30 or more hours per week and requests a desk for the purposes of better health and ergonomics.” In some locations, standing desks were purchased for all employees. By the year’s end, more than 280 employees were using standing desks. We also offered online ergonomics training to demonstrate the best use of standing desks.
282
standing desks in use by employees
Once we got people standing, we decided to get them running and stretching as well. We kicked off the first-ever Thornton Tomasetti Wellness Challenge in January 2016, pitting office against office in a fun month-long competition for the most points from completing wellness-at-work activities. This was our third year of assessing employee comfort with a biannual office environment survey. The survey canvassed employees concerning thermal comfort, air quality, lighting quality, noise levels and ergonomics. Survey results have led to a variety of office improvements, and in 2016 our corporate sustainability grants program funded a number of them, including air-purification and sound-masking systems, hot water pipe insulation, anti-glare blinds and ergonomic workstations.
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
27
Employee Engagement (continued)
(Right) The Chicago Women@TT group shared stories and experiences over a game of golf. (Bottom) Our new Communities of Practice leaders from across the firm gathered for training in New York.
Developing and Sustaining Our Talent In 2016, following the 2015 merger, we began offering integrated benefits to all of our employees. We expanded our paid parental leave benefit to include both parents and adopted a paid time off (PTO) sharing policy to assist employees facing medical and other emergencies. In addition, all employees can now participate in an investment education service to enable financial wellness. We offered developmental training to 78 percent of our employees through online training (204 courses) and seminars (24). We built and delivered the best practice course “TT Project Management” to ensure that our technical projects are delivered to consistent standards around the globe, as well as designing and delivering quality assurance and control tools for our structural engineering practice. For the first time, we integrated a coaching component to build a bridge between project management training and implementation in daily practice, while also supporting leadership development of staff. We aided 27 employees pursuing higher education through our tuition assistance program. We also helped 35 employees
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Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
receive their first professional engineering or architecture license by reimbursing the exam fee and preparation costs. In addition to myriad engineering and architectural credentials and certifications, 158 of our employees held LEED accreditations within the year, and we remain a U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) Education Partner, providing courses that are among the highest-rated on the USGBC’s education platform. In 2016, we contributed nearly $1 million toward the furtherance of research and development. We launched an internal R&D solicitation that committed $250,000 to the development of innovative projects proposed by individual employees and continued to support our CORE group, Thornton Tomasetti’s R&D incubator.
2016 Kicks Off TT Wellness Challenge
A
iming to fulfill our New Year's resolutions for better health, we started the year with a kick-off of the new biannual Thornton Tomasetti Wellness Challenge. Across 22 locations, 250 employees engaged in everything from group stretch breaks to healthy staff lunches. This four-week challenge invites employees to participate in a number of wellness activities at the office to encourage healthy habits during the workday. These activities include some that are easy, such as drinking at least four cups of water a day, and others that are more challenging for more points, such as going on a “walking� meeting.
per year, are all the individuals who seek to better their health. Our 2016 winners included our Denver (above left), West Hartford, Chicago (above right) and Portland offices. The first challenge engaged 250 employees in 22 locations, with similar participation rates in our fall challenge. Enthusiastic teams organized group stretches (like our San Francisco office, stretching above), fitness classes (like our DC office, below right), and healthy lunches. Inspired individuals ran their first 5K (like staff from Mumbai, below center) and many started their day with a smile (like Elsa Mullin from Portland, below left) to win a point in the Wellness Challenge.
Winning offices received trophies and began healthy habits. But the real winners of this competition, which occurs twice
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
29
Social Responsibility
Progress Report We continue to see a gradual increase in most of our indicators of social responsibility. The increase in our charitable giving and growth in the number of employees with ownership reflect the steep rise in the number of employees by one-third following our 2015 merger. Although the percentage of employees who are women or minorities remains fairly consistent, our numbers remain relatively high compared to other firms within our market sector. We continue to highly value research and development, funding individual R&D proposals from employees and supporting CORE, Thornton Tomasetti’s R&D incubator, to drive change and innovation.
Employee Volunteer Hours on Company Time
Charitable Contributions
$322,603
$193,368
869
55%
$199,317
1,308
$307,317
1,570
1570
increase in volunteerism since Volunteer Day
N/A
benefit established
0
2013 2014 2015 2016
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Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
2013 2014 2015 2016
11%
50%
49%
49%
13
$230K
$120K
$220K
19%
11%
13%
24%
23%
23%
Percentage of U.S. Employees Who Are Women or Minorities
24
906
$906K
322
Employees with Ownership in the Company
50%
Percentage of Employees Receiving Promotions
11%
Support for Research and Development Projects
0
2013 2014 2015 2016
0
2013 2014 2015 2016
0
0
2013 2014 2015 2016
2013 2014 2015 2016
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
31
Business Operations 32
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
Throughout Thornton Tomasetti’s 40 offices in nine countries, we are implementing sustainable business practices and moving closer to our goal of carbon-neutral business operations by 2030. Our approach involves “greening” our offices and working toward reducing the carbon footprint of office energy use, waste and travel associated with the workday, as well as providing a comfortable and healthy workplace for our people.
Our Denver office received a corporate sustainability grant to help fund the purchase of a sound-masking system. Denver employees now report higher satisfaction with their work environment and are able to fully enjoy their sunlit open-concept office space.
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
33
Business Operations
Our Carbon Footprint
A typical passenger vehicle emits about
4.7 In Chicago, we are reducing our footprint by using Divvy bikes for site visits and commutes.
2016 Carbon Footprint by Indicator Waste 1% Waste 1%
Business Travel Business 23% Travel 23%
Electricity 35% Electricity 35%
Commuting 30% Commuting 30%
Heating Fuel Heating 10% Fuel 10%
2016 Carbon Footprint by Indicator (with Offsets) Waste 2% Waste 2%
Commuting 42% Commuting 42%
Electricity 48% Electricity 48% Heating Fuel Heating 14% Fuel 14%
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Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, according to the U.S. EPA.
1200
Tons2016 of Carbon Footprint Challenge Winner CO2 by Office aving won this year’s Carbon Footprint Challenge, our London office Location Kilowatt 1000
H
800
TonsTons of of CO e/Person CO2 /Person 2
Hours per Square Meter
De nv er Ed in b Fo ur gh rt La ud er da le Ka ns as Ci ty Lo nd on Lo s An ge le s M um ba i Ne w NY ar k Do w nt ow NY n M ad is on Ph ila de lp Thornton Tomasetti hi a Po rt la Sa nd n Fr ULI Greenpoint an ci sc o Sh an gh BBP ai
Da lla s
Ch ic ag Ch o ris tc hu rc h Cu pe rt in o
Al bu qu er qu e Bo st on
600 to boast about their low carbon footprint. As a has earned the right two-time winner, the London office is a model for our other locations, with 400 a per capita footprint of 1.71 tons of CO2e per person, even when not accounting for offsets. This individual footprint is very low compared to 200 the average for all our office locations, about five tons of CO2e per person, and the Mayor of London’s Business Energy Challenge shows the energy 0 intensity of the office to be below the industry benchmarks (at right) for energy performance. Congratulations, London!
250
200
150
100
50 0
9.00 8.00 7.00 6.00
9
5.00 4.00 3.00 2.00 1.00 0
T
hornton Tomasetti aspires to achieve carbon-neutral business operations by 2030. In 2012, the baseline year for our biennial carbon footprint assessment of our business operations, we set a short-term goal of achieving a per capita carbon footprint of 4.0 tons of CO2e by December 2018. In 2016, two years ahead of our goal, we have exceeded this target with a footprint of 3.25 tons of CO2e per person. This progress can be, in part, attributed to our commitment to offset the emissions that we are unable to reduce. We continue to purchase carbon offsets to compensate for the carbon emissions from air travel – once the largest contributor to our carbon footprint. By making donations to support energy efficiency and renewable energy projects, we can compensate for the emissions attributed to the travel we must engage in to conduct business. Our actual air travel per person is on the decline, and this is good news too. This was our second year as a U.S. EPA Green Power Partner. Each year, Thornton Tomasetti must meet the EPA’s green power use requirement of 10 percent of our annual baseload electricity usage. Green power, also known as “renewable energy credits (RECs),” offsets the electricity emissions in six of our offices,
ba i Ne w NY ar k Do w nt ow NY n M ad is on Ph ila de lp hi a Po rt la Sa nd n Fr an ci sc o Sh an gh ai
um
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Ci s
Ka n
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de
bu
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0
helping to keep the carbon footprint of these leased office spaces low despite the necessary use of computers, office equipment, lighting and air conditioning. Our low per capita footprint was achieved following the 2015 merger which increased the number of employees by about one-third. In several cities we consolidated multiple offices into one location, resulting in a lower per capita carbon footprint because of shared electricity use and heating. We have continued to move offices into downtown areas with access to transit systems, supporting our per capita carbon footprint decrease in the area of commuting. In 2016, our green champions (see page 36) contributed to energy efficiency improvements in their offices, and more offices received LEED certification (see page 37) resulting in more energyefficient offices. As expected with the growth in employee numbers, the total carbon footprint for Thornton Tomasetti is larger than reported for our baseline year of 2012. At 4,741 tons of CO2e, we have exceeded our first recorded footprint in 2012. This is 24 percent greater than last year’s carbon footprint when we had fewer employees.
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
35
Total Number of Green Champions 60 49
50
53
38
40
30
Business Operations
Business Operations
Our Green Offices
31
19
20 14 10
0 2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
Present
Greening Existing Offices
T
his was the fifth year of the Thornton Tomasetti Green Champion program. Green champions are employees who volunteer to coordinate the greening of their offices and to meet the guidelines of our sustainable operations policy. Numbers of green champions continue to steadily grow (see chart), with employees in 24 locations participating in the Green Champion program in 2016. Support for our green champions includes an organized program, helpful resources and a dedicated intern. Once a month, green champions learn from each other and share experiences on a conference call, and a sustainable office plan specific to each location guides their work. We are in our fourth year of offering corporate grants through Green Champions to support the implementation of sustainability improvements.
The Los Angeles green champions celebrated Earth Week, during which they planned activities that included “cycle to work” and an avocado plant competition to raise awareness in their office.
400
hours contributed by green champions
36
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
The 2016 grant program provided $30,000 in support of Green Champion projects in 10 locations. Grants funded initiatives to improve energy efficiency as well as employee health and comfort. For example, the Beijing office received air purifiers for healthier indoor air, and the London office was awarded a grant for insulating their hot-water pipes. Green champions engage our employees in educational and awareness-building activities. Daylight Hour, organized by the Building Energy Exchange to reduce energy use from manufactured lighting, is a favorite annual event. In 2016, the global Daylight Hour campaign saved enough energy to power 7,600 homes for a day. Thornton Tomasetti’s contribution involved 22 offices in four countries turning off their lights for one hour or more during the workday.
35%
of employees work in LEED registered or certified offices
The San Francisco office, with ample daylighting and great views of the city, achieved both LEED v.4 points and high praise from staff.
Greening New Offices In 2012, Thornton Tomasetti instituted a policy of pursuing LEED certification for all new office fit-outs and major office renovations that are 4,000 square feet or larger. Our goal is LEED for Commercial Interiors (CI) Gold or higher, and this year we celebrated two LEED Platinum certifications and one LEED Gold certification. Our LEED certified offices now include Chicago and its expansion, Philadelphia, Denver, Kansas City, San Francisco, as well as Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, which were certified in early 2017. In next year’s report, we expect to announce the successful certification of one additional office. Our San Francisco office project at 650 California Street tested out the new, more stringent, version of the LEED rating through the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED v.4 beta program. This early experience with LEED v.4 allowed our sustainability team – acting as our own LEED consultants and commissioning agent – to enhance their expertise, and we were very pleased to achieve the highest level of certification on this project. At the time of certification, it was the first CI project in the U.S. to be certified Platinum under the new rating system and the largest Platinum LEED v.4 CI project in the world to date.
Visitors to the new office first notice that it is aesthetically stunning and functionally adaptable. The office has enviable daylighting and views of downtown San Francisco. To attain Platinum certification, the office achieves high levels of energy efficiency. The office features many interior materials and furnishings that meet LEED v.4’s rigorous material ingredient reporting and raw material sourcing criteria. The project did very well in the Location and Transportation, Innovation and Regional Priority categories of LEED, and the team received perfect scores for Enhanced Commissioning as well as Advanced Energy Metering. Our second Platinum certification this year was awarded for an expansion of our LEED v.3 Gold certified Chicago office at 330 Wabash Avenue. The expansion was completed in collaboration with the Syska Hennessy Group, which shares the space. In keeping with our corporate guidelines for using Energy Star appliances, 100 percent of equipment in the office is Energy Star-rated. Lighting design was optimized to yield a 28 percent reduction in power use. Occupancy and daylight controls further reduce the electricity load. Restroom fixtures were upgraded with low-flow flush valves, and all furniture meets recognized standards for low chemical emissions.
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
37
Business Operations
Progress Report Our goal is to achieve carbon-neutral business operations by the year 2030. To this end, we annually measure our carbon footprint. The charts show progress in reducing our carbon footprint per capita without accounting for offsets for business travel. We purchase green power (RECs) in a number of our office locations to reduce emissions from electricity use and offset 100 percent of our air-travel emissions. With offsets, we have exceeded our short-term goal of reaching 4.0 tons of CO2e per capita by 2018.
Average Annual Carbon Footprint per Person, without Offsets (tons of CO2e)
4.5
4.4
4.7
5.3
5.3
3.25 tons of CO2e carbon footprint per employee, with offsets
0.0
2013 2014 2015 2016
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Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
Emissions from Employee Commuting (tons of CO2e/person)
Emissions from Air Travel, without Offsets (tons of CO2e /person)
1.63
49%
1.68
1.68
1.37 0.82
1.13
1.04
1.26
34%
1.36
1.36
45%
1.52
1.5
1.9
1.63
1.9
Office Products Purchased with Recycled Content and Other “Eco Features�
48%
Emissions from Electricity Use, with RECs (tons of CO2e/person)
0.0
2013 2014 2015 2016
2013 2014 2015 2016
0.00
0.00
2013 2014 2015 2016
2013 2014 2015 2016
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
39
Financial Responsibility
W
Corporate Sustainability Department
hen Thornton Tomasetti established a Sustainability practice back in 2012, the Corporate Sustainability Department was created to demonstrate our sustainability expertise in-house and to “practice what we were preaching.” Although more than four years have gone by, Thornton Tomasetti remains unique among engineering firms in maintaining a corporate officer and staff dedicated to the firm’s sustainability, separate from project work.
Operating Costs Travel, conferences, sponsorships, office supplies, telephone, etc.
In 2016, the budget for the Corporate Sustainability Department was $466,000. This budget supported staff, the publication of this report and a number of key initiatives – many in collaboration with other corporate departments.
Sustainability Report Graphic design and editorial assistance for this report.
Staffing Includes corporate sustainability officer, full-time intern and part-time project staff.
9% 3%
Sustainability 2.0 Initiative Training technical staff on sustainability practices and tool development, in collaboration with the Sustainability practice.
36% 28%
Total Budget $466,000 6% 17%
3%
Grant Program
LEED Certification of Offices Subsidies to offices support LEED certification for new offices and major renovations.
40
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
Corporate grants support the work of our green champions and sustainability improvements in the local offices.
Carbon Offsets Donations to Carbonfund to support energy efficiency and renewable energy projects, offsetting all business travel.
Personnel Department Staff Amy Seif Hattan Vice President of Corporate Sustainability Nado Saab Sustainability Intern Rachel Tam Sustainability Intern Green Champions Eric Hansen, Albuquerque Penny Tennant, Albuquerque Nasreen Awal, Boston Kim Carr, Boston April Bennett, Chicago Rachel Michelin, Chicago Abhiram Tammana, Chicago Jerome Tobolski, Chicago Mary Williams, Chicago David Milner, Cupertino Rupa Patel, Christchurch Thomas Davies, Dallas Matthew Hardman, Denver Tania Peterson, Denver
Kathleen Halford, Edinburgh Vanessa Da Rocha, Fort Lauderdale Jacqueline Lopez, Fort Lauderdale Michelle Olender, Fort Lauderdale Janelle Weir, Irvine Jason Dimaria, Kansas City Duncan Cox, London Daisy Harvey, London Debbie Cervera, Los Angeles Luke Lombardi, Los Angeles Alana Martinez, Los Angeles Jackson Pitofsky, Los Angeles Claudia Bruder, Miami Angela Brysiewicz, New York Lauren Francis, New York JungWon Kwon, New York Shannon McMullan, New York Silverio Patrizi, New York Jason Silbiger, New York Natalia Zawisny, New York Jennifer Grau, Newark Courtney Wells, Philadelphia Amanda Garvey, Portland Xiaoshu Du, Portland Dean Schoenberg, San Diego Kimberly Kung, San Francisco Zoe McBride, San Francisco
Marshall Roberts, San Francisco Maggie Smith, San Francisco Gary Lin, Shanghai Elizabeth Chong, Washington, DC Kathryn Williamson, Washington, DC Evan Lapointe, West Hartford Corporate Sustainability Steering Committee Thomas Berry, Vice President Greg Briggs, Principal Raymond Daddazio, President Robert DeScenza, President John Fairbairn, Vice President Human Resources Faz Ehsan, Managing Principal Gunnar Hubbard, Principal Leonard Joseph, Principal Jim Kent, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Gary Mancini, Managing Principal Peter Quigley, Principal Steve Ross, Chief Information Officer Lynn Simon, Senior Vice President Michael Squarzini, Managing Principal Mary Williams, Senior Project Engineer
Portland green champions and Sustainability practice staff meet for an Earth Day lunch and discuss ways to green their office.
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
41
Financial Responsibility
Progress Report During the same period when our income, revenue and employee numbers have grown significantly, our total carbon footprint has grown, which was expected following the late 2015 merger. At the close of 2016, we had 1,161 employees – but for reporting on indicators in this report, we used the mid-year count of 1,191 employees. Our employees appear to have good engagement, and our retention numbers are comparable to the industry average.
Net Revenue
Income from Project Billings
Number of Employees
207
785
850
$159M
$154M
$168M
$128M
22%
$144M
$166M
951
$220M
$207M
1,161
220
growth in employees since 2015 merger
0
0
2013 2014 2015 2016
42
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
2013 2014 2015 2016
2013 2014 2015 2016
84%
88%
3.95/5
4.02/5
4.02
88%
40
4741
30
32
3,827
Retention of Employees
0.0
2013 2014 2015 2016
2013 2014 2015 2016
N/A
N/A
2,393
3,020
4.5
4.4
4.7
4,741
5.6
5.6
Average Employee Engagement Score (from engagement survey)
86%
Embodied (Life Cycle) Carbon in Our Structural Projects (kgCO2 per ft2)
33
Total Carbon Footprint (tons CO2e)
40
Average Annual Carbon Footprint per Employee, without Offsets (tons CO2e)
0
0
2013 2014 2015 2016
2013 2014 2015 2016
0.00
2013 2014 2015 2016
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
43
Where Are We Going?
?
Looking ahead to next year, we expect to achieve progress toward our people, planet & profit goals in these specific areas: 2017 Targets Reduce electricity emissions from office operations by at least 8 percent to return to pre-2016 levels. Achieve carbon neutral business operations
Increase the number of employees who provide service to their local communities using the company’s volunteer benefits to 20 percent. Increase employee volunteerism in our communities
Increase the diversity of hires for technical staff positions by 10 percent, and decrease the attrition rate Foster of diverse workplace diversity and employees by inclusion 10 percent. 44
Thornton Tomasetti 2016 Sustainability Report
We can happily celebrate the early achievement our 2018 target of attaining a per capita carbon footprint of 4.0 tons of CO2e per person, yet we still have work to do to reach our aspirational goal of carbon-neutral business operations by the year 2030. As employee numbers and office locations increased between December 2015 and 2016, so did our electricity emissions, now the largest contributor (35 percent) to our carbon footprint. An 8 percent reduction in emissions from electricity use will reduce our per capita electricity emissions footprint, with RECs, to 1.25 tons of CO2e per person, bringing us below 2015 levels. We can reach this target by continuing to seek LEED Gold or higher certification when offices move or undergo renovations, which can reduce electricity use in those locations by approximately 30 percent, and by achieving reductions through changes in occupant behavior with help from our green champions. Planned changes to IT systems may also significantly reduce Thornton Tomasetti’s electricity use. In addition, more offices are purchasing green power to offset their electricity consumption.
An employee survey conducted in 2016 shows 52 percent of respondents feel there are “opportunities for me to connect with my community (i.e., volunteerism) while using my skills.” Although the firm offers employees eight hours of paid time annually for volunteering in their communities and more than 10 hours of additional paid time for participating in the ACE Mentor program, we find that only 15 percent of employees are using these benefits. We know, through the many stories that are shared on the company’s intranet, that our employees are avid volunteers in their personal time. With more frequent and improved communication about opportunities for volunteerism, we can increase hours of service related to our policies. We find that our people are more likely to use these benefits when volunteerism is a group activity, organized by a local champion. We will support our green champions in organizing volunteer days for their local offices.
In the first year of the firm’s new inclusion and diversity initiative, we have set measurable targets for what we hope to achieve. We will compare new-hire and attrition data on ethnicity, race and gender from previous years to 2017 numbers to determine if we’ve met these targets. We define diversity broadly to include age, education, expertise and everything else that defines who we are, but in the flagship year of this initiative, we will measure the data we are able to gather mainly for employment purposes. It is important to note that although this goal focuses on diversity, we are leading the initiative with inclusion.
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