The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently granted Nichols’ headquarters the coveted ENERGY STAR® 
certification, signifying the facility performs in the top 25 percent of similar buildings in energy efficiency.
ENERGY STAR® is a performance scale used by the EPA to determine a building’s efficiency relative to similar facilities nationwide. A building can score anywhere from 1 to 100, but only those with a score of 75 or higher are eligible to receive the ENERGY STAR® certification.
The EPA has been using the ENERGY STAR® partnership since 1992 to reduce greenhouse gases. Today, over 65 products, 1.4 million homes, and 20,000 commercial and buildings have received the certification. And we’re proud to be the newest member of the ENERGY STAR® club.
This award didn’t come without some hard work. Since 2007, we’ve been taking steps to reduce our energy consumption by managing usage and making cost-effective upgrades. The result? A 20% decrease in energy use and an EPA score of 89. That’s not only good for the environment – it’s good for business. Over the past 20 years, business and families have saved more than $230 billion in utility bills while preventing over 1.8 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases from being released into the atmosphere.
To make the final push towards our ENERGY STAR® certification, we replaced our lights, studied our light levels and made reductions where possible, and installed a heating and air conditioning system that automatically monitors CO2 output. But our work isn’t done yet. There are always ways to improve. Moving forward, we’ll be focusing on getting our other facilities up to the standard of our headquarters, so this will not be the last ENERGY STAR® we receive. We promise you that.
Saving energy (and saving money!) is easier than you think. You can calculate your greenhouse gas emissions here and learn all about the ENERGY STAR® program here.