Cut your energy bills with these award-winning ideas

What does going full tilt on environmentally green efforts get you, really, in this economy?
A lot, say the two winners of this year’s Practice Greenhealth Environmental Leadership Circle Award.
Lower energy, water, and waste bills have all come thanks to aggressive recycling programs, not to mention goodwill built among patients and the community, says Dawn LeBaron, vice president of hospital services at Fletcher Allen Health Care of Burlington, VT, one of the facilities that received the award.
The only way to convince administrators to jump on the bandwagon is to save money with your environmental initiatives. That can be a tough sell because the stigma of green construction and other waste-reducing schemes is that they cost more to do the right thing. But that hasn’t proven to be necessarily true.