Greening Our Routine

By applying the spirit and intent of Green Your Routine to our own operations, the City of Fort Lauderdale maximizes performance, controls costs, and ensures the resiliency of essential programs and services for our neighbors.

Greening Our Routine is a framework for innovation and change related to sustainability within the City of Fort Lauderdale. Like the community-oriented Green Your Routine, the emphasis is on the triple bottom line: changing how people think and what they do in their jobs on a daily basis in order to protect the environment, practicing fiscal responsibility, and being accountable to each other as colleagues.

At selected priority facilities and sites, the City has implemented the Greening Our Routine framework using the International Organization for Standardization’s ISO14001, which brings a systematic approach to innovation that improves our service performance, lowers costs, improves safety, incorporates new technology, and involves employees in the areas of energy, water and material conservation, pollution prevention, waste reduction, climate emergency preparedness, and wildlife and natural resource protection.

Getting Started

While we consistently strive to meet or exceed regulatory standards, the formalization of an approach to performance improvement is part of our overall program of planning, management and accountability driven by our City’s vision and strategic plan. Using the ISO requirements and resources as the foundation for “Greening Our Routine,” we can achieve peak performance quickly by building on the experiences of hundreds of communities around the world.

To gain that knowledge, the City participated in Virginia Tech’s Environmental and Sustainability Management System (ESMS)training and technical assistance program from 2013 to 2015. ESMS is a set of management processes and procedures that allow an organization to analyze, control and reduce the environmental impact of its activities, projects and services as well as operate with greater efficiency and control.

In the spring of 2013, the City created two teams to evaluate two facilities: the Fleet Facility and the George T. Lohmeyer Wastewater Treatment Plant. Each team has identified significant environmental aspects for analysis and management system application. Actions taken in these two facilities strengthened the City's operational performance with regard to hazardous waste disposal, energy usage, and stormwater management, and are challenges that we encourage all Fort Lauderdale businesses to address.

In preparation for initial certification to the ISO 14001:2004 standard, City staff was trained in General ESMS Awareness and all procedures and documentation were finalized. Upon obtaining certification of the two fencelines to the ISO 14001:2004 standard in September 2015, the City joined a rare group of municipalities within the United States that have more than one fenceline certified to this standard.   As part of the maintenance of our certification, we  conducted surveillance audits at both fencelines with our third-party auditor in 2016. In 2017, the two sites were recertified to the updated ISO 14001:2015 standard - one year ahead of schedule!  We continue moving forward in maintaining certification as well as expanding our activities to new fencelines.  Stay tuned to this page for future fenceline additions.

The Environmental and Sustainability Management Policy

As a result of this initiative and in order to ensure its long-term integration within our operations, the City of Fort Lauderdale has established and committed to a formal Citywide Environmental and Sustainability Management Policy. The policy is being introduced to leadership and to all City employees, and must also be followed by any vendors, contractors, or other persons who work for or on behalf of the City.

Employee Training and Follow Up

City employees are introduced to our ESMS policy and processes through training sessions and have access to support materials online. Procedural changes resulting from analysis of the significant aspects are developed, integrated and monitored by staff teams.

More Information

ISO 14001 is based upon W. Edwards Deming’s proven “Plan-Do-Check-Act” cycle and incorporates many of the methods of analysis that the City of Fort Lauderdale and other organizations have been using for a long time to improve and maintain quality. Because of its unique focus on environmental management, ISO14001 is an important new tool. We invite our neighbors to learn more about these standards, and encourage those in our business community to consider adopting them in their workplaces.

Learn along with us!

Click here to see the Significant Aspects for our Fleet Fenceline team's work.  This printable is available in three sizes.

Fleet Fenceline Significant Aspects - Letter Size 

Fleet Fenceline Significant Aspects - Small Poster 

Fleet Fenceline Significant Aspects - Large Poster 

For even more information on environmental and sustainability management systems, access these resources.

International Organization for Standardization (ISO)

Located in Geneva, Switzerland, ISO promotes the development and implementation of voluntary international standards, both for particular products and for environmental management issues. ISO 14000 refers to a series of voluntary standards in the environmental field. Included in the ISO 14000 series are the ISO 14001 EMS Standard that Fort Lauderdale is implementing and other standards in fields such as environmental auditing, environmental performance evaluation, environmental labeling, and life-cycle assessment. The web link above is ISO’s official webpage about the Environmental Management standard. It includes an overview video as well as resources for any size organization.

United States Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA)

The U.S. EPA has an excellent Frequently Asked Questions webpage on why and how communities implement environmental management standards and the benefits to the citizenry

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