A. Kreiner Company – Bringing a Focus on Environmental & Economic Sustainability to our Clients

A.Kreiner Company is a sustainability-based consulting firm located in Delaware, US with expertise in energy, climate change, environment, agriculture and local food issues, green building operations and pollution prevention/cleaner production.

We believe that environmental and economic sustainability are entwined; that it both makes sense and saves cents to take actions that reduce our environmental footprints. We infuse this belief into all our work with clients.

Since our establishment in 2005, we have been assisting public- and private-sector organizations with:

Sustainability Initiatives;
Strategic Planning;
Policy Evaluation and Development;
Project and Program Development and Management;
Meeting Facilitation;
Outreach and Engagement;
Grant Writing; and
Business Process Redesign.

Organizations vary widely in the type of support they need to advance their sustainability goals. Therefore, sustainability assistance and projects take many forms.

Our sustainability projects have ranged from developing localvore and fresh-from-the-farm programs to creating and managing staff engagement and office certification programs to energy and material use data gathering and analysis.

Our work never gets boring; there is always something new and different to work on.

The Energy & Sustainability Leaders Roundtable

One of our favorite projects is operating the Energy & Sustainability Leaders Roundtable. The Roundtable is a member-based regional forum where businesses and institutions meet quarterly to exchange information on their efforts to reduce their environmental and/or carbon footprints.

Members learn from speakers and through sharing their own case studies of sustainability and greenhouse gas emission/energy use reduction practices. One of the beauties of the Roundtable is the wide variety of the organizations: hospital systems, supermarkets, large financial institutions, chemical and pharmaceutical companies, and small non-profit organizations and businesses. Their operations are quite different, but they share the same goals and are able to learn from each other’s efforts.

The backbone of much of our sustainability work involves developing plans for implementing programs and systems that will increase the sustainability (or decrease the environmental impact) of an area or organization. A few of the more interesting plans and projects include:

Dover-Kent County Regional Bicycle Plan for 2030, which included facilitating the Bicycle Working Group through development of its vision, goals and objectives, and identifying and prioritizing on- and off-road projects throughout the county for implementation.
Delaware City Eco-Tourism Plan, a 6-month process utilizing teams to develop an action-oriented ecotourism plan addressing interests of hikers, cyclists, bird watchers, canoeists and historical tourists.
Developing and implementing staff and faculty initiatives to achieve the goals in the University of Pennsylvania’s Climate Action Plan. Initiatives include:staff eco-reps program; green office certification program; 30 x 30 challenge; sustainability trainings; developing faculty research projects based on campus sustainability efforts, and creating a faculty sustainability discussion group. We developed a carbon calculator for actions in the green office certification program.
2009 Delaware Energy Plan, a year-long process that involved five work groups, with over 100 participants from state agencies, local governments, educational institutions, businesses, NGO’s and the general public.

Strategic planning

For organizations, whether they are for-profit, not-for-profit, governmental or institutional, having a strong, functional strategic plan is key to the success of organizations, programs and projects.

nagegroup2 A strategic plan should be a living document, guiding daily implementation and reassessed regularly to ensure that it continues to serve the needs of the program, project or organization.

Developing a strategic plan with an eye to sustainability results in an even stronger, more action oriented plan.

We have worked with a variety of organizations to develop action-oriented strategic plans:

Clean Water Network
Delaware Energy Office
Clean Cities Coalition
First State Historic Park
Delaware Municipal Electric Corporation

2015 marks the 10-year anniversary of A.Kreiner Company. We have worked with clients across the United States and are now refocusing its efforts to bring our combination focus on environmental and economic sustainability to work with businesses and organizations globally.

AKreiner company website

This presentation was provided by Andrea Kreiner, principal and policy advsior of A.Kreiner co.

Business is going green. Even if some of the Corporate Social Responsibility profiles (CSR) many companies like to garnish themselves with is just greenwashing, many do serious and good work. We cannot wait for politicians to take the lead. Those who can and will take responsibility must do it.

Initiatives with ideas for a more environmentally friendly future are important steps towards a future sustainable society and the coming green eco economy.

The more companies taking CSR seriously, the quicker and less painful the necessary road to sustainability will be.