Rick Alfandre Architect

Priceless: Healthy Buildings – with Rick Alfandre, Architect

Episode 19

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Hosted by
Ron Kamen

Ron Kamen has decades of expertise & leadership in catalyzing exponential change in sustainable energy adoption with communities, governments, non-profits, and businesses.

Quantum Quote:

“The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.” – Gaylord Nelson 

“Sustainability is living on nature’s income rather than living on its capital.”–   Murray Gell-Mann

How much is it worth to not get sick? What would you pay to not get COVID where you work or live. 

Most of us spend 90% of our lives inside a building at home or work. And the COVID pandemic has made it clearer than ever that we need Clean Indoor Air. 

Architect Rick Alfandre’s mission is to create healthy, sustainable buildings. For nearly 40 years, Rick has worked to create homes and workplaces where fresh, clean indoor air enhances people’s health, improves the ability to think clearly, and increases productivity. 

Today, Rick discusses how the productivity benefits of a healthy building can be worth 30 times the value of the energy savings and how the US military and many others have documented that a healthy building decreases sick time. And the lifetime improvements to productivity can be worth more than the cost of the entire building. 

Rick and his wife built a healthy office building in the Hudson Valley of New York that not only creates more clean energy than it uses, but has an air filtration system that eliminates COVID and other pathogens makes working there safe and gains higher rents from their tenants. 

Get ready to hear Rick Alfandre’s inspirational story and energize.

Supernova 1:  “We need to change the paradigm from Return on Investment to what would you pay to not get COVID? What would you pay to not get sick? What would you pay to feel comfortable in your work environment or in your living environment?”

Supernova 2: “If one person uses 300 square feet and that person gets paid however much in a year, you can begin to quantify the dollars per square foot in payroll costs for that space, which turns out to be orders of magnitude higher than the energy costs – 30 times more perhaps.  At that point, it comes back around to the building owner or the tenant being able to say, well, for me, the return on investment is the productivity enhancements, the health and wellbeing of my employees; or my tenants or my students.”

Supernova 3:”Doing something new isn’t necessarily more expensive. Often subcontractors and contractors want to try something new if it looks like it’s going to be a good thing. They want to learn from it and find a way to implement it going forward.”

Contact:  https://www.alfandre.com/ 

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Episode 19