Easy Building Environmental Health and Safety (EZBuildingEHS)

I was working as an environmental scientist doing environmental health and safety (EHS) audits at buildings across the US but kept finding the same problems everywhere. Most of the property managers and facility engineers I worked with didn’t understand what regulations they were required to comply with and what they were supposed to do. Fines for noncompliance and pollution of soil and groundwater were common. I got frustrated.

The property managers and engineers never had time to research requirements; the regulations changed frequently; and personnel changed. I felt I could make a bigger impact on their issues by developing something that was more widely available than audits and readily accessible. My experience taught me that building management needs to be as simple and as actionable as possible. A lot of sustainability and green buildings is too much idea/talk, and too little action. This is actually one of my favorite things about my system: it's a low cost way to simplify your EHS compliance needs that even your custodial staff can understand and act on.

Our system has been designed to be used by non-environmental personnel – the property managers and maintenance staff. It gives them simple up-to-date checklists to help them comply with the EHS regulations. Key features are that our system is proactive, e.g., it doesn’t wait until you have been fined – it tells you how to avoid fines – and our proof-of-concept system is specific to NYC regulations. Our goal is to develop 50 of our expert systems for 50 major cities in the US and the 50 states.

Built With

• boilers
• building-permits
• department-of-housing-and-urban-development
• nycitymap
• web