Green Building Tips

Julie Starr • July 8, 2021



Green building
can help you to save energy, lower your operating costs, and love a more environmentally friendly life. Everyone benefits from a green building.

Use Space Efficiently

Larger spaces need more energy to heat, cool, and light. The decisions that you make when you design a building will impact the environment for years to come, so you need to pay attention to the way you use your space. Where you can, minimize the size of the building. A smaller footprint means a lower energy load, and less open space is used. Using the right materials and equipment helps too. Buy used equipment, instead of new, at FleetUpMarketplace

Invest In Insulation

An HVAC system is one of the main energy drains in a building. If you invest in high-quality insulation, you will be better able to maintain the interior temperature.

Insulation keeps cold air in, and hot air out during the summer, and the opposite in winter, reducing the workload on your HVAC system.

Use Solar Energy

The roof deflects the sun’s rays from your building. You can harness those rays to provide some power. 

Solar energy is growing fast because it’s clean and has almost no ongoing costs to collect. Solar panels can be placed strategically on your roof. Any power that you are able to produce and don’t consume can be sold back to your electric company. 

You could also choose to fit a battery that can be used to store any excess power. At night, when you can’t get solar power, the batteries can be used instead. This helps you to reduce the amount of electricity you need to pay for even more. 

Make Space For Gardens

Massive farms producing food can be very damaging to the environment. Runoff from pesticides pollutes the water table, while heavy farming equipment releases greenhouse gases. If you’re designing a green building, you should understand the importance of producing fresh produce. 

Residential and commercial properties should try to find some space for gardening to be done. At home, a food garden reduces your grocery spend and can teach children about where food comes from. Gardening has a lot of health benefits that companies can use to help stressed employees. 

The extra greenery also helps to clean the air. 

Adapt To Nature. Don’t Replace It

A new building changes the space it occupies forever. A new structure casts new shadows, changes the way that rainwater reaches rivers, lakes, and streams, and forces animals that lived on the site to move on somewhere else or be exterminated. New traffic patterns come into play, increasing road noise, and requiring new parking spaces, reducing the local tree population. 

Architects who want to build in a much greener, more sustainable way should make sure they take the time to carry out a detailed site survey. This survey should look at how water flows, and how nature is currently interacting with the land. Where possible, you should try to balance the needs of the development with the needs of any existing wildlife and plant life that is inhabiting the land at the moment. 

Over the last couple of decades, an enormous amount of the planet’s wilderness has been destroyed. We all have a responsibility to do more to reduce the impact of the ever-growing urban landscapes on nature and the planet. Including large green spaces in our developments is a good place to start, but there is more than can be done. 

For example, when constructing, it’s better to use locally sourced materials. Layouts should be adapted to the existing landscape. Build with the local landscape in mind, such as including sliding glass walls and doors that can be pushed back when the temperatures allow it to let some of nature in. Architects should try to make their buildings blend in with their surroundings, through locally sourced building materials. 

Those who advocate for green building practices are all working very hard to teach architects and construction companies how to best minimize the impact their work has on the planet. They can learn to preserve natural water flow and avoid site preparation that is expensive and excessive. 

In the construction of transportation networks, environmentally conscious design can be used to create bridges for animals. These bridges are important, as they allow migratory species to avoid having to crossroads and highways, and instead walk over them safely. This reduces the number of collisions between vehicles and animals, keeping humans and animals safer. These bridges also support the local ecosystem by allowing natural migratory patterns to continue. 

By Julie Starr June 20, 2025
In today’s competitive food and beverage (F&B) landscape, traceability is no longer a compliance checkbox—it’s a differentiator. The ability to track every step of a product’s journey, from origin to shelf, is vital for regulatory accuracy and to ensure brand integrity, supply chain agility, and consumer trust. Add smart sensors to the mix: the quiet, tireless observers revolutionizing supply chain intelligence. Traceability Has a Data Problem Despite digitization across many F&B operations, most traceability systems still rely on fragmented or manual data inputs. Batch numbers, barcodes, and handwritten logs often stand between a supplier and clarity when things go wrong. This approach struggles with latency and scale. When contamination or delays occur, root cause analysis is slow, costly, and damaging. Smart sensors shift this paradigm by embedding real-time, contextual intelligence into every stage of the supply chain . Whether monitoring humidity in transit or recording fill-level precision in bottling plants, they remove the guesswork by turning physical conditions into structured, time-stamped data. From Passive Monitoring to Active Optimization Sensors used to be reactive tools, alerting operators to anomalies. But smart sensors now play a proactive role in process control. They measure, and they interpret. For example, temperature sensors embedded in cold chain logistics can dynamically adjust cooling systems or flag threshold breaches before spoilage occurs. These advancements reduce waste and loss at a systemic level. In a production facility, smart sensors integrated with PLCs can enforce recipe compliance, verify clean-in-place processes, and detect micro-stoppages in real-time. This enables operations to pivot faster and isolate inefficiencies before they cascade downstream. Trust is Built on Transparency Consumers are paying more attention to what they eat and drink. They’re looking beyond labels, expecting visibility into how ingredients are sourced, processed, and handled. Smart sensors make this level of transparency achievable —without burdening manufacturers with excessive manual oversight. By capturing metadata throughout production and distribution, these sensors create a digital footprint that’s tamper-resistant and instantly accessible. When this data is integrated with a central platform, brands can respond confidently to audits, recalls, and quality assurance challenges with a level of precision that would be impossible through legacy systems. Intelligence Without Infrastructure Overhaul One common misconception is that adding smart sensors requires a top-down reinvention of supply chain infrastructure. In reality, companies can deploy edge sensors in a modular, scalable way. Many modern solutions offer plug-and-play functionality, allowing for fast integration with existing machinery and MES systems. This is where suppliers like alps-machine.com are reshaping expectations. Rather than pushing proprietary ecosystems, they design sensor-ready equipment with interoperability in mind. This future-proofs investment and keeps businesses nimble in the face of regulatory or market shifts. Designing for Data Longevity Sensors are only as powerful as the context they capture. A smart implementation ensures the data collected can be standardized, stored securely, and accessed meaningfully across departments. This means moving beyond local dashboards toward centralized, queryable datasets that inform everything from supplier contracts to marketing claims. As AI and predictive analytics become more accessible, these data-rich environments will unlock new capabilities—such as predicting demand spikes based on real-time freshness indicators or adjusting production schedules dynamically based on in-transit sensor feedback. Final Thoughts: Smarter Isn’t Optional Traceability isn’t solved by more paperwork—it’s solved by embedded intelligence. Smart sensors don’t just help businesses know what happened; they help prevent the wrong things from happening at all. For companies in the food and beverage sector, adopting smart sensors is less about chasing innovation and more about enabling resilience, speed, and confidence in every decision.
By Julie Starr June 5, 2025
If you're lucky enough to have a garden as part of your business, taking some time to set it up for summer is a great investment of your energy. Not only will it be ready for your customers to spend time in, but you can also incorporate some eco-friendly elements into it. Many people just think about the property and what eco-friendly updates they can make , but there are plenty that you can implement in your garden. This gives you the best of both worlds. You own a sacred and beautiful place for your customers to spend their summer, and at the same time, you can do your part for a better planet. If this is the route you want to take, then you also need to consider how to do this with the different seasons. To help you on your journey, here are some top tips for preparing your garden for summer. Plant trees and flowers Planting trees and flowers in your garden is a must. It will make a beautiful scene of nature for everyone to enjoy. Trees will provide people and animals with shade, as well as provide a habitat for wildlife. More trees are needed in the world because they purify the air that we breathe. Flowers, especially if you plant with pollinators in mind, can be an excellent way to attract bees and butterflies, which contribute largely to the earth. Use natural pest control When preparing your garden for summer, you can do this more sustainably and kindly by using natural pest control. Simply by planting trees and flowers, you are likely to attract lots of different wildlife, some of which may destroy your efforts. While all wildlife should be considered, you may need to take measures. Some better and more eco-friendly ways you can do this, as opposed to spraying toxic chemicals onto your plants and into the air, you can implement companion planting, using protective nets over your crops, choosing resilient plants, using natural repellents, and encouraging natural predators so nature can do its thing. Maintain your garden Maintaining your garden in itself can make it more eco-friendly. Composting your garden waste regularly, and kitchen waste can help you to reduce overall waste and create nutrient-rich soil. This is a great cycle of sustainability. You can also keep on top of things that need cleaning and replacing, so you can recycle the materials for other garden structures and projects, and repurpose things around your garden before they become waste. If you have features in your garden like a swimming pool, then a regular pool maintenance service is going to be vital in keeping your water consumption to a minimum, as when it is cleaned and maintained, it will need to be drained and refilled less as well as using less energy. You could also consider how you can use natural purification methods to reduce chemical usage and support biodiversity right in your backyard. Your garden is just an eco-friendly project waiting to be built. Use these top tips to help you get started.