Ohio County encourages green living with sustainability competitions

Key Takeaways

A little friendly competition never hurt anyone in Montgomery County, Ohio when it comes to taking the steps necessary to reduce carbon emissions and save energy costs.

The county launched the Bring Your Green Challenge to engage organizations in sustainability competitions. Using a web-based software platform designed by the county, participants learn about energy use effectiveness, track progress and engage with other competitors throughout the community. 

Lamees Mubaslat, Montgomery County sustainability manager and Dayton Regional Green director, said prior to the Bring Your Green Challenge, the county launched a Green Business Certification Program, which serves as a checklist to help businesses become more sustainable and receive enhanced rebates. 

Learn More

For more information about the Bring Your Green Challenge, contact Montgomery County Sustainability Manager Lamees Mubaslat. 

Montgomery County’s Bring Your Green Challenge is the recipient of a Best in Category 2020 NACo Achievement Award in the County Resiliency: Infrastructure, Energy and Sustainability category. 

Businesses that receive a green business certification can join the Bring Your Green Challenge to increase sustainability efforts for cash prizes. The challenge is inclusive for any organizations with the goal of achieving large-scale energy and resources reductions while educating the community about sustainability. 

Mubaslat said she wanted to find a way to engage county employees in more sustainability programs, which led to the county’s first Bring Your Green Challenge in 2015.

Through a partnership with Dayton Power & Light, the challenge was available to all of the utility’s customers in commercial buildings in Montgomery County and surrounding counties. 

“We wanted to do something beyond just a checklist,” Mubaslat said. “We know that businesses have done energy efficiency projects because they’ve received enhanced rebates from the utility company, but we couldn’t capture those results.”

The Bring Your Green platform allowed businesses to track their progress by using their utility bills and adding data about energy, gas, electricity and water use. The challenge is available to all levels including cities, city organizations, people within organizations and citizens at large. 

Through the competition, more efficiency means more points, which are calculated automatically through the platform by completing various challenges such as installing solar fields, building electric charging stations or having a green fleet of vehicles. 

“The more they recycle, the more points they get for waste diversion and the system translates those numbers into greenhouse gas emission reduction,” Mubaslat said.

Other competitions involve energy rating tools, energy reduction, rebates and resources, waste and water reduction and employee and citizen engagement. 

“It gives local governments ideas of what they could do locally to help their community become more green,” Mubaslat said. 

Participants are able to see where they stand online at the data-tracking leaderboard. 

More than 200 locations from the business and government communities participated in the inaugural challenge where winners received a total of $80,000 in cash prizes from Dayton Power & Light. 

“Competition drives innovation, and it drives participation at the same time,” Mubaslat said. 

In 2017, the county launched Bring your Green 2.0 which included a Healthy Schools platform targeting environmental standards at schools. More than 100 student teams participated. The latest challenge launched in 2019 and added two additional platforms — green government and green eats. 

The sustainability challenges have reduced more than 12.5 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere and more than 2.6 million tons of waste diverted from landfills. On average, the challenges’ participants see $851,000 in energy cost savings. 

These reductions are equivalent to taking 1,700 homes off the grid, 2,500 cars off the road or planting over 350,000 trees, according to the Bring Your Green Challenge website. 

Over 400 businesses in total have participated in the Bring Your Green Challenge including local governments, schools, universities and non-profits to engage in sustainability competitions. 

Mubaslat emphasized the inclusiveness of the program for employees, students or other community members. 

“We really tried to make it as inclusive as possible to allow everyone in the community to do something to become more green and sustainable,” Mubaslat said. 

The program is open to any business or community in Ohio. Mubaslat said she is interested in opening the challenge to all counties across the country. 

“I would love to see this as the way that different counties throughout the state can track their progress and compete with each other,” she said.