What is Earth Day?
Earth day is a day to remind everyone how fragile our planet is and to reflect on the importance of protecting it. It is celebrated annually on the 22nd of April and was founded in 1970 by a 25-year-old graduate student, Denis Hayes, who organized the first Earth Day celebration. The success of that event, which brought together 20 million Americans, helped to spark the modern environmental movement.
This year's Earth Day Theme is Invest In Our Planet. Making the transition to practices that are more sustainable for people, communities, and the planet—these kinds of changes don’t just happen. Infrastructure is an environmental issue, so we must focus on building healthy cities, countries, and economies.
To celebrate this milestone, we’re talking about how healthy infrastructure is an environmental issue. The health of our buildings and infrastructure directly impacts the well-being of humans and the environment. Therefore, maintaining the built environment—our buildings, dams, bridges, power grids, and transportation systems—is crucial!
As a New York City-based company, we are champions of cities. The urban landscape's efficiencies are precise: public transportation, tall buildings, and walkability. Yet the stress the built environment places on the natural world is increasingly concerning.
It is in our environmental interest to regularly maintain and improve our infrastructure to boost sustainability and thus better protect our earth.
Potholes, water main breaks, power grid failures, and bridges collapsing are only some of the potential catastrophes when infrastructure breaks down. But unfortunately, society tends to focus on infrastructure only when there is a palpable disaster.
Strategic planning around routine maintenance, preventative maintenance, repair, and long-term capital planning is essential.
We make software and solutions to help facility executives who care for Infrastructure and develop these critical capital plans, which aim to protect the life-cycle of physical assets that make up the complex facility portfolios they manage. The extent to which the programs can maintain quality building operations, in turn, contributes to the future of the built environment and the natural world.
In the Environmental Protection Agency's recent report, Our Built and Natural Environments, the EPA emphasizes that how we build the built environment has an indirect and direct impact on the natural world and human health. In particular, it articulates "the relationship between the built environment and the quality of air, water, land resources, habitat, and human health."
Technology can help us better manage and maintain physical assets in our most critical facilities, such as hospitals, schools, and government buildings. Further, with the proliferation of IoT, Smart Cities, and connected devices, monitoring the health of building operations is becoming more transparent.
The EPA's report highlights that the "development patterns, including transportation infrastructure, building location and design—the built environment—directly affect the natural environment."
At Intellis, we're excited about the future! With our capital planning and facility management software, we disrupt how facility executives manage and improve both the built and natural environments.
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Intellis was founded in 1996 to enhance and elevate the human experience of the built environment through the development and implementation of innovative technology solutions.
Our history is firmly rooted in cutting-edge data collection. We made our name by transforming how organizations collect and analyze information related to physical assets during critical Facility Condition Assessments (FCA). We created the first configurable mobile platform to identify, document, rate, and collect data on deficiencies. For organizations and firms with multiple sites, regions, and requirements, that technology was—and is—integral to efficiency and accuracy.
In celebration of Earth Day, we are continuing our commitment to our original mission by developing new and innovative ways to manage facilities with software and emerging technology like Building Information Modeling so that we can empower facility executives to better support sustainability, improve energy efficiency, and in turn better protect our planet. #WeAreIntellis
Talk to us directly to learn more!
