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FROM SITE SELECTION MAGAZINE, MARCH 2023 ISSUE |
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ONTARIO
The largest auto parts manufacturer in North America by sales is getting larger by the day.
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INVESTMENT PROFILE: CANADA
Project Arrow is confirmation of the talent and technology abundant in Canada.
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Photo courtesy of Waters
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In January the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) released its annual ranking of U.S. states by LEED-certified gross square footage per capita over the previous calendar year (below). “It was a strong year for LEED certifications across the U.S. as companies and governments embrace LEED as a tool for meeting ESG goals and organizational commitments to climate action, occupant well-being and resource efficiency,” said Peter Templeton, USGBC president and CEO.
As a federal territory, Washington, D.C., does not appear in the official top 10 list of states, but consistently leads the nation because of the federal government’s commitment and District’s commitment to green building. In 2022, said the USGBC, the nation’s capital certified over 46 sq. ft. of space per resident across 115 green building projects. No. 1 state Massachusetts saw 96 buildings encompassing over 26 million sq. ft. become LEED-certified in 2022, equating to nearly 3.7 LEED-certified sq. ft. per resident. They include Waters’ LEED-certified facility in Taunton (pictured above), the first and only LEED-certified chemical manufacturing site in the state.
Rank |
State |
Projects |
Gross area (SqFt) |
2022 GSF Per Capita |
* |
District of Columbia |
115 |
31,759,516 |
46.06 |
1 |
Massachusetts |
96 |
26,442,008 |
3.76 |
2 |
Illinois |
91 |
44,577,321 |
3.48 |
3 |
New York |
142 |
64,042,120 |
3.17 |
4 |
California |
386 |
96,457,139 |
2.44 |
5 |
Maryland |
80 |
14,769,661 |
2.39 |
6 |
Georgia |
66 |
24,068,422 |
2.25 |
7 |
Colorado |
59 |
12,532,909 |
2.17 |
8 |
Virginia |
95 |
16,289,394 |
1.89 |
9 |
Texas |
174 |
48,717,532 |
1.67 |
10 |
Oregon |
36 |
6,066,035 |
1.43 |
In 2022, USGBC surpassed 100,000 LEED-certified projects globally, totaling more than 11 billion certified gross sq. ft. Additional information on the 2022 rankings, along with a listing of notable projects, can be found on USGBC’s Top 10 States for LEED page.
How do the Top 10 states fare in Site Selection’s rankings of corporate project attraction and business climate? California, Georgia, Texas and Illinois appear in all three Top 10s. These data are crucial to the annual Sustainability Rankings published by Site Selection each July. — Adam Bruns
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COLORADO – BUSINESS COMES TO LIFE 2023 |
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HEALTH TECH
The health tech sector is changing medical care in Colorado and beyond.
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HIGHER EDUCATION
Colorado’s colleges and universities compete to win on the national stage.
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SITE SELECTION RECOMMENDS |
If your organization is one of the thousands examining or already practicing a four-day work week, you’ll want to see the resources we were tipped off to this week courtesy of the Reynolds Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. “In case you missed it, the largest pilot program for a four-day workweek launched last June in the United Kingdom with 2,900 workers from 61 companies participating,” the Center informs us, noting the program’s sponsorship by advocacy organization the 4 Day Week Global Foundation. The results include the finding that 92% of the companies state that they will continue the four-day workweek schedule. A number of states are examining the idea, the entire nation of Australia this month introduced a pilot program, and a number of companies such as Toshiba, Panasonic, Bolt and Basecamp have made varying degrees of commitment to the concept. Buildremote reports that 271 companies are trying it out as of February. Among the Reynolds Center’s historical observations: “In 1956, Richard Nixon — then Vice President of the United States — stated that a four-day workweek was ‘inevitable’ in the ‘not-so-distant future’ and the hopes of the administration were to ‘double everyone’s standard of living’ and have a ‘fuller family life for every American.’ ” Topics like this are found throughout Site Selection’s annual Workforce reports.
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Japan
Driven in part by demand from the electric vehicle sector, Mitsubishi Electric announced this week that it will “double a previously announced investment plan to approximately 260 billion yen in the five-year period to March 2026 mainly for constructing a new wafer plant to increase production of silicon carbide (SiC) power semiconductors.” The new 100-billion-yen factory will incorporate an owned facility in the Shisui area of Kumamoto Prefecture. In addition, the company will newly invest approximately 10 billion yen in a new factory that will consolidate existing operations, currently dispersed throughout the Fukuoka area, for the assembly and inspection of power semiconductors. As of March 2022, the company operates 203 consolidated subsidiary locations worldwide and employs nearly 145,700 people.
California
As reported by Data Center Dynamics and other outlets, Amazon has made this investment in a property that was formerly home to an insulation factory operated by Owens Corning that closed last year. The property was originally slated for logistics development by Panattoni. Meanwhile, Amazon is planning to construct at least one data center complex at properties located about three miles away in Santa Clara that it purchased last year — the first self-built data centers AWS pursued in the city as it adds to a Bay Area portfolio that includes leased data center capacity with Equinix and Digital Realty. “The company is also developing a campus in the City of Gilroy, to the south of Santa Clara,” Data Center Dynamics reports. “It is also leasing a new data center from Hines further north in Hayward.”
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Photo ©Ballyhoura Fáilte courtesy of Tourism Ireland
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Tomorrow is a certain Irish holiday. So it’s a nice time to gaze out on an Irish landscape. This one is located at the crossroads of Munster, on the borders of Tipperary, Limerick and Cork counties, in a region known as Ballyhoura Country. The local tourism authority describes it as “an area of undulating green pastures, woodlands, hills and mountains. The ancient and unspoilt landscape, an abundance of significant heritage sites, thrilling outdoor activities and friendly people make it the perfect place to discover rural Ireland.”
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