The 2026 Environmental Excellence Awards are open and will be due on Wednesday April 15.
November is a time to reflect and give thanks. At Practice Greenhealth, we have a lot to be grateful for, and want to recognize these accomplishments with you, our partners. Every day in November, we'll be sharing data to show our appreciation for all of your hard work. Today, we are grateful that the median water use intensity across all facilities decreased by 4 gallons per square foot - from 44.1 to 40.0 gallons. Water is an increasingly precious resource, and this reduction represents millions of gallons saved across our partner network. We’re especially grateful that the median water savings from alternative irrigation sources doubled from 21,000 to 40,000 gallons, showing that facilities are getting creative about where their water comes from and how they use it.
We're pleased to share that updates for the 2026 cycle have been focused on user experience updates and increased transparency. We have:
- Cut questions on the application by 20%
- Created a new version of the Partner for Change specifically for systems to share their system-level data and their successes.
- Made the autoscore (one of the 4 scoring frameworks we use) transparent by publishing how much each question is worth on the Facility type 1 pdf of the application.
For more specifics on how the awards application has changed, check out the "What's New in 2026" video on the Metrics and Awards landing page of the Practice Greenhealth website, or join us for our second and final "Excel at your Environmental Excellence Awards application" partner events to hear a walk through of those changes and ask any questions you may have
If you have questions, need assistance or technical support, or need help setting up or updating an awards account, please contact the Awards team or call our support hotline at 888-508-0198.