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 we see a 62% increase in the number of facilities submitting local spend data since 2021. More impressively though, we also see a 149% increase in spending on local food. This tells us that while more people are tracking local food spend, they are also spending more on it than they were a few years ago - in fact the average local spend went from $193,696.92 in 2021 to $298,261.32 in 2024!
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 one of two "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.