Mountain Team Limits Environmental Footprint and Earns Actively Green Certification

June 4, 2026 – Eagle, CO — The Encore Electric Mountain Business Unit is taking steps to reduce the company’s construction-related environmental footprint through green construction initiatives created by the Encore Electric Green Team. Construction significantly affects the environment through consumption, pollution, habitat loss, and greenhouse gas emissions, but sustainable practices can mitigate these impacts. To reduce this impact, the Encore Electric Green Team finds ways to make construction in the Colorado mountains more environmentally friendly by participating in the Actively Green Certification Program. 

Encore Electric project in the Colorado mountains

Credit: Paul Brokering

The Green Team stays up to date on the latest environmental changes, laws, and programs happening in Eagle County and the surrounding mountain areas. The Actively Green program, led by the Walking Mountains Science Center, is designed to help businesses in Eagle adopt best practices to improve efficiency, customer satisfaction, and environmental stewardship. To become Actively Green Certified, companies must make sustainable changes to their operation each year. 

“Actively Green is a certification that provides a framework of sustainable business criteria and performance indicators that support any business in elevating performance with the use of best management practices specific to sustainability principles,” states the Walking Mountains website 

Actively Green Award Ceremony

Photo taken at Actively Green Award Ceremony in 2025.

The Encore Electric Green Team was started in 2015, and since then, has been Actively Green Certified. Some of the initiatives include recycling, composting, and decreasing the amount of energy being used at the office by changing all the lights from fluorescents to LEDs.  

“Every year, we come up with different goals. We started very simply with recycling and decreasing the amount of energy that we use,” said Liz Bankert, project accountant and member of the Green Team. “We also did an LED swap program for years with Eagle County, where they would provide us with a bunch of LED lights and people would come into the Encore office with their old ones, and we’d swap them.” 

The Green Team’s most recent initiative in 2026 was providing each Encore Electric teammate in the mountains a reusable water bottle to minimize the use of single use plastic bottles on project sites and in the office. Each water bottle has a sticker that states, “I’m saving about 156 plastic water bottles per year by using this reusable bottle.”

Green Team
The Actively Green Certification Program was created after the town of Vail hosted the 2015 FIS Alpine World Ski Championships. Encore Electric completed all the electrical work for the global event. In addition to Vail gaining global exposure for the event, town leaders wanted to create a long-term model for sustainable tourism by making Vail a sustainable destination. To make Vail a sustainable destination, the Actively Green program was created. Since then, the Encore Electric Green Team has continued to take steps to minimize the company’s environmental footprint, earning an Actively Green Certification for the last eleven years.  

In addition to Bankert, the Encore Electric Green Team is made up of Director of the Mountain Business Unit Josh Pizzino, Journeyman Lead Tyler Pasterski, Project Engineer Nick Signorelli, Project Coordinator Tammy Chambers, and Project Manager Nate Netzhammer. 

“I want to do my part to contribute to better things and not be complacent in the status quo. Construction is not a clean thing, and there can be a ton of waste. We want to neutralize that, even just a little bit, and be better than the average,” Pizzino said.

The Green Team highway cleanup programs
In addition to the initiatives previously mentioned, the Green Team has also participated in several highway cleanup programs during springtime and has partnered with the Salvation Army to help the community.  

“We have helped the Salvation Army with boxes of food during the holidays, by packing and delivering them. The Salvation Army also used to have a greenhouse, and our electricians volunteered their time to complete the electrical for them,” Bankert said.  

Looking ahead, the Green Team will continue to support the mountain community and find new sustainable steps to reduce the company’s environmental footprint.  

Actively Green Certification badge