Sustainability That Starts With Using Less

Our Approach to Sustainability

Most sustainability pages open with a list of upgrades. Ours opens with what we left out. 10 Federal Storage facilities are fully contactless: you rent, sign your lease, and pay online, and your gate and unit codes arrive by text and email. No one is stationed on site, so there's no staffed office to heat, cool, and light during business hours, and no daily drive to open up and lock up.

That operating model is our starting point. On top of it, we've added efficient lighting and temperature controls, water-saving fixtures and landscaping, and paperless billing at every property.

Sustainability also covers how we treat people and the rules we hold ourselves to. Our social and governance commitments follow, along with a short list of claims we don't make.

Self Storage Starts With a Smaller Footprint

The median self-storage facility uses less than half the energy per square foot of the median U.S. office building.

Storage buildings don't need much energy to do their job. Most units are never heated or cooled, and no one lives or works inside them. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's ENERGY STAR program publishes national median energy use for each building type, and self storage sits near the bottom of the list.

Site energy is the energy a building draws from its utilities. Figures are U.S. national medians from the EPA ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager. Climate-controlled buildings use more energy than drive-up units because they hold a steady temperature year round. Our own measured results are in Measuring Our Footprint.

Measuring Our Footprint

Our 2023 baseline is the benchmark we measure every year against.

In late 2023, we partnered with GreenPlaces, a sustainability platform, to measure our carbon emissions across all three scopes. The results became our 2023 baseline, published in our 2024 Impact Statement.

• Scope 1 — 326.8 t. Direct emissions: refrigerant from cooling equipment, plus fuel burned in vehicles and on-site equipment.
• Scope 2 — 441.4 t. The electricity we buy to run our buildings.
• Scope 3 — 792.5 t. Our wider value chain: purchased goods and services, upstream fuel and energy, employee commuting, business travel, and waste.

Environmental Sustainability

Four practices, and where each one applies.

Efficient Lighting and Temperature Control

Our facilities use LED lighting, and motion sensors keep interior lights off until someone needs them. We retrofit existing locations with LED lighting and build it into every expansion project. In climate-controlled buildings, programmable thermostats and building automation hold a steady temperature without running equipment harder than it needs to, and we've upgraded HVAC equipment in many of those buildings.

Where it applies: LED lighting and motion sensors across our facilities. Thermostats and building automation in climate-controlled buildings.

Paperless Rentals and Billing

Renting a unit doesn't produce a stack of paper. You choose a unit, sign your lease, and pay online, and your gate and unit codes arrive by text and email. Billing is paperless at every property, and you manage your account and payments in MyAccount.

Where it applies: Every facility.

Fewer Trips to Each Site

Because no one is stationed on site, there's no daily commute to open and close each facility. Gate access and security systems are managed remotely, and our field team visits for maintenance and inspections. We also use autonomous drones to monitor properties remotely, which cuts down on travel to each site. Read more about how contactless move-in works.

Where it applies: Every facility.

Water Use

Self storage uses little water to begin with, because no one lives in the buildings and no staff work on site all day. Where our facilities have restrooms or landscaping, we use low-flow fixtures and water-efficient landscaping with smart irrigation, and we monitor sites to catch leaks and wasted water.

Where it applies: Every facility. Fixtures and landscaping where a site has them.

What We Don't Claim

Broad environmental claims are easy to make and hard to back up. Here's where ours stop.

• No carbon-neutral or net-zero label. We measure our emissions, and measuring them isn't the same as eliminating them, so we don't use those labels.
• No reduction claims yet. The emissions figures on this page are our 2023 baseline. We'll report reductions once we've measured them against it.
• The EPA figures aren't ours. The energy chart describes self storage as a building type. Our own results are the 2023 baseline figures above.
• Climate control costs energy. A climate-controlled unit uses more energy than a standard unit. If your belongings don't need a steady temperature, a standard unit is the lower-energy choice.