Facilities Dive

Many facility managers sign a cleaning contract without asking how the vendor classifies its workforce. Not knowing that creates legal and financial exposure that an indemnification clause won’t fully protect managers from. Joint employer liability doctrines in many states mean the facility operator can get pulled into disputes over worker classification, especially if they exercised any control over scheduling, uniforms, building access or supervision of the workers.

Wisconsin and Kentucky are among the latest states to adopt battery stewardship programs. Their governors signed battery EPR bills into law this month. Although the laws are directed at battery producers, they direct consumers and facility managers to dispose of batteries at designated locations. • on April 2.

Agentic AI and robotics are among the most transformative opportunities for efficiency gains in modern manufacturing. But as automation scales, it raises a question that may not be top of mind for manufacturers: What are the energy costs?

Within 48 hours of Hurricane Milton tearing off the roof of Tropicana Field, Kenneth Johnson was on the phone with the city of St. Petersburg, Florida. Within 72 hours, Johnson said his team was on the site of the MLB ballpark. “It looked like an atomic bomb went off,” Johnson, executive vice president of sports for AECOM Hunt, said of the aftermath of the October 2024 hurricane.

As rack densities rise, facilities teams are under pressure to manage heat while maintaining uptime and keeping operating costs down. Traditional air cooling is reaching practical limits in high-density environments, and immersion cooling is one approach to address these challenges. As these systems move into production environments, operators are learning that fluid selection plays a large role in long-term performance.

Energy efficiency conversations in commercial facilities tend to gravitate toward the big-ticket items: HVAC upgrades, LED retrofits, building automation systems. These investments matter. But there’s a persistent, measurable source of energy loss hiding in plain sight. Plus, it’s one that facilities teams can address without a capital project. Space heating alone accounts for roughly 32% of energy use across all U.S. commercial buildings, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has ordered construction work to halt on President Donald Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom. U.S. District Senior Judge Richard Leon issued a preliminary injunction on Tuesday, preventing “any action in furtherance of the physical development of the proposed ballroom at the former site of the East Wing of the White House.” The order goes into effect in 14 days, giving the administration the opportunity to appeal.

As AI workloads surge and compute density increases, data center operators are running up against a hard reality: demand is accelerating far faster than new facilities can be built. In many markets, power availability, permitting timelines and capital constraints are pushing organizations to look inward at the facilities they already own.

Legionnaires’ disease can be fatal. Yet in the United States, cases have been increasing. According to the National Institutes of Health, reported cases of Legionnaires’ disease have risen significantly since 2000. A separate study estimates that 8,000 to 18,000 people in the U.S. are hospitalized for the disease each year, with a fatality rate of 10%. Last August, New York City faced one of its largest outbreaks ever, linked to contaminated water in 12 cooling towers across 10 buildings.

As global leaders gathered in Davos, the story that dominated the World Economic Forum was familiar: artificial intelligence is the next great engine of productivity, competitiveness, and economic growth. “Industries in the Intelligent Age” was one of the key themes this year. But we are not paying enough attention to the less glamorous reality underneath it: the physical infrastructure required to make AI work.