Demystifying sustainability

Demystifying sustainability

It’s safe to assume that everyone agrees sustainability is a good thing. If your business isn’t sustainable, you won’t be around for long.

But lately, sustainability has taken on a broader meaning, encompassing the survival of not just a company, but of the entire planet. And that’s where the confusion comes in.

The average business owner can understand “green,” and might organize a car pool or install a composter in the corporate lunchroom. She might even champion “corporate social responsibility” and donate to local charities. But when it comes to saving the planet, where do you begin?

BCBusiness convened a panel of experts who for years have been helping companies untangle the meaning of sustainability, and build it into their daily operations.

Rob Abbott is a public speaker, writer and consultant who now calls Calgary home, but still spends about a week every month in Vancouver, where he lived until about a year ago. Coro Strandberg, principal of Strandberg Consulting, helps companies integrate social and environmental values with measurable business goals. (More on what that means in the pages to come.) Boyd Cohen is a professor of sustainable entrepreneurship at SFU, and a founder of the Green Building and Consulting Company.

Here’s what the experts say about one buzz word businesses can’t afford to ignore.

BCBusiness: Let’s start with the big question: define sustainability.
Rob Abbott: Sustainability is a process, not some kind of utopian end event. It’s about creating financial and social wealth or well-being in a way that doesn’t, frankly, trash people and the planet. Too many people frame this as an environmental proposition and the hole in the doughnut, too often, is the social dimension.

Coro Strandberg: I define it as an integration of social and environmental and economic considerations in your decision-making, and doing it in a way that balances the factors so economics doesn’t always trump the environment or social considerations and vice versa.

BCB: That’s all very well, but how do we bring it down to the level of daily operations for, say, a business owner with six employees?

RA: If I’m a small business owner, I’ve got a whole variety of issues: people issues, systems issues... Within each of those, I can probably begin to have a conversation that starts by asking questions like, how can I reduce my environmental footprint? Where am I sourcing my materials? Do I have a sustainable purchasing process in place? Who are the people that I’m dealing with as suppliers and how green are they?

CS: Employee engagement is critical for any sustainability strategy. An easy first

thing to do is to get them all together and say, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about these issues and what’s on your mind?” Chances are, they’re sitting there thinking about some practices that the company might do differently. And then you’ve got a group of engaged, motivated employees who are prepared to go the extra mile in helping you advance your program.

RA: Include your critics, and let them know you’re going to give them an opportunity to be heard. You’re not necessarily going to respond to everything they have to say, but it’s important to begin sowing those seeds and benefiting from their perspectives.

BCB: So as a starting point I might engage my employees, my critics and my suppliers. But how do I sustain it over the long run? Do I formulate a sustainability policy, strike a committee?

Boyd Cohen: I’m opposed to doing sustainability departments or committees if they’re on the side, because they never have teeth. I’ve seen somebody hired into a company as a sustainability officer or VP, but who doesn’t actually have any bearing on executive decisions. Their role is to advise departments on how they can enhance their sustainability. Well, when push comes to shove, you’re not going to care what this tree hugger over here is saying.

CS: A couple of approaches seem to work. One is setting up an employee engagement team. You might just have one employee champion team and liberate them to set some targets and provide some resources for them. Then, as the CEO or the general manager, you can indicate to the rest of the employees that you’re totally behind the effort.

Another aspect is to think more about your impact on the land and how you engage with communities. It’s really not about whether you have an extra $10,000 to give to the community or whether you have an extra hour to do your recycling program. It’s actually about how you run your business day to day. You might want to rethink your business process or look at your product. Can you hardwire an environmental or social attribute into your product?

RA: It matters much less what is written down or enshrined in policies than what is talked about in the corridors of the ¬company. Every employee needs to understand what matters to the CEO or the owner/ manager. A fundamental step is to establish baselines, measures of environmental performance, social performance, financial performance, ethical performance. And there must be, at a minimum, a commitment to internal reporting on these levels of performance. But there also needs to be external reporting, some kind of scorecard or measurement report.

BCB: How can you measure sustainability?
RA: You’d actually be surprised how many things can be measured if you think innovatively. The Global Reporting Initiative – the GRI – is an international initiative to help companies figure out how to report on their sustainability performance on an annual basis, and they’re starting to do it by sectors. It’s practically free to get all this information, so you can measure yourself against your peers around the world who have similar firms of similar size.

There are also things locally, like Canadian Business for Social Responsibility, which has regular meetings and resources and ways to actually tap into the network to get information.

CS: Small businesses can be quite overwhelmed by this idea of reporting and measuring. But it’s very motivating for employees, who are the chief ambassadors for your product and for your role in society, if you set a benchmark. So on the social side, maybe it’s employee volunteering: what percent of employees would you like to have volunteering? Or how many hours a month would it be reasonable for them to volunteer? Or how many community organizations would you like to see benefited by the community volunteering? So even though it’s hard to measure happiness or social welfare, you can set a target depending on what your particular priorities are.

RA: The imperative to measure and use measurement as a useful feedback mechanism is just part of good, strategic decision-making and planning that all organizations should engage in. So I’m not advocating that every business, regardless of size, should produce a triple-bottom-line report. But I am saying that for most organizations, especially smaller ones, there are maybe seven, plus or minus two, measures that very quickly tell whether that company is heading in the right direction.

BCB: Where do I get that list of seven key indicators?

CS: That’ll cost you – two grand a day! But seriously, it would begin by asking what percent of your products or services have an ¬environmental or social component. It would include engagement with community, employee well-being...

RA: I would add voluntary turnover. I would want to know why people are leaving my company voluntarily. I would also weigh in on the social side and ask, “Hey, to what extent does my workforce reflect the demographics and the population of the jurisdiction I operate in?”

BCB: How can employee turnover be a measure of a company’s commitment to sustainability?

CS: Turnover can be a measure of the degree to which the employees believe the company’s actions and behaviours are in line with the stated values of the company. It’s a way of indicating to executives whether they’re walking their talk. If they’re not, you’re going to see employees leaving the company for other companies that are demonstrating higher social and environmental integrities.

BCB: Once we start talking about employee satisfaction, the definition of sustainability gets awfully diffuse and seems to just mean “good business.” Business schools have been teaching good business practices for more than a century without a newfangled term like “sustainability.”

RA: But the responsibility of business has evolved. It’s gone from a time when it was primarily creating jobs, or the owner’s responsibilities to the employee and the arts and “society,” to today, when Fortune magazine recently had a story on Wal-Mart changing the world, potentially. If business can step up to the problems of society today – climate change chief among them – this is why we talk about good business and the responsibility of business to society.

CS: The Wal-Mart story is an example of how supply chain is becoming a huge driver for sustainability. All these large mult¬inational corporations are looking into their supply chain as a way to create efficiencies, to reduce cost, to boost innovation and to manage reputational and environmental risks. If you are in anyone’s supply chain – and almost every business is in somebody else’s supply chain – then one day you’re going to have an opportunity to respond to an RFP, and it’s going to say, “What are you doing to demonstrate your social or environmental commitments?” A lawyer friend of mine, for example, came across this in responding to a Telus bid. A lawyer! So we’re not just talking about manufacturing companies and dry-cleaning companies.

BCB: Can we bring this back down to the micro level again? I’m a small-business person, I sunk $60,000 of my life savings into some little business and all these things sound great, but where do I start? Do I have to hire a consultant like you? Where are some resources?

BC: You can start with recent business-school graduates. Students are actually demanding – this happened at UVic and now at SFU – that the faculties in business bring more sustainable business education to them because they know that’s where the world is moving, and they’re jazzed about it. So if you’re a small firm and you’re hiring some people right out of school, those people are going to be educated and motivated to actually help bring your company in that direction. And they’ll also be more likely to stay if you give them a voice and allow them to help take some leadership in the company in terms of doing some research, going to events, coming up with some ideas about how we can practically apply sustainability in our company in a way that would be profitable down the road.

CS: You could have one of these students as an intern in your company. Some of them have to do projects, so you can contact your local college and say, “Are there some students around that might want to help me design a sustainability strategy?” Also, almost every industry has a trade association that is plugged into global networks, and they often have tools and resources on their website or elsewhere that you can tap into. And don’t overlook your chamber of commerce – chances are there’ll be lots of other companies who are struggling with the same issues. Can the local chamber or board of trade convene some meetings and bring people together and bring in some speakers from the outside to give you some ideas?

RA: The Greater Vancouver Regional District has a program called SmartSteps, which is intended for the small- and medium-sized enterprise. It’s a program that says, “Ask yourself some big questions: here they are.” It can help get you started with small steps. If you’ve already got the composter in the kitchen and organized a carpool, SmartSteps can point out some more ambitious things to be considering. And it’s available free. The GVRD will put one of their businesspeople in your company, working with you cheek-by-jowl. And in Vancouver, there’s a network now of other businesses and business leaders in this town who, in my experience, are happy to share their experience and their expertise.

CS: The federal government also has a guide on how to implement corporate social responsibility in your organization and they have little topic boxes for small business. That’s a handy, website-based guide.

BCB: Any closing thoughts?

BC: A lot of our conversation has been focused on how can you improve your process so that you’re more sustainable in your own business activities. But what really excites me is innovation and all the financial opportunities that exist for firms that recognize where the world is moving. You look at, for example, the green-building sector. As of five years ago it was less than one per cent of the development industry in North America and now it’s about six per cent, which is somewhere around $20 billion worth of construction every year. Think of all the companies that supply windows and roofing materials, and subcontractors who are involved in that: they’re talking to founders and companies about where they can innovate for sustainability and achieve profitability as a result, recognizing where market trends are taking us.

RA: I think what binds the entire conversation together is that this is becoming a new business ethos. This is not one of these things where you’ve got a few leaders, and five or ten per cent of companies, and everyone else is still doing the old thing. The entire playing field within which all businesses operate is changing. To survive, much less prosper, you have to be ready to adjust to those new rules of the game.

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Coping with carbons (and taxes)

Coping with carbons

Everyone living in B.C. is now part of a great policy experiment, whether they want to be or not – and that goes double for businesses.

When the latest B.C. budget dropped North America’s first true carbon tax in our laps, we were stunned and strangely silent. Even though the tax had been widely expected, its arrival was hard to believe. The tax is tiny today, but it will grow and will also bring a friend: the long-debated cap-and-trade system the Campbell government is building with select provinces and U.S. states is supposed to be designed by August.

If you’re doing business in B.C., where the first set of carbon emission rules is in place, the big question is: what are you going to do about it?

We brought three experts together to talk about what B.C.’s carbon-fighting schemes mean for business. James Tansey is an assistant professor at UBC’s Sauder School of Business and the co-founder and CEO of Offsetters Climate Neutral Society, a non-profit that helps organizations

reduce their carbon footprint. Chris Bataille is an adjunct professor with the School of Resource and Environmental Management at SFU and a principal at M.K. Jaccard and Associates, an environmental consulting firm that has worked closely with B.C. and federal government climate thinkers. Peter ter Weeme is a principal with the Vancouver-based sustainability consulting firm Junxion Strategy Inc.

One of the major issues for businesses today when it comes to climate change is the new government regulation. James, to start us off, what are the logics of these plans introduced by B.C.?

JAMES TANSEY: The carbon tax is really as much about educational change as it is about behavioural change. It’s a way of letting consumers know the extent that carbon is embedded in the choices that they make. But it’s not set at a high enough rate to enable great behavioural change. It may have a significant effect on major fuel users, like truck fleets for instance, so it sends a small signal through the system.

I think the cap-and-trade scheme sends a secondary signal right into the manufacturing base, the major users of energy who are more sensitive to marginal increases and energy costs. If it’s set at the right

level and if it’s a robust system, then there will be strong incentives to reduce emissions.

How are these plans supposed to work if all goes well?

CHRIS BATAILLE: The carbon tax and the cap-and-trade system are essentially close cousins of one another. What they do is put a marginal price on emitting carbon into the atmosphere.
With a cap-and-trade system, ideally what you’ll do is issue permits for how much you want to emit, and then you let the market decide who is going to do what emitting. So you issue these permits somehow, whether it’s by auction or according to previous recorded emissions, and then you let companies trade amongst each other to determine who gets to do the emitting and who does the reductions.

What has been the reaction to these ideas among businesses?

PETER TER WEEME: I think it’s been relatively muted, and I think people had expected a lot more of an uproar. I agree that the tax is not nearly high enough to really send a strong enough signal, but I think it’s the beginning of a series of measures that we’re easing the public into. I think the business community is kind of worried about where this might go now. What other taxes might be coming our way? Is this the thin edge of a big wedge? I think it is, quite frankly.

TANSEY: It’s also clear that the carbon tax has been set up to be revenue-neutral. So for Consumers there’s an offset within the tax system for the additional cost. That’s not going to be the case, as I understand it, for the cap-and-trade system and for the system that will be in place in 2010, where government ministries, universities, hospitals and Crown corporations have to be climate neutral. This will be a real cost to those organizations.

I’m involved in chairing the committee at UBC looking at greenhouse gas emissions and where the opportunities lie for reducing those. The operations guys are trying to work out what to do about their 50,000-tonne-a-year gas furnace and suddenly a whole bunch of alternatives start to look very appealing when there’s a fee of $25 a tonne for the emissions in 2010.

TER WEEME: One of the other things is that businesses like certainty and they like level playing fields. One of the challenges is, if every jurisdiction starts to do its own program and use different policy instruments, it makes it challenging as a business to try and figure out how to manage that and how to make good decisions in terms of investment and so on. There’s a desire to see some national solutions to these issues.

How likely is that?

BATAILLE: It depends on what happens in the U.S. next year and on what administration comes in. There are several bills before Congress to impose fairly strict cap-and-trade systems. What happens next fall is going to set a lot of that agenda. It’s going to echo back through the United States and into Canada. We have a certain amount of control here; B.C. really is pace-setting at this point, in terms of climate-change policy in North America and in the world. But that’s not going to happen within the context of the greater North American economy as we move forward.

TANSEY: I really think the most striking thing about this is the pace at which policies have been set in the province. It’s almost unprecedented. I can’t think of a jurisdiction where there have been, without a couple of years of concentration or buildup, these kinds of shifts. It’s tough for the critics,
because you’ve got to run to keep up.

BATAILLE: And the policies really do conform very well to good theoretical design for climate-change policy from almost any side of the spectrum in terms of putting a price on carbon, making a revenue and using that to reduce labour and corporate taxes. The devil’s going to be in the details, but that is really good quality policy design.

And just for perspective – with the current carbon tax of $10, and a planned 2012 carbon tax of $30: in the U.K., they are living with gasoline prices that are equivalent to about a $300 carbon tax on top of what we’re paying. And it hasn’t crushed the U.K. economy; it’s quite vibrant.

A lot of this depends on government, and government decisions depend on how much political capital they have. In the ’70s Jimmy Carter said the energy crisis was one of the biggest crises facing our generation, and then the recession of the early ’80s came and nobody could care less. What’s the chance of the political capital of climate change all of a sudden just vanishing?

BATAILLE: Well, you’ve got two things moving at once. You’ve got basically a huge increase in base energy prices underneath the whole climate-change agenda – and, frankly, the increase in energy prices overwhelms almost anybody’s imaginable climate policy even within the last five years or so. We’ve seen doublings and triplings in energy ­prices. Nobody has even possibly imagined that in

terms of climate policy, or even thought of proposing that.

TER WEEME: You’re talking about $1.45-a-litre gas this summer?

TANSEY: When I first came to B.C. in the late ’90s, I remember seeing 39 cents a litre for gas. To put it in perspective, the carbon tax, even at its full rollout, will amount to seven cents a litre, which is the kind of volatility we see in prices between a weekday and the weekend. In some ways, there are scarcity effects that are driving the climate agenda and energy agenda as much as any definitive policy around climate change. The size of that signal coming into the system is sensitizing people to climate change.

Whatever the politics of climate change are, I think it’s pretty clear that those high oil and gas prices are here to stay. So those things also drive a good kind of policy and put us in a position to reduce emissions.

TER WEEME: I also think that the zeitgeist is different now than in the ’70s. The average citizen is a lot more aware of the depth of the environmental issues facing the ­planet, be it the collapse of the fisheries, the acidification of the oceans or the dying off of large coastal coral formations.

It’s a whole range of things that have happened over the last 20 years. I think it’s a very different place. A lot of what I do is track consumer expectations and behaviours around corporations and government and so on, and I don’t think there’s going to be a question of bad economic times coming along and everybody’s suddenly abandoning this.

I also think if the NDP were to replace the Liberals in this province, they would not repeal some of these environmental issues. I think that would be politically unwise.

For businesses that are seeing these changes happen, what do they do?

TER WEEME: Well, the thing you don’t do is throw up your hands and say it’s too complex and live in denial. We often advise people to start to wrap their mind around where the policy frameworks are going and what their carbon footprint looks like. And where are the areas of greatest impact and where’s the lowest-hanging fruit? Because regardless of whether carbon taxes increase or not, or whether there’s a cap-and-trade system in place, you have to understand what your carbon footprint is – both the direct emissions and indirect emissions that are associated with your business.

That raises another point: if the first step is getting an inventory of your carbon footprint – well, there are so many different ways of doing it. It can be confounding to business leaders. Where should they start?

TER WEEME: It’s very simple to calculate annual fuel use. You can get your gas and electricity very easily. And if you add those up, for most organizations, they can often be 70 or 80 per cent of the total emissions. Those are also the places where you can make the biggest difference quite quickly.
And then there are a huge number of lists, you know, the top 10 things you can do for climate change: managing lighting, managing energy used on computers. We just tested a piece of software on campus over the last month that powers down PCs to basically the equivalent of a shutdown when the computer’s not being used. The energy used was 28 per cent of the energy used without the software, so a 72-per-cent reduction for a piece of software that costs three to six dollars to install.

So consumers can look to the websites that give that kind of advice, pick the kind of things that they want to do and probably start to see 10- to 20-per-cent reductions fairly quickly if they have a little bit of discipline.

Now it’s interesting that when you talk about those kinds of solutions, we’re talking about people really believing in this and considering it to be important.

TER WEEME: That’s one of the first preconditions to any kind of behaviour change: people acknowledging that there’s a problem. One of the challenges with climate change is people are confused. There’s a great deal of misinformation and they don’t really know, even to this day, exactly what climate change is and how is it caused.

And I think the other thing is redefining what quality of life means. You can’t sell people a hair shirt. Nobody wants to buy sacrifice and a sense that future life is going to be less fulfilling than it is now. So I think part of what we also have to do is reframe how a carbon-constrained future can be congruent with a great quality of life – because it can be.

Business does this very successfully, sort of a reductionist approach: this is going to cost us money, so we’re not going to do it. Whereas other businesses say, “You know what? There’s an opportunity here. If we reduce our carbon footprint, we can sell these credits to somebody else, we can make money from this.”

What do you tell businesses to convince them to take a step forward on this?

TANSEY: Companies that are aware and consumer-driven will identify opportunities where being proactive around climate policy will capture market share, and some of that expenditure will just come out of their marketing budget rather than out of their infrastructure budget.

The overall drive beyond the early adopters is going to be this slow penetration of price signals when people start to see the increase of the cost of their energy. Yeah, it’s going to take five years for some of the businesses, or 10 years for others, to really respond to the signals. That’s my sense.

BATAILLE: At M.K. Jaccard we’ve been getting feelers and doing projects for various firms who want briefings on where climate change policies are going to go. They want education; they want some strategic recognizance. There is knowledge that there is something coming down the line.

TER WEEME: I think the notion around efficiency, productivity and so on resonates with businesspeople because, in a lot of cases, when you do a carbon footprint analysis there’s an

efficiency: you’re flying people too often, you’re not ganging your courier deliveries, you don’t have good travel policies internally and a range of things like that. It becomes an opportunity to say to businesspeople, “Look, we’re going to help you run your business better, more efficiently.” So that obviously resonates with people. But a moral appeal doesn’t work.

We mentioned that B.C. is in the lead here and we don’t have a national strategy on this or a North American strategy on this. What is the danger to our economy? Are we in a vulnerable position by being first?

BATAILLE: With the carbon charges we’re proposing – no, they’re just not sufficient. We’ve looked at really serious and deep reductions, and we’re talking reductions of 45 per cent and 65 per cent. Over the long haul it looks like that might cost two to three per cent of GDP in transition, and then we go back to our original growth path. It’s a matter of readjusting the infrastructure, but the trick to that is adjusting gradually.

What the low carbon charges the B.C. government has brought out do allow is that initial warning signal, a shot across the bow: you’ve got to start adjusting your consumption decisions; you’ve got to start adjusting investment decisions and taking carbon into account. Those carbon prices will gradually come up, and if it’s in pace with capital stock turnover – when you’re replacing cars, houses, industrial machinery, what have you – the marginal cost is not that much.

So if we hear warnings that this is going to cost us X thousands of jobs . . .

TER WEEME: It’s fear mongering.

TANSEY: We’ve already done the experiment on one of the fundamental cost factors of the economy, which is oil. We’ve doubled or tripled the price of oil in the last five years, and people have studied what the impact has been on economic growth. It’s hard to trace out, but it’s well under two per cent – some people say half a per cent.

What we may see happen is it might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back on some sectors, such as auto manufacturing in North America. But that’s an industry that’s been borderline bankrupt for the last five or 10 years already, for a whole bunch of other factors. So the real danger there is the straw gets blamed for breaking the camel. The danger is somebody will blame the collapse of a car company on these kinds of policies.

BATAILLE: Canada has industrialized on a fairly intensive path based on very low energy prices. Now that’s going to have to change, so there’s going to be a bunch of industries that reflect that previous time. They’re going to suffer more. But that’s a few focused industries that, to be honest, don’t represent a huge amount of GDP or a huge amount of jobs.

TER WEEME: Personally, I don’t think there’s a huge amount of risk for B.C. to be the leader. I think, if anything, it helps us establish where this needs to go, and ultimately I think provinces like Alberta are going to find themselves the pariah. The concern I have about that is how they react. They may just dig in their heels, or maybe they’ll slowly come around.

BATAILLE: Just talking to people who do this around the world, and reading other studies, people should not be surprised if within a generation or so we’re looking at $100 or $200 a tonne for carbon. This is not going away – it’s just going to keep coming up.

TER WEEME: The good thing is there are lots of resources available, be they online, consulting resources, non-profits – a whole range of organizations that can help you wrap your mind around what the right choices are.

For businesses, they have to find what the competitive advantage is in addressing some of these issues, and I think consumers also have to reconsider what quality of life means and how they can find satisfaction in a carbon-constrained future. These are not necessarily conflicting goals. I think we’re going to have to work on reframing some of the things we value in this society.

Condos slow to join green bandwagon

Condos slow to join green bandwagon

Larry Pynn, Vancouver Sun

Published: Thursday, October 25, 2007

Builders of residential housing are doing it. So are owners of single-family homes. So why are condo owners among the last to jump on the energy-efficiency bandwagon?

It's not for lack of trying.

The Light House Sustainable Building Centre on Granville Island reports it has been swamped with calls from frustrated condo owners wanting to take action to create greener buildings, but finding themselves limited in what they can do without authorization of their strata councils.

"We get a lot of strata owners coming in looking for help," confirms Helen Goodland, executive director of the non-profit society.

Without permission from their strata councils, individual condo owners may be restricted to measures such as changing light bulbs or appliances to more energy-efficient models.

But if they belong to a condo building that assesses heating fees on a uniform basis or by size of unit rather than through individual metres, the individual might not see the financial benefits.

"People want action, but in a strata you have to go through steps to have your voice heard," Goodland said. "It's a complicated system that requires time and energy. As the occupant of a suite, you have very little control."

Generally in a strata there are a handful of enthusiastic individuals; their job is to present a solid financial case showing their fellow condo owners that the energy benefits outweigh the costs.

"They're always concerned on how they're going to pay for it," said Eileen Keenan, a HomeSpa consultant for Light House.

In response to demand, Light House has created a Green Building 101 seminar for strata councils through its HomeSpa program, visiting condos and providing personalized advice extending to factors such as windows, insulation, lighting, and heating sources.

The first step is to have an energy assessment of the building (probably costing less than $ 1,000) and come up with an energy-efficiency plan that can be unfolded at the time of routine building maintenance and upgrading.

Another option is to develop a green roof that absorbs water while cooling the building during the heat of the day and keeping it insulated during cold periods.

"Condos can be energy-intensive, especially older ones," said Goodland, recognizing that strata councils are also cautious not to do anything to trigger leaky-condo syndrome.

"It's not an easy science. You need someone who knows what they're doing."

Liisa Peitso attended the 101 seminar on behalf of her 44-unit Kitsilano condo, a development on West Fifth Avenue that is more than 30 years old. Peitso said she raised the issue of green initiatives after buying into the development in February and found the strata council receptive to green change.

But she notes there are seniors on fixed incomes in the building whose position must be carefully considered. "There are a lot of elderly people and they are more hesitant," she said.

Among the future upgrades under discussion are initiatives such as improvements to drafty single-pane windows, replacing top-loading washers and dryers with front-loading models, installing light-emitting diode bulbs, and replacing fixed lighting with motion detectors in the garage.

"Our plan is to apply a green lens to projects, maintenance, etc., that we undertake in the building to see if there are more sustainable options," added Jean Lederer, another member of the strata council. "We'll also propose setting up a sort of community garden in the back for residents to grow vegetables."

Keenan said strata councils are curious to see solid examples of older condo buildings that have successfully undergone green-energy retrofits, but she is finding there are few examples out there.

Councils are also keenly interested in knowing about the costs of going green and about any grants and incentives for green building upgrades, and disappointed to hear there are so few.

"It's a shame to tell people," she said. "People say, 'Oh, there's bound to be one in the future so I'll just wait.' They may be right. But in the meantime, it's causing people to delay."

(For information on BC Hydro initiatives, visit www.bchydro. com/business/incentive/incentive 8821.html, and for federal grants www.oee.nrcan.gc.ca/residential/ personal/homeimprovement.cfm).

Vancity Capital has also jumped on board, working with strata councils to finance green retrofits such as solar hot water or geo-exchange systems that employ the energy of the Earth. The energy savings are calculated and folded into strata fees, the costs amortized over 10 to 25 years.

With strata councils notoriously misery with their expenditures, the struggle is to convince them to look at the costs and benefits.

Derek Gent, the institution's investment manager, noted that buyers can be reluctant to pay extra for a condo with the latest green-energy options. "They'll pay extra for granite countertops, but they won't pay extra for geo-exchange, even though the countertops don't have a payback."

He added: "We're trying to finance the business case for greening your condo. If you make that investment, it will have cost savings down the road.

"People are reluctant to make that up-front payment to go really green. So we'll saying, 'What if we loaned you the money, and then you pay us out of the cost savings down the road?'

"We're trying to lead the market a little. As energy costs keep going up, the business case keeps getting better."

WindSong, opened in 1996 in the Walnut Grove area of north Langley, is one of three co-housing developments in the Lower Mainland. The others are Quayside Village in North Vancouver and Cranberry Commons in Burnaby. More are being developed in North Delta, Vancouver, and Yarrow in Chilliwack (www.cohousing.ca).

Condos are managed by a strata council composed of individuals who have purchased their units from a commercial developer. Co-housing developments are built by a collection of individual owners interested in close-knit community living, including the sharing of certain common areas such as crafts rooms and kids' play areas.

WindSong is investigating the feasibility of a geo-exchange or solar-based system for heating the 34-unit townhouse-style development, said co-founder and resident Howard Staples.

The capital costs should fall below $1 million, he said, money he hopes could be paid back in 15 years through reduced natural-gas heating bills.

"We'd like to dramatically reduce our gas usage," he said, noting that the people drawn to co-housing are more environmentally minded.

"Money is a key factor. There can be a lot of inertia. Strata corporations are encouraged to act more conservatively. You can't go out and raise strata fees randomly. But with the rising cost of gas, we have an opportunity."

LINK

Prices keep going up and up and up

Prices keep going up and up and up but we are not getting anything more for our money, in fact we are not able to keep pace with the rising costs of operating our Parkside Place home.
You know by now we have a shortfall from our last budget, one that will cost each of us an additional 400 and some-such dollars...we will get that bill soon. The new fees have been increased. Will there be another short-fall at the end of this budget? The accountant thinks there will be. So, what do we do?
We figure out how we can reduce our costs. With 45 percent of our fees going to heat and water thats a great place to start don't you think? Heat and water costs are going to continue to rise.

Here is a link for you to visit. We hope to be able to capture some of these grant monies described at that site.

http://www.gov.bc.ca/empr/popt/livesmart_bc.html

Have a look. Think about helping us! email parksideplacevictoriabc@gmail.com

Hello

Visiting from the article in the Saanich News today? Thank you for coming. Have a read, make sure you check it all out, lots of information here. If you have an idea, a link, a suggestion please share!

On a Positive Note?

Informational, inspirational and hopeful, that is what the intent of this blog is.

Sometimes the news of the day will drag down the hopeful aspect.

Be sure, as a community, approximately 300 of us, we can make the changes we need in order to live at Parkside Place within our finiancial means.

So, while the following may be a drag...understand if you work with us we can overcome.

July 1, 2008, the province will begin phasing in the carbon tax, which will hit gasoline, diesel, natural gas, coal, propane, and home heating fuel. The starting rate will be based on $10 per tonne of carbon emissions, and rise $5 a year to $30 per tonne by 2012. (see the increase there?)

This increase has not been factored into our operational budget. Oh! you didn't think this applied to you? it does and will.

That means the money will have to come out of the existing condo budget, or, we will have to increase the condo fees....again. (that is a certainty..the increase I mean)

Also, as of today oil is $124 per barrel. The average increase of oil and gas over the years has been 15%. Assuming we stay with that 15%, add this new carbon tax into the mix and what will our condo fees look like 2, 4 or 5 years from now? Double? that is a certainty too.

Unless, we do something today about our aging infrastructure.

Right.

So, get off your butt, email me and ask what you can do!

(thats the inspirational part of this post)

Current condo fees are 230 per month. 460 per month is not appealing, certainly with over half of that going to heat and water. That means our common property, our roofs, everything remains as it is today...no change because we don't have the money to do the upkeep/maintenance. Change is needed, help make it happen.

parksideplacevictoriabc@gmail.com

What if............

On Friday May 9 a company called SolarCrest
stopped in to see our Parkside Place. Solar Crest has a solution for our pool heating. Did you know our pool costs us 10,000 per year? With SolarCrest products we can see a return on our initial investment within two years, after those two years our heating costs are ZERO. From SolarCrests website:
"The monthly payment for the system will be equal to or less than the payment that was being made for the energy to heat the pool previously. This is a true investment that saves a substantial amount of money and energy from day one. The money saved could be directed toward other energy efficiencies or implementing other renewable energy systems that will create the same effect again."
Yup! They looked at our hot-water and domestic water (thats the washers/showers/sinks/dishwashers) system and we are a perfect fit for retrofitting our existing systems to use this type of solar engery. Can you image our heating costs dropping by 50%? Not going up? Wow! Now thats sustainable living!

(PS. our pool season would be able to be extended an additional 3 months! this means the payback would actually be approximately 18 months)

Interested in this project?
Join us! email parksideplacevictoriabc@gmail.com