Smartphones and Sustainability
Sustainability in Government Agencies
Take advantage of wasted resources
The Oregon Department of Corrections is also seeking ways to improve its image with its host communities. Someone realized one day that the vehicles used to transport prisoners from the cities to the prison in Pendleton, Oregon, which is in the sparsely populated eastern portion of the state, usually returned to urban areas empty. At the same time, farmers around Pendleton were ploughing-under surplus produce. So they have set up a system to take tax-deductible donations of surplus produce from farmers, use prisoners to sort and bag it, and transport it in the empty buses to the Food Bank in Portland for distribution across the Pacific Northwest. The prison gets a boost to its image, the prisoners do something they can be proud of, the farmers get a tax deduction, and the hungry get fed.
Many governments have adopted zero waste goals. Gary Liss, who is affiliated with the GrassrRoots Recycling Network, has been trying to track these. His list includes communities from San Luis Obispo County in California to Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Entire nations, including New Zealand, have also adopted zero waste as a goal. Like many sustainability initiatives, one effort can have multiple benefits. A study in Northern California showed that encouraging water-efficient landscaping resulted in a 54 per cent reduction in water but also a 25 per cent reduction in labour, 61 per cent savings in fertilizer and 44 per cent savings in fuel use.
RESOURCES
GrassRoots Recycling Network, www.grrn.org.
Connett, Paul and Bill Sheehan (2001) ‘A Citizen’s Guide to Zero Waste – A United
States/Canadian Perspective: A Strategy that Avoids Incinerators and Eventually Eliminates Landfills’, www.zerowaste.co.nz/assets/Reports/CitizensGuide.pdf.
Streamline red tape
Red tape usually translates into increased costs and long lag times. Plans go from agency to agency for approval and any one can stop the process. Contractors hate it. So the Oregon Department of Transportation, preparing to rebuild many of the state’s crumbling bridges, pulled all the relevant regulating agencies – state and federal – together to define the criteria and specifications for the work. When they issued their requests for proposals, sustainability criteria were embedded in the requirements. A contractor submitting a proposal can be assured of immediate approval unless they wish to suggest a different way of constructing a bridge. On one project alone, they saved 100 days and over $1 million. Streamlining usually involves analyzing the work process to find redundant and wasteful steps. The total quality movement has created many of these tools, the most useful of which is likely to be process mapping.
Employ green building practices
According to the National Research Council, 60 to 85 per cent of a building’s real costs are related to operations; the initial construction cost is 10 per cent or less. Since many government buildings are owner-occupied, you may want to pay a little extra for ‘green’ features so that you can save operating costs over the long term. The California Department of Finance, with the help of Capital E Group and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, studied national data on 100 green buildings. They concluded that the financial benefits of a LEED-rated green building are $50–70 per square foot, more than ten times the additional construction costs. The cost savings come not only from conserving energy and water but also from productivity and health-related human benefits.
RESOURCES
Morton, Steven (2002) ‘Business Case for Green Design’, Building Operating Management, FacilitiesNet, November 2002, www.facilitiesnet.com
The Green Building Council’s LEED rating system is available at www.worldgbc.org,
California study:
www.colorado.gov/rebuildco/services/highperformance/Costs_and_Benefits_of_Green_Buildings
Better Bricks, a programme under the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance, www.betterbricks.com
Portland, Oregon’s G/Rated programme and their Tenant Improvement Guide,
Find new funding sources
Occasionally, agencies can catalyse new business models. One irrigation district funded by the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board invented a new type of fish screen to prevent fish from moving into irrigation canals. Typically these screens clog and need to be cleaned out, sometimes several times a day. Their new design rarely clogs and has no moving parts.
Farmers Irrigation District has now patented the fish screen and the Farmers’ Conservation Alliance is promoting the screens. They will use all of the profits to further their mission of developing solutions to ensure fish, farms and families thrive.
Revolving loan funds have been used successfully to fund expensive upgrades in wastewater treatment plants. Unlike grants that go to the first in the pipeline, revolving loan funds continue to provide resources for change and may grow over time.Sometimes the challenge is front-loaded cost. Renewable energy is an example where the fuel may be free but most of the cost is in the up-front capital costs. Individual citizens are particularly resistant to factoring life cycle costs into decision-making. Many would rather pay a small amount for an incandescent bulb even though the compact fluorescent will cost them less over the long haul. To counteract that problem, Berkeley, California became the first city in the US to help citizens install solar panels without having to pay for the cost of the system up front. Instead, the city spreads the cost over 20 years, thus removing this barrier.
To solve the same problem within government, Ann Arbor, Michigan created a Municipal Energy Fund in 1998 as a revolving fund for energy improvements in city facilities. It’s invested in street lighting improvements, electric vehicles, and solar cells. By providing the capital for approved projects, the fund removes a barrier, and 80 per cent of the savings from the projects replenish the fund. See the municipality as a whole system
The obvious opportunity here is to develop land use patterns that promote sustainable behaviors. In the report, ‘Growing Cooler: Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change’, the authors analyzed scores of academic studies. Not surprisingly, they concluded that compact, mixed-use development could do as much to lower emissions as many of the climate policies now promoted by state and national politicians. This trumped such strategies as improved auto efficiency standards, green building codes, and international treaties. This is a perfect example of the maxim, ‘Think globally, and act locally’. Local governments don’t have to wait for national action to make a huge impact.
Too often, organizational silos represent mental barriers. When you look at your municipality as a whole system, though, new opportunities become apparent. Think about closing the loops, living off what is available within your boundaries, and getting more benefits from each function. For example, Portland, Oregon uses their drinking water system to generate electricity. They installed a micro-hydro system in the water pipes leading from a reservoir. Most water departments would never think about generating electricity; energy isn’t their responsibility. But with creative thinking, many cross organizational efficiencies can be uncovered.
Industrial ecology prompts us to think even across sectors. Eco-industrial parks are popular in Europe. Kalundborg, Denmark is probably the most famous example, where steam, water, fly ash, sludge, fuels and sulphur are traded among the different entities, the waste of one becoming the input for another. China has grasped this concept and implemented a ‘circular economy initiative’. ‘China can no longer afford to follow the West’s resources-hungry model of development and it should encourage its citizens to avoid adopting the developed world’s consumer habits,’ says Pan Yue, Deputy Minister, State Environmental Protection Administration. ‘It’s important to make Chinese people not blatantly imitate Western consumer habits so as not to repeat the mistakes made by the industrial development of the West over the past 300 years.’
Part of seeing the community as a whole system is to change how we measure community health. Heidelburg, Germany uses eco-budgeting processes developed by ICLEI. In the same way that a government periodically reviews its financial performance against a budget, eco-budgets follow similar processes related to natural resources. They don’t set monetary values but they account for how the natural resource budgets within a community are ‘spent’ over time. Heidelberg accounts for CO2, water consumption and waste generation, along with other resources. This approach makes intuitive sense to anyone who has managed a cheque book. You know if you continue to deduct more from the ‘account’ than is being deposited, you’re headed for trouble.
RESOURCES
Allenby, B. R. (1995) Industrial Ecology – Policy Framework and Implementation, Prentice Hall, New Jersey.
International Society for Industrial Ecology, www.is4ie.org
Journal of Industrial Ecology, www.yale.edu/jie/
