Author Archives: Anca Pascalau

Old building, new approach as The Mount embraces sustainable growth

Andi van Koeverden is in her office in the oldest section of the former Mount St. Joseph convent, describing the work that has gone into creating the Mount Community Centre in a massive, 120-year old building that sat vacant for four years.

While the story is intriguing, I find it hard not to be distracted by the unusual stand that supports her computer screen.

It’s a used paint can. The screen’s circular base fits perfectly in the lid of the can and sits at just the right viewing height to reduce strain on her neck.

When I ask about it she laughs and says by way of explanation: “I don’t usually do interviews in this office.”

Maybe she should. The recycled can, paint drips and all, is an effective visual reminder of her observation that “sustainability has so many facets.”

That’s something she’s come to appreciate during her two years as strategic advancement director at the Mount project.

“At the end of the day this building is not in the landfill,” she says. “That is nothing short of a miracle.”

Portions of the rambling, 130,000-square-foot complex on Monaghan Rd. are protected under the Ontario Heritage Act so it would not likely have been torn down and replaced.

However, van Koeverden notes, it could have simply fallen apart over time.

When the developer that purchased the complex from the Sisters of St. Joseph in 2009 abandoned its condominium restoration plan, the Peterborough Poverty Reduction Network stepped in.

The non-profit group’s vision of affordable housing and a “food hub” eventually morphed into a grander plan run by a volunteer board, the Mount Community Centre. The complex is now on its way to becoming housing, offices for non-profit agencies, an arts and culture centre and a food centre with community gardens and a commercial-grade kitchen and food processing capability.

The first 43 apartments opened three weeks ago in the most modern wing, renamed Woodland Apartments. The wing had contained 130 tiny residence rooms, not much more than cubicles, that were used by Sisters of St. Joseph nuns.

Volunteer crews tore out 1.5 linear kilometres of cinderblock walls in the process, van Koeverden says, and all if it was repurposed as fill.

Volunteers also took apart, repainted and reassembled large wooden wardrobes that had been the Sisters’ closet space. They are now part of the new apartments.

“When the Sisters came through for their tours, three of then when I told them that story, their eyes filled with tears that we weren’t dumping their wardrobes in the dumpster.”

Along with the old and preserved there is new and high-tech.

A large room on the ground floor is dedicated to storage of e-bikes, complete with recharging stations. Three massive old boilers have been replaced with super-efficient Viessmann boilers that she describes as “literally, the size of a beer fridge” and which can heat half the entire building space.

Peterborough Utilities staff did an assessment of the original building and the renovation plan “and we are eligible for rebates and incentives right down to every bathroom fan in the apartment units, motors for the big air handler units on the roof, even installing low-flow toilets,” van Koeverden says.

“Even something like 50 bucks for every toilet is a huge incentive.”

She takes special pride in the food hub and plans for up to 100 garden plots in 5,000 square feet of space. Tenants will have first call but there will likely be many left for the general public.

“We envision training programs, people learning to grow fresh produce in their own garden plots and then on Tuesday and Thursday nights learn how to make soup, or can it … or what have you.”

The plan has echoes of the community garden plots the Sisters offered on the property 50 years ago.

“We are trying to carry on that legacy as well of service to society,” van Koeverden says, “so, trying to sustain that legacy.”

One more facet of sustainability, one that goes well beyond bricks and mortar.

This is one of a series of articles commissioned and paid for by Sustainable Peterborough and published in partnership with The Peterborough Examiner. By Jim Hendry, Peterborough Examiner, original article published Friday, October 28, 2016.

 

DBIA doing its part for a greener downtown Peterborough

Cig-urns are sprouting in downtown Peterborough.

Not familiar with the term? It’s the accepted shorthand for cigarette urns, where smokers who have been banished to street corners and alleyways can deposit their butts.

Their appearance downtown is an example of the challenges and opportunities the Downtown Business Improvement Area faces.

The DBIA represents more than 400 businesses and building owners, by far the largest collected mass of retail and office space in the city. Downtown has been described as both the heart and the face of Peterborough.

But even if there is one heart and one face, DBIA members don’t operate with a single mind. They are independent business owners and that independence can manifest as a degree of mistrust of government and reluctance to join collective ventures.

When Terry Guiel, the DBIA’s executive director, outlines the cig-urn program during an interview in his bare-bones Water St. office he touches on all those themes, intentionally or inadvertently.

The cigarette litter problem is a government creation, he says.

“The health unit and the government decides its going to ban smoking. I did 25 years, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year in smoke-filled bars so I was the happiest guy around when they did that,” says Guiel, a longtime local bar circuit staple as a singer and guitar player.

“But there was no residual plan. What happens to cigarette butts? Now everyone is standing just outside the patios or on the corner of the street and cigarette butts are everywhere. Now we have to clean it up.”

His solution has been to attach 21 cig-urns to the sides of buildings. That helped, but created a secondary problem of its own: Who cleans out the urns and where do the toxic butts go?

“We hope the owners of the buildings take it over,” he says, although that hasn’t been happening to the degree he’d like. “We kind of put the cart before the horse because we had to do something right away to start tackling the problem.”

Stage two will be the addition of another 20 urns on downtown lamp posts. A cleaning crew the DBIA pays will look after those, he says, as long as he can work the extra cost into his budget.

Not a perfect system, but a practical attempt to deal with litter that is both unsightly and damaging.

Another project was easier to implement.

After he was hired three years ago Guiel noticed that food vendors at DBIA-sponsored events like Ribfest and Taste of Downtown were dumping waste liquids, including grease, down the drain.

The solution was to provide grey waste bins to collect the liquid. The organization got some positive publicity over that initiative when a Trent University graduate student, Jessica Correa, shot a video and featured it on her Random Acts of Green website.

“I wasn’t thinking I was doing anything green, I was just thinking this is illegal and it shouldn’t go in the water,” he says.

“But when you think about it these are all little steps that improve the quality of life and we should be doing these, everything we can. It’s the right thing to do, thinking of the bigger picture.”

Education, which Guiel likes to refer to as “edification,” is another DBIA focus. A representative of Peterborough Utilities Inc. has spoken twice at monthly breakfast meetings, explaining how business owners can cut electricity consumption and take advantage of subsidy programs.

Promoting cycling lanes and downtown trails, and the now annual Pulse event where a stretch of George St. is closed to cars, are also a high priority.

Pulse is a co-operative venture with Peterborough GreenUP, a partnership Guiel hopes to expand.

“The more these synergies happen, the more positive impact its going to have on the community,” he says. “We’ve got to stop looking at green people as tree huggers, and I think that mentality is shifting thanks to organizations like GreenUP.

“We’re seeing that we’re all in this together, and that there’s only one planet.”

This is one of a series of articles commissioned and paid for by Sustainable Peterborough and published in partnership with The Peterborough Examiner. By Jim Hendry, Peterborough Examiner, original article published Saturday, September 24, 2016.

Business through a sustainable lens

The thick countertop at Green Eyewear has the unmistakeable lustre of old wood, but customers who routinely comment on it might be surprised by its origin.

The planks come from a Hamilton factory that supplied munitions for the Canadian Army in both world wars. It was also home to Studebaker Canada’s assembly plant.

At some point during an expansion years ago, old-school industrial shipping crates were broken down and the inch-and-a-half thick, 12-inch wide boards were repurposed as flooring, explains Shane Palmer, co-owner with Amanda Palmer of the eyewear store at Hunter and Aylmer streets.

The last Studebaker made in Canada rolled out of the plant in 1966 but the aging factory building survived. Two years ago it was was torn down and a Grimsby demolition company ended up with the flooring.

Rob Bianco, a cabinet and furniture maker in Warsaw, acquired the wood. At the same time the Palmers were moving Green Eyewear from George St. to its current location. Bianco supplied them with some of that planking to fashion the countertop that became a focal point of the store.

The re-use triple play – packing crates to flooring to countertop – reflects the Palmers’ low-environmental-impact approach to everything about the business. The rest of the counter is barn board that was used as shelving in their former George St. store, barn board that Palmer bought from a farm in Keene a decade ago.

“I got a really good deal on it because a lot of it was rotten but the lady made me take it all,” he recalls. “She told me I could go back to the big city with nothing. I told her I was from Peterborough.”

Other sections of what had been barn board shelving were cut down and hung vertically on the new store walls. Instead of sitting on shelves, glasses are suspended on metal rods down the middle of the boards.

“We just try to re-use stuff, you know like old chairs . . . as much as we can.”

Two vintage red 1950s chairs in the store were made by Nightingale Corp. in Toronto, still a major Canadian furniture manufacturer.

But their main “green” focus is the products they sell. One supplier, Tipton Eyeworks, provides a line known as Vinylize Eyewear. The frames are made of recycled LP vinyl records and all the metal in them is also recycled. Another style of frames is fashioned from repurposed camera film. Film is made with cellulose acetate and has a base of plant fibres, not petroleum.

The Palmers have also made a commitment to local production. Many of their frames are designed by Paul Storace, founder of Alternative Eyewear and Plan B. Storace has lived in Millbrook for more than a decade and the edgy, internationally competitive eyewear company’s offices are in Ajax.

Storace hires his marketing expertise in Peterborough and subscribes to the “buy local” philosophy whenever possible, Palmer says, which helps Peterborough’s economy. His frames are not as environmentally friendly as the Vinylize line so Green Eyewear donates $2 to Peterborough GreenUP for every pair sold.

The Palmers met more than 20 years ago while both were at university in Ottawa. Ten years ago they decided to go into business for themselves and to do it in Peterborough, which they saw as a good place to raise a family.

In 2014 they moved the store from George St. to a new building developed by Ashburnham Realty. Part of the attraction was the building philosophy of the firm’s principals, Paul Bennett and Rob Fisher. “They probably build more environmentally focused than most people do for commercial buildings,” Palmer says.

The walls of the four-storey, mixed residential and commercial complex are constructed of foam blocks filled with poured concrete. The method, known as ICF, produces insulating factors in the R-19 range and makes the building nearly soundproof.

Now well-established commercially and settled into an environmentally friendly building, the Palmers’ vision of a unique “green” Eyewear business has come fully into focus.

This is one of a series of articles commissioned and paid for by Sustainable Peterborough and published in partnership with The Peterborough Examiner. By Jim Hendry, Peterborough Examiner, original article published Saturday, September 10, 2016.

Trent is cleaner, greener

Painted and costumed in their college colours, hundreds of first-year Trent University students will soon cap off Orientation Week with this year’s version of the loud and proud Great Race.

A recycling relay is one of the events.

“Students love it,” says Shelley Strain, Trent’s sustainability co-ordinator. “Upper-year students tell me they remember it.”

For the relay Strain puts together a miniature version of one of the dozens of recycling stations found on Trent’s campus. Team members run to the mini-station, a piece of cardboard, plastic or some other recyclable item in hand. They have to read the directions and figure out which receptacle it goes in.

“Invariably people coming from a different municipality will get something wrong, but they’re going to fight tooth and nail that they are right, because it’s right in Hamilton, or wherever they come from. Which is exactly the point,” Strain says.

“It really highlights the differences in the systems and then you get more people paying attention to adjusting to how we do things here.”

It matters that Trent students understand how recycling works on campus, and in Peterborough. Just over 1,500 of them will live in residences this year. Total enrolment is nearly 8,000.

Orientation Week is a tailor-made opportunity for Strain to make new students aware of their role in fashioning an eco-friendly campus. Waste diversion is her main theme.

Friendly reminders and hands-on lessons start the day students arrive. They have packing materials, cardboard boxes and other waste to get rid of. Volunteers show them where each college’s main recycling station is (outdoors, at the rear of the building) and explain what goes where.

Composting is also explained early and often.

“Something that is unique to Trent is that we compost on campus,” Strain says. “Whatever we produce on campus we are able to compost on campus.”

The 37 tonnes of compost produced last year was also used on campus, primarily in gardens.

Trent’s composting facility will be one stop on an eco-tour that is also part of orientation week.

“That’s more of a get-to-know-your campus initiative, but we put a green spin on it. We show them: ‘This is where your compost goes. It’s not for naught, we are actually doing something with it.'” Strain says.

“It’s important for people to see that.”

Another tour stop is the renovated P.S.B. Wilson athletics building. The spacious addition, which includes the coffee shop where we are doing our interview, was designed and built to a

LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Silver standard. The Life and Health Sciences building is LEED Gold.

First-year students also get an explanation of a blue box program run by Community Living volunteers. Anyone can toss used printer cartridges or obsolete cell phones into a blue box to be collected by the volunteers, taken to the mail room for packaging and sent off to be recycled.

Community Living receives a small donation in return for each recycled item.

Strain put together the partnership with Community Living in 2008, shortly after she left her position as Peterborough County’s education and training officer to take on the newly created sustainability co-ordinator job at Trent.

“Second life notebooks” are another aspect of the partnership. Community Living volunteers bind paper that has been used on only one side into notebooks and hand them out to students to use as scrap paper.

A behind-the-scenes program students will be exposed to is the school’s Energy Performance Contract. Swapping out old lights for LEDs and incorporating efficient new boilers in the heating and cooling system will help reduce annual energy costs by $1.5 million.

But pointing students toward better recycling and reuse habits is the biggest opportunity to get them involved in sustainability progress. Strain believes that is true whether students live on campus or off.

“I think people’s approach and behaviour and choices probably dictate much more how much waste they generate than where they live does,” she says.

“They have a great opportunity. We just help them realize it.”

This is one of a series of articles commissioned and paid for by Sustainable Peterborough and published in partnership with The Peterborough Examiner. By Jim Hendry, Peterborough Examiner, original article published Saturday, August 27, 2016.

The more renewable the better at local utility

Every little bit helps.

And in terms of greenhouse gases sent spewing into the atmosphere when electricity is produced, a little bit in relative terms adds up to big load of carbon.

When I asked John Wynsma, vice-president of generation for the city-owned Peterborough Utilities Group (PUG), how much the utility was reducing greenhouse gas output by generating electricity from renewable sources he responded with an insider’s view of the reality of climate change.

The short version: About half the greenhouse gases we deal with in Ontario drift up from the north-eastern United States. About a third are produced by cars, trucks and other means of transportation and 15 per cent by industry. That leaves only eight per cent coming from power generation.

The message: Renewable electricity sources are helpful but electric cars and trucks that run on natural gas are the way to make a difference.

But then he ran the numbers. And it turns out that over the past eight years as it developed into a major player among municipal electricity generation companies, PUG has also made a difference.

The utility has produced 650,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of renewable electricity. The effect has been a CO2 reduction of just under 51,000 metric tonnes. That’s like taking 10,000 cars off the road for a year.

That result has come by focusing primarily on two methods of renewable “green” energy production: hydro dams that use the power of river water and solar energy.

Wynsma was recruited by PUG eight years ago with a mandate to build up the generation side. Ironically, as a private consultant back in the 1990s he prepared the proposal that Trent University used to get licence approval for what today is the Robert G. Lake dam and generating station just north of the university.

Originally known as the Trent Rapids project, it wasn’t built until 2008. By then Wynsma would be running the generation side at PUG and his division would partner with Trent to bring it to life.

When he arrived the utility had one hydro generation station, the London St. dam, and generated six MW of electricity. Since then it has partnered with Trent on two more run-of-the-river dams, bought a hydro dam in Campbellford and added a second site at London St.

Two smaller dams will be developed at Lock 24 and Buckhorn over the next two years and a second Campbellford dam will be taken over in 2018.

On the solar side there are the 10 MW Lily Lake solar farm that opened in 2011 and rooftop projects on the Kinsmen Arena in Peterborough and Asphodel-Norwood Community Centre that will be on line shortly. Twenty 500 KW solar projects will be built in the Apsley-Bancroft area next year.

All told, PUG has a current generating capacity of 36 MW.

When all the new projects are producing “we’re going to be very close to 60 megawatts,” Wynsma says, “so we’re very excited about that.”

Energy Ottawa is the only municipally owned utility in Ontario with more generation capacity.

The impetus for expanding PUG’s generation stable was economic. Larry Doran, a former PUG president who hired Wynsma, looked at the prices being paid for renewable energy and saw a business opportunity.

It was a good call. PUG now pays the city a dividend of $5.5 million a year with $3.1 million coming from generation.

“I can see those dividends from our company going up, quite nicely, over time,” Wynsma says.

Growth has also meant job creation. When he came there was one full time operating manager for London St. Now the division has 16 full-time staff, all of them in good-paying technical and management jobs.

And he sees another opportunity for green job creation, although this time not for people, at the Lily Lake solar farm.

“If I have one thing I’d like to do, which we saw in Europe, is to put some sheep on it,” Wynsma says.

Sheep trimming grass while sun-power flows into the grid. It’s where the past meets the future in electrical generation.

This is one of a series of articles commissioned and paid for by Sustainable Peterborough and published in partnership with The Peterborough Examiner. By Jim Hendry, Peterborough Examiner, original article published Saturday, August 13, 2016.