Author Archives: Anca Pascalau

Rainwater reservoir helps Robinson Place stay green

Homes with a rain barrel connected to the downspout are fairly common today, saving up nature’s own water source for use watering gardens and washing cars.

But 20 years ago a rain barrel was a sign that whoever lived there was on the cutting edge of eco-awareness.

So to with Robinson Place, the massive but elegantly designed building at Water and Charlotte streets commonly referred to as “the MNR office.”

When it opened 20 years ago Robinson Place had a hidden resource down in the basement: a 35,000-litre rainwater tank, equivalent to a 24-by-12-foot swimming pool, eight feet deep.

Water from the tank is used to flush toilets. A seven-storey, 350,000-sq.-ft. building that provides office space to more than 1,000 provincial government employees has a lot of toilets.

David Burns didn’t know about the rainwater system when he signed on as building manager at Robinson Place. Nor was he aware of the large natural area, waterfall and vegetable garden tucked away on the Otonabee River side of the building.

Burns works for CBRE GCS Canada, a property management company hired by the province. Robinson Place is the largest of several buildings he is responsible for in Peterborough and area and his own office is there.

Designed as the provincial headquarters of the Ministry of Natural Resources (now Natural Resources and Forestry), it was originally used solely by MNR. Today it also has offices for six other ministries.

In eco terms, the building’s defining accomplishment is achieving LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum status two years ago. Most LEED Platinum buildings were built with the exacting standard in mind. Robinson Place is one of just 12 in Canada to qualify in the “existing building operations and maintenance” category, and the first government building.

Technical upgrades that pushed the building into the platinum circle included magnetic bearings in the compressors of huge cold water “chillers” that drive the air conditioning system. Using a magnetic field instead of mechanical shafts reduced energy use, Burns explains.

Across the board, energy consumption has been reduced by 31% over the past decade, he says. Aggressive recycling promotion has steadily increased the rate of diverting waste from the city/county landfill site. In 2012 the diversion rate was 62%; for 2015 it was 77%.

Features like the vegetable garden also contribute to LEED success, Burns says. We walk from the bright, sunny lobby out to a rear stone courtyard. Off to the right is a gate, latched but not locked, in a tall fence covered with vegetation.

Inside the garden area, roughly the size of large backyard, we sit at one of several picnic benches. It’s a natural area without trimmed grass or landscaping. Seven raised vegetable planters, each six feet by four feet, are the most noticeable feature.

The planters overflow with tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, melons, lettuce, spinach, onions, beets and carrots. Burns and 10 to 20 others who work at Robinson Place and tend the gardens each summer deliver their harvest to the nearby Lighthouse Community Centre at St. John’s Anglican Church.

Another hidden resource that contributes to the “green” aspect of Robinson Place is a bicycle parking area in the underground garage.

“We have a very high percentage of staff that bicycle to work,” Burns says, “in the range of 80 to 100 bicyclists.” Several garage parking spaces were converted to bike racks and a bicycle repair station.

The vegetable garden sits on top of the parking garage entrance. We go back out the gate and stroll alongside the waterfall, which more closely resembles a gently descending set of rapids. The quiet burble of tumbling water makes for a soothing little oasis.

It’s a popular lunchtime retreat, one that Burns and many of the building’s workers appreciate.

“I have people come up here from Toronto, consultants, and they say, ‘Oh my God, I wish I worked here.’ And I say, ‘Sorry, you can’t, because I am.’”

Employers take note: good, green design can help attract, and keep, good people.

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, July 30, 2016.

Creating sustainable attitudes at Camp Kawartha Environmental Centre

Jacob Rodenburg is looking out the large, south-facing central window of the Camp Kawartha Environmental Centre, an innovative zero-carbon building that can still claim some environmental “one-and-only” features seven years after it opened.

While those features make the building a showcase for green construction techniques, they are just packaging for the real purpose of the centre.

Rodenburg and the centre’s staff want to help develop a generation of environmentally aware citizens who feel comfortable with nature and protective of it. It’s all about stewardship, he says, and with funding from the Ontario Trillium Foundation and research help from Trent University the recently put together an action plan for achieving that goal – Pathway to Stewardship: A Framework for Children and Youth.

“It’s a vision of how we as a community can sponsor stewardship together . . . it’s a co-ordinated effort involving schools and parents and everybody to foster stewardship,” Rodenburg says.

“We make the argument that kids are born biophiic, which means they are born loving nature. And there is a little window of time there, where if they have direct exposure on a regular basis then they tend to cultivate that love. But if they don’t, then the window shuts.” That window is opening in front us and we’re are about to get tossed out. Where we’re standing has become the middle of a song circle for 30 children enrolled in the Environmental Centre’s day camp.

Craig Brant, the centre manager, has his guitar ready and good-naturedly shoos us away. The interview moves outside.

The centre is on an acre of land on Pioneer Rd. at the south edge of Trent University. Trent provided the site at no cost, along with access to 200 acres of university owned natural space criss-crossed with trails.

It’s an offshoot of Camp Kawartha, a non-profit summer camp and year-round outdoor education facility on Clear Lake. Rodenburg is the executive director at Camp Kawartha. The Environment Centre was built by Fleming College students under the direction of Chris Magwood, Canada’s foremost straw bale construction expert who was a Fleming instructor at the time. Principal funding came from the Gainey Family Foundation.

Partnering with Trent was important, Rodenburg says, because of the link to its school of education. Teaching future teachers how to instill respect for the environment in their students is a key component of the centre’s mission.

“Student teachers come here, they learn about some of the techniques and strategies for environmental education. They even learn about sustainable living. And then those same students do a practicum, implementing some of the things they learned,” Rodenburg says.

“Then they get a certificate from both Trent and Camp Kawartha saying you’re an eco-mentor, go forth and take environmental education into the schools.”

There are also 30-odd programs students from elementary school to university can take at the centre during the school year. The programs are tailored to mesh with the school curriculum, not just science but history, leadership, recreation and the arts.

Home life is equally important for turning young children into lifelong environmental stewards, Rodenburg says.

“The average kid these days tend to spend around seven-and-a-half hours a day in front of a screen. They are more apt to be able to name 100 corporate logos than be able to identify five things in nature.”

Parents can change that dynamic, Rodenburg suggests. Take children to the many green spaces in and around Peterborough. Create a planter box and grow some flowers and vegetables. Get a humming bird feeder. Put together a nature table that changes with the seasons. Kids can fill it up with what they find outdoors.

“And how you speak about nature is really important too,” he says. “A lot of parents will say, ‘Oh, yuck, put that down, that’s dirty.'” So what are you saying? Are you saying that nature’s dirty? If you start using the language of appreciation, and even of love and respect, that can mean a lot.”

Buildings, however sustainable, eventually crumble. Attitudes can last for generations.

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, July 16, 2016.

Level 2 Drought Persists!

Despite some rain in August, Level 2 Drought for the Otonabee Watershed still persists, and 20% water conservation is encouraged.  For more details please refer to the news release and presentation by Otonabee Region Conservation Authority.

Some helpful resources include:

OMAFRA Dry Conditions and Low Water

MOECC Green Facts – Managing your water well in times of water shortage

CMHC Household Guide to Water Efficicency

Quaker curbs waste loss

Up on the third floor of the century-old Quaker Oats plant, Stephen Loch points out a set of doors next to a panel of high-tech measuring devices.

This is the brain of Quaker’s waste measurement and control system. Steel “containment vessels” brought from production lines two floors below hold waste material from a run of Quaker Oats, granola bars or whatever was being produced.

Each container has an RFID tag, a radio-frequency identification device similar to those inserted under the skin of cats and dogs.

When the doors open the container is pushed into a set of arms, picked up and weighed. The measuring device records the weight and reads a radio signal from the tag that identifies what production line the container came from and the product it was running.

“Then we would enter it in our tracking system,” explains Loch, the plant manufacturing manager. “So then we understand where our waste losses are coming from.” RFID tracking helps cut production costs. It also helps make the plant more sustainable, says manufacturing director Terry Labrash, a Peterborough native whose parents still live in the south end of the city.

“We strive to be what we call a zero landfill site,” Labrash says. “Less than one per cent of our total waste goes to landfill. Part of that is our strategic partnerships that we have with our food waste byproduct stream.”

Food waste includes oat hulls and “fines,” powdered material that Loch defines as “basically different grades of flour.”

Eight years ago Quaker invested in a new building attached to the 12 large grain silos at the back of the plant. Trucks from Quaker’s waste management partner, SPB Solutions Inc., drive in and are loaded with hulls, fines and “wet” waste from the chewy granola bar and Instant Quaker Oats lines.

SPB Solutions, a national company with a local location in the Pido Rd. industrial park, processes the material for use in animal feed.

During an interview in his office Labrash sketched an overview of the company’s current modernization plan for its oat milling process, which he describes as a “substantial investment.” Milling oats is still the heart of the operation. Oat grains are hulled and the seeds (the hull is a husk; the seed is a groat) are cleaned, sorted, separated, graded and processed with heat and steam.

“We are going to take 68 pieces of equipment and replace them with nine pieces of equipment,” Labrash explains. “And there will be a significant reduction in our energy consumption.”

The plant has cut annual energy use by five per cent (1.7 million kw/hours) and water use by eight per cent (nearly 10,000 cubic metres) over the past five years. Modernizing milling operations will significantly improve those numbers, he says.

It is easier to grasp how 69 machines can be reduced to eight as Loch takes us through the plant. On one milling floor, wood frame “aspirators” continually shake the grain while blowing in air to help sort it. Each is about four feet high and four feet wide.

On another floor a new stainless steel Buhler aspirator is waiting to be assembled. About two-thirds the size of one of the old wooden machines, it will replace six of them.

Some of the old, single-function milling machines date back 80 years. The modern replacements are multi-taskers. Loch mentions that one of the new energy-efficient processors will replace 18 old pieces of equipment.

Another step toward conservation is the application of ideas from a “resource conservation summit” that brought experts from within the company – Quaker is owned by beverage and food giant PepsiCo – and outside consultants to Peterborough last year.

“We just blitzed all of our processes in the entire facility looking for areas of opportunity on conservation,” Labrash says, “and identified some 160 action items that we are now prioritizing for execution.”

As that happens Quaker will further reduce the amount of water and energy it uses, and the waste it produces, while continuing to help feed the nation.

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, July 2, 2016.