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HILARY BRADBURY: A company that creates value for its full circle of stake holders. So it’s no longer just its stockholders, but the full circle of stakeholders which would include, obviously, customers the community, environment. What it’s trying to do is make money by meeting their needs.You can apply the concept to just about anything, Bradbury says—natural resources, urban growth, public policy. But for the moment, let’s consider sustainability as it applies to business and the economy HB: It does seem to make money, which is interesting.Had you invested 10-thousand dollars in a regular corporation on the Standard and Poor’s Index in 1996, you’d end up about 18-thousand dollars by the year 2000, Bradbury says. Take that same 10-thousand in 1996 and invest it in companies with sustainable inclinations… HB: It turns out you would end up with something around $21,000. So this difference has been remarked upon by many people in the business.The success probably has something to do with management’s openness to innovation and its ability to truly grasp the complexities of sustainability—meaning serving the stakeholders. HB: What I’ve noticed over the years is, the environmental stuff is almost easy for these companies. What they find very hard to get their heads around is the people stuff.Perhaps all this is best demonstrated by a real-life example. We can find it right here in Cleveland at The Oatey Company. Vice-chairman Bill Oatey is the third generation Oatey to run the plumbing supply company, which has six plants world-wide. Oatey says the business owes its success to consistent innovation of its products. For the past three years, that innovation has taken a new direction. BILL OATEY: This facility that we’re standing in was built in the late 1950s and it was very dark. We’ve since put in new lighting and painted the ceiling white and the walls white which enables us to turn off a lot of the lights, save electricity and just have a more pleasant environment for the associates.Not all of the steps have been as simple and low-cost as painting a room. But taken together, Oatey says the company has the potential to save 80-thousand dollars a year on energy costs alone. Other, pricier changes include installing sky lights and setting up piping systems to keep dust particles to a minimum. The company offers English as a Second Language classes to its multi-national work force. And when it comes to reducing waste, The Oatey Company now purchases its materials in bulk—which cuts cost. It’s all about meeting the triple bottom line, Oatey says: people, planet and profit. OATEY: Yeah, it’s another triple bottom line situation. The scrap you generate, the lower cost it is to make your product. And we have to pay every time they come and pick up a trash bin and take it to the landfill and fewer we can send to the landfill, there’s a savings there. And again the environment we’re helping ‘cause we’re not adding to the landfills.Lately, Oatey’s been considering installing a living roof—meaning a roof that sprouts vegetation—on purpose. Living—or “green” roofs—lower heating and cooling costs. OATEY: It could actually provide an environment up on the roof where our people could go and eat lunch.So when it comes to sustainability as it applies to business, it’s all about creating a healthier environment both in and out of your workplace. But how does this idea of sustainability extend beyond an individual business? For that let’s turn to David Beach, director of Eco-City Cleveland—a non-profit, environmental, city planning group. DAVID BEACH: (sighs) big sighIt’s difficult because there are so many ways to interpret sustainability. Is it an environmental cause? Is it an economic policy? Is it a social movement? BEACH: It’s doing things with an eye on the future and making sure you can keep doing what you are doing without any degradation of the ability to do that. So sustainability in part means having a long-term focus and making sure that how you live today doesn’t compromise the ability of your children, your grandchildren to have the same quality of life, the same opportunities.Beach says that at the core of a sustainable community is a well-planned city—which is what you’d expect an urban designer to say. He also says people need to decide what a high quality life is and how to live it. By way of example, think about cars. Consider how much time you spend in your car—driving to work, driving to the grocery store, driving to the coffee shop, driving the kids to activities—even driving to the gym. That’s a lot of time driving that could be spent doing more enjoyable things like bike riding or spending time with your family. DB: We might find that by redesigning our communities we can have a great lifestyle and not have to drive as much because we’re living in a vibrant pedestrian-oriented community where everything is close by and we can walk to Starbucks to get our coffee instead of driving ten miles.If the world around you offered everything you needed within walking distance, would you still choose to spend your time in the car? DB: Cars are only great when they’re actually giving you mobility. They’re not so great if you’re stuck in traffic half the time.What’s more, the benefits of such a community could extend beyond one neighborhood or city or state—and could be spread equitably throughout the world, Beach says. What would it take to create such a world? It certainly can’t happen overnight, Beach says, it took 50 years to get where we are now—city’s sprawling ever larger. DB: And to turn that around it’s going to take us another 50 years of continual development—which we’re going to do anyway. It’s a matter of choice and design.Consider your local school or college. Those are basically microcosms of the larger world, but with bells telling us when to move on. Schools contain aspects of life that can—with a few changes—become sustainable. Think about it: a school is a building and that had to be constructed. The building uses energy. Students go to and from school every day using some form of transportation. And once they’re there they eat—teenagers especially eat… a lot.. If memory serves, cafeteria food rarely qualifies as gourmet—sometimes there are favorites, like ‘tater tots or pizza. But other times, the culinary selection is just something that doesn’t make you want to clean your plate. That food gets thrown out—much to the horror of grandmothers everywhere. But wasted food offers our first opportunity to hook into sustainability. Why throw food away, when it can serve other uses? And this doesn’t mean sending it to starving children. Let me explain by looking at Oberlin College’s unwanted food. It turns out, the college produces an impressive amount of discarded rations. LUCIAN EISENHAUER: The daily average for Oberlin College is around 1400 pounds. And, um, so that works out to about 150 tons per year.Lucian (loo-shun) Eisenhauer graduated from Oberlin this May and wrote his senior thesis on food waste at the college. He says discarded food has a dollar figure attached to it—a price that the school could probably eliminate. The first cost is the garbage disposal in the sink—which uses fresh water on one end and waste water at the other.. L.E.: Currently at Oberlin College those in sink disposals run for the duration of each meal. Generally, that’s about eight gallons per minuteAt eight hours a day, the cost of that process comes to about 40-thousand dollars per academic year. Then there’s the garbage that goes into the dumpster. L.E.: So there’s a fee each time that dumpster is tipped and each time that it’s transported to the landfill.So all that wasted food ends up costing money, when it could be used to save the school some cash. Actually, not all of that food is wasted. Oberlin College has ties to a 3 acre organic farm at the Ecological Design Center, a chunk of land about three miles outside of town.  The
farm is already trading wasted food and mulch for fresh produce. The
college, the city and a few local restaurants are in on the deal and
the arrangement has potential to grow. Brad Masi, executive director
of the Ecological Design Innovation Center, strides through the farm’s
green house and fields, explaining the concepts of organic farming.
Of course, there are no chemicals, the crops are varied and they occupy
a relatively small area of land—small, that is, in comparison to commercial
farms…and then, there are the chicken tractors.
BRAD MASI: So this is a larger scale of what I was explaining in the green house. But this is actually a bigger scale, what’s called a chicken tractor.No, the chickens don’t actually sit in a John Deere and tool around the farm. About a dozen egg layers are contained in a 75- by four-foot enmeshed run, where they scratch and peck at the soil, eat residue and produce the ultimate fertilizer, manure. The chicken tractors are rotated across the rows where crops will be planted so eventually the soil will be rich in nutrients and produce abundant crops… and that brings in the money. BM: I would estimate—we had another farm that we ran for about six years and… (chicken sounds get loud, Masi laughs) They often get excited like that when one’s laying an egg.With the chicken celebration subdued, Masi gets back to the point—how much money can a small organic farm earn? Oberlin College spends 2-point-4 million dollars on food each year--about 200-thousand dollars of that goes to nine local farmers as well as the Innovation Center. Masi says the beauty of a large institution buying even a small percentage of its food from local farmers is that the money stays in the community. BM: The average food molecule travels 1300 miles from the farm where it was produced to the plate where it is consumed. In addition to thinking about the transportation, the fossil fuel that’s burned to support the system…you have to think about the economics and how does that impact this region.Spending money on food that was grown say, in California, basically means that your money is leaving the Cleveland area, leaving the state and going into the pocket of distributors and farmers somewhere else. BM: So by trying to create direct connections, we take large concentrated populations or institutions and urban areas and find ways that that combined buying power can be used to support local farms right here in the region.And there’s more. Increasing the regional food industry provides a business opportunity for the industries related to food such as food distribution, processing and creating regional specialties. No one’s saying we have to give up importing products that could never grow in this region—like avocadoes or coffee, Masi says. But supporting farmers who grow indigenous food would keep more food dollars in Northeast Ohio. And that’s one of the basic tenants behind sustainability; buy local and keep the money in the area. PARKER BOSLEY: We have not used commercial lettuce for about two years…Parker Bosley, owner of Parker’s New American Bistro, has been one of the region’s loudest proponents of buying locally. Bosley says, 99 percent of all the ingredients he uses are homegrown products and that includes meats, produce—even fish. But it took 20 years to get to that point. PB: So when I started to do this no matter how well I cooked, the ingredients would always control the end result…and I realized I was using generic, commercial, food service products, And I said, “I live in an agriculture state. I’m an hour from farms, why am I using this?” So I said at that time, “I’m going to change this.” And I went out to do it and it was pretty tough and most people said that’s a crazy idea, you’re going backwards and there was no support system at that time. No—nothing.These days there’s plenty. In fact, just around the corner from Bosley’s Bistro is the Great Lakes Brewing Company, a micro-brew pub that features fare from local growers. Just like the Oberlin Farm, the Brew-Pub is recycling its garbage, but with a twist. They’re looking at waste as an opportunity to create a new product. Pat Conway, who co-owns Great Lakes with his brother Dan, says they started with the stuff most of us are familiar with: PAT CONWAY: We’re doing the low hanging fruit by recycling the glass, cardboard and the paper in our office. And in verma composting where the worms are eating some of our barley and making great organic fertilizer.Well, maybe verma-composting is a little unusual…but now their efforts have advanced. Now it’s about using old food to create new food… PAT CONWAY: Making Pretzels and bread from our barley; making ice cream from our low-fill beer—Mitchell’s Ice cream makes Porter Chocolate Chip Ice cream; Kilbuck Farm is making gourmet mushrooms from our barley substrate…They’re closing the food loop—buying from area farmers, and selling their goodies around the region, then passing on their waste to other local companies that need it for entirely different treats. And it doesn’t stop there. Their latest project: putting a green roof on one of their buildings that’s due for roof repair anyway. PC: We’ll grow some organic flowers and herbs and produce that. We could feed with the verma compost, the organic worm castings, and then bring the food across the street to the restaurant.It’s an expensive proposition, but Conway says based on their previous efforts, it will probably pay off. PC: We absolutely are up. In the brewery we’re up over 20 percent. The restaurant is up and the banquet facility is up big and our store is growing. I think that’s part and parcel to the image that we are conveying to the community that maybe you’d be interested in supporting a company that supports the society around us. We always have a real strong social message and we have this real strong environmental message.A message that’s quite pleasing to the olfactory senses whenever the Great Lakes Brewing Company’s Fatty Wagon drives by. The mini-bus runs on pure bio-diesel made from the brewery’s waste vegetable oil—the stuff that was used for frying food. It was Ray Holan’s idea. Conway says about two years ago, the brewery was hosting a meeting for entrepreneurs interested in sustainability when he first met Holan. PC: At the end of the meeting, Ray come up and said, I have an avenue for your restaurant grease. I can make some fuel and run possibly some co-generation. And I said, “we have a shuttle bus that runs people to and from the Indians games and Playhouse Square.”The two agreed on a deal: Great Lakes provides production space and spent oil, and Holan turns it into a fuel additive: which you’ll smell every time the white van dashes across the Detroit-Superior bridge, looking for another Indians game. This leaves Holan in charge of the new company, BioDiesel Cleveland. Other grease-suppliers are also on board now. RAY HOLAN: Tommy’s Restaurant out on Coventry has been very supportive as well. And my personal favorite has been Peterson Nut Company because their oil is peanut oil. And at one point we thought about making different flavors of fuel because when we use the peanut oil it really does smell like peanuts when you go down the road. So that’s kind of fun.Peanut aroma tops diesel fumes any day. In fact, the fragrant fuel additive cuts pollution from diesel. According to the U-S Environmental Protection Agency there’s about a 50 percent reduction in the amount of smog—or ozone forming particulates—when biodiesel is in the tank. And, Holan says, biodiesel helps diesel engines run more smoothly and last longer. The key now, is to making the production of it less labor-intensive. RAY HOLAN: The door opens and waste vegetable oil is brought into the facility, right there on the pallet. So the oil comes in and then its heated in these tanks you see here…stainless steel about 80-90 gallon tank.Holan mixes in sodium methoxide to the oil which strips away something called esters. Then glycerin is somehow produced and…basically it goes through a process that a chemist could understand much better than a curious journalist. The process takes about 36 hours and produces 500 gallons of biodiesel, which sells for $2.75 a quart. Holan puts biodiesel in his own 1996 Passat, HOLAN: There’s about 20 percent in there now.Great Lakes is no longer his only customer. The Cleveland Metroparks buys from Biodiesel Cleveland for their mowing equipment and NASA Glenn has even found a use for it—helping reduce the noxious fumes from idling trucks. Turning oil to gas is a sustainable process in and of itself. But it doesn’t stop there. BioDiesel’s waste can be reincarnated. The glycerin that’s produced during Biodiesel’s creation can be used to make soap. Also, studies say bio-diesel’s by-product is hydrogen —a key component in fuel cells. And as for emissions, it helps reduce air pollution. Bio-diesel’s carbon dioxide emissions are way below those of fossil fuels. Reducing garbage on the ground and in the air means a cleaner environment. A cleaner environment means future generations can enjoy the same quality of life we have now. Which is basically the definition of sustainability. There are other efforts underway around Northeast Ohio to reduce toxic emissions. One company makes ethanol from sugary beverages that would otherwise be thrown away…and another company—commonly known as RTA, the Regional Transit Authority—is taking steps to convert its fleet of buses into clean, green, transit machines. Tamara Gray (TAM-er-uh) drives a downtown RTA loop in a bus that operates on compressed natural gas. She says the alternative fuel makes no difference in how the bus handles. Gray’s been driving buses for eight years, so she knows what she does like about the new bus. TAMARA GRAY: I guess it doesn’t give off fumes like the…um, 88 or 89’s. They have, like, smoke, smog…whatever that is. But this, the natural gas, it doesn’t do any of that. You don’t smell anything neither. It’s better than the other ones the old ones.Twenty percent of RTA’s fleet runs on natural gas. Another third of the big buses use ultra-low sulfur diesel—which Gray says are a delight to drive and are less stinky than regular diesel buses. That’s probably because ultra-low sulfur diesel is pretty clean stuff, says Joe Calabrese (KAL-a-breeze), CEO and general manager of RTA. Normal diesel fuel emission is rated at 300 to 500 parts per million in particulate matter. JC: The ultra low-sulfur diesel fuel is in the 15 to 30 area. So it’s ten times cleaner than normal diesel fuelCleaner air is certainly a component of sustainability. In general, its easy to find where the environment fits into the concept. But there are other less tangible components to sustainability that may be harder to measure, but no less important. Let’s go back for a moment to sustainability’s definition…this time according to Bill Gruenkemeyer, leader of the community development program at The Ohio State University Extension: BILL GRUENKEMEYER: Sustainable development is specifically about how do we find a balance between the economic side of our community, the environmental side of our community and the social side of our community.The R-T-A is all over the social side of sustainability, Calabrese says. It’s collaborating with a non-profit group, the Council for Economic Opportunities in Greater Cleveland, to build a Head Start day care center right next to the rail station in East Cleveland. JOE CALABRESE: I’ve talked to customers who may have four or five children who get on a bus in the morning to go to a day care center to drop two or three of them off. Then, get back on the bus with the remaining children to go to another day care center. Then get on a third bus to go to work. And then they repeat that in the afternoon. So this day care at the East Cleveland Stokes-Windmere station is a wonderful lifestyle enhancement where they can drop their children off there, walk literally a few feet to get on the train to go downtown and back.By building a strategically located day care center, RTA is helping low income parents juggle the responsibilities of childcare and job performance. And that’s another piece of the sustainable puzzle. If it helps to increase ridership, all the better for RTA. In fact Calabrese says the company's goal this year is to increase ridership among teens. Currently, about six thousand Cleveland Public High School pupils take public transportation to school…and some of those students get off the bus at the corner of Stokes Boulevard and Carnegie right next to John Hay High School. The school is shut down now—not just for the summer, but for the next year and a half. The students have been relocated while John Hay gets a complete makeover. It’s the first of 110 schools in the district to go through renovation under a 1-billion dollar initiative to rebuild the city’s schools. Sustainability advocates are drooling: What an opportunity to create green buildings and to make use of all the locally-owned businesses that have gone sustainable. The question is, will the school district take advantage of this opportunity PAUL FLESHER: We’re always looking to try to align what we can do within our budget and within our design manual that we have to meet.The design manual in question is a tome of rules and regulations dictating the number of classrooms a school should have, the kind of paint on the walls and the efficiency of the heating system. Paul Flesher, executive director of facilities says there’s much in the design manual that matches up with green building concepts…but 1 billion dollars doesn’t go as far as you’d think when you’re talking about 110 buildings …so it’s hard to add on the costs of always making “green” choices. PF: We don’t want to invest in unproven technology…things that haven’t shown definite economic benefit, but we’ll look at each on a case by case basis.
DAVID BOWEN: It has very, very nice materials, high quality materials—bricks, stone, metalwork, wood. And we’re just going to refurbish those nice elements and we’re trying to do a nice balancing act between energy efficient, the needs of the students and also the historic character of the building. And some of them compete.Between the state board of education’s building requirements and the 24-million dollar budget for John Hay, Bowen says the extent of his firm’s ability to make the building 100 percent environmentally friendly is limited.  The
building cannot have the most energy-efficient windows, but it can
have lighting transducers that will read light levels and dim the
electric lights as needed. It can’t have a green roof, but it can
be topped with gravel, which should do a better job reflecting the
heat of sunlight. In some ways, Bowen says, the structure came with
green components built in.
DB: What you see above us is glass block flooring and above that is another floor and it has skylights. So originally, before these got painted over the skylights would bring light into the third floor and then the glass blocks would bring it into the second floor. Another green building technique done in 1927.The advantage to having natural light in the building works on so many levels, Bowen says. It conserves energy and reduces the electric bill. And, according to the U-S green Building Coalition, natural lighting improves student performance and makes for a healthier atmosphere—which means fewer sick days. So the painted over glass blocks are going to be cleaned off and new, light-diffusing skylights will be put in. DB: There is a big whole in the roof up above us…When the building is done, it will serve about 1000 students, divided into three, career-based micro-schools. The new improvements made to the school’s heating and cooling system, the new window, the quantities of natural light—they’ll end up saving the district thousands of dollars in energy costs. But Bowen says, he’s not satisfied—time and money restraints meant the project couldn’t be as green as many had hoped. DB: We’ve been able to model the school for energy efficiency, but we haven’t been able to do some of the other things that you would do under LEEDLEED refers to the official green certification standard. It means “leadership and energy in environmental design.” DB: And then the next school we plan on hopefully progressing from there and hopefully make it a LEED certified school.If Richard Bowen and Associates wins that contract too, of course. The students probably won’t know about the efforts to make John Hay a green building in a sustainable community. They won’t know that two of the three contractors who worked on the building were Cleveland-based firms—or that a Northeast Ohio Company manufactured the skylights that liven up the environment. And all of that matters, remember, because sustainability is about keeping money in the region and creating a green and pleasant, social atmosphere. When it comes to building materials, Northeast Ohio has the potential to produce all kinds of green products. SADDHU JOHNSTON: All of the components that you’re seeing around you—they’re all parts of this new industry.  Saddhu
Johnston, executive director of the Green Building Coalition, remarked
on Northeast Ohio’s potential a few months ago during construction
of the Cleveland Environmental Center. The building is the first commercial
building in the city to be officially dubbed green, or LEEDS certified.Johnston says green construction is no longer some fringe idea. Governments and public agencies across the country are requiring new buildings be LEED certified—this includes the city of Shaker Heights and the General Services Administration SJ: The largest landlord in the world.And that means, Johnston says, that the green building industry is about to boom. SJ: We here in Northeast Ohio could start to manufacture more of those materials and supply them for this new industry…we have the basis of manufacturing for that.  The
more manufacturers, construction companies, engineers and architects
learn how to incorporate green policies into their work, Johnston
says, the more marketable Northeast Ohio becomes. No one would deny that Northeast Ohio is lacking in potential to become sustainable—certainly no one involved in the movement. And even those critical of sustainability acknowledge that some aspects of it have great benefits—such as the connection between the reduction of waste and the improvement of the environment with economic gain. But there’s a glitch, says Ned Hill, professor of Urban Studies at Cleveland State University. The vagueness of the term and the complexity in actually implementing it can be problematic. NED HILL: It means you can have one of these great conversations where everyone says yes, we want sustainability.” Nod their heads and walk away and do completely different things.And in the end, Hill says, a company can strive to be as sustainable as possible, but it’s the consumer that ultimately decides if they want it. NH: So if the consumer desires a product that may have some negative environmental impacts, the only way really to deal with that is by changing prices. And here you’ll see the discussion about automobiles, SUV, decreasing gas miles of the American auto fleet, shows the impact of having very low prices of gasoline encouraging people to buy large vehicles. DAVID BEACH: It’s not that you’re sustainable or you’re not. It’s a way of constant improvement.Says David Beach of Eco-City Cleveland. So what might not seem enticing to customers today, may prove to be the norm once people see its benefits. DB: Weather you agree with sustainability as a concept or not, most people are agreeing that we have to change the way our economy is going, our industrial system is going that we’re running into some fundamental limits in how the planet is functioning.Natural resources are being depleted at a rapid rate, Beach says. Not only does that mean that maintaining the status quo will ruin our economy, but it means that lack of resources—be it water, air or oil—are bound to lead to conflicts, war and refugees. DB: So that should motivate us to think about are there creative ways that we can live in greater harmony with natural systems. Where we can live so that everyone around us can have a decent life, and allow us to do more of the things that make us human.And by the way, Beach spoke to us from his office in the new Environmental Center—with freshly painted walls that didn’t smell of chemicals, by a desk made from compressed wheat and next to a window that opened up to a breezy spring day. In Cleveland Shula Neuman, 90.3. Resources:
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BM:
Chickens are actually part of our soil restoration strategy. By
concentrating the chickens here, they help to till up the soil and
build the fertility. And help to accelerate the process by which
we can get more productive soil.
BM:
I think we’re looking at some of our better years, about 40-some-thousand
dollars of total sales on about three acres. That’s less than what’s
possible.
