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News & Announcements
5/4/2011 | Real Estate Industry Needs to Think Restoratively, Not Just Sustainably
BLJC looks to set an example with restorative environmental practices
“The reality is the real-estate industry is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and waste,” says BLJC president Gord Hicks. “And with the state of where we are in the world, we need to be thinking restoratively in order for us to ensure that our environment doesn’t continue to deteriorate at the levels it’s currently deteriorating.”
Brookfield LePage Johnson Controls (BLJC) was just named to Maclean’s list of “Canada’s greenest employers,” and Hicks hopes that it serves as an example to the rest of real estate industry.
“Hopefully this serves as a role model to other companies to do similar things,” he says. “We’re all about encouraging the industry to get better and this is a good way of being able to demonstrate that some good work is being done.”
Hicks says BLJC’s goal to deliver environmentally restorative portfolios to clients is a tremendous aspiration, but it’s not an easy thing to do. The ambition is to have entire portfolios of buildings making a positive contribution to the environment by producing oxygen, and consuming more carbon dioxide than they emit.
“Restorative is the way everyone needs to be thinking, not just reducing,” he stresses. “There’s too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today. If everyone starts reducing, it’s still going to increase. So that’s not going to be acceptable.”
Hicks calls improving sustainability a journey. “For us, this journey started many years ago, we started taking some decisive actions in 2006 to be one of the first companies in our industry to ban the use of pesticides across our portfolio, years before it became legislated.”
“We believe we need to do that in other ways, whether it be banning the use of plastic water bottles in our offices or using hybrid vehicles as our service vehicles as far as we can,” says Hicks.
Another initiative being piloted at BLJC’s head office in Markham is a zero garbage initiative, where more than 400 employees are looking to divert 100 per cent of their waste from the landfill and into composting and recycling plants.
Hicks says buildings can be more conservative with their water consumption by implementing rain water capture as well.
BLJC is also directing its clients to minimize their energy consumption on site and supplementing usage with renewable energy, or turning to “green power” from companies like Bullfrog Power. Bullfrog Power provides “green electricity” that comes exclusively from wind and hydro facilities certified as low impact by Environment Canada under its EcoLogo program.
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