FEATURE
OUR JOURNEY TO
ZERO CARBON Words: Brendan Alborn.
Firstly, please indulge me for a few paragraphs so I can provide some background on how I first fell, head-first into the business of sustainability. In 2004 my career in refrigeration engineering took a welcome detour into facility energy efficiency. I was working overseas for an American company that put me in charge of setting up a ‘facilities solutions’ business in China, where I had lived and worked previously. After two years of helping supermarket chains in China improve their energy efficiency (our version of ‘facilities solutions’) I left the American corporation to set up my own consulting business with two former colleagues who had also been working in the same industry for many years.
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ur first customer in this new business was a French hypermarket company called Auchan. The management at Auchan primarily wanted to improve the energy efficiency of its stores around China as this could potentially lead to sizable reductions to their operating expenses. While we started by doing some major engineering-based energy saving projects they also wanted to establish and formalise their sustainability programme. So, in July 2007 my colleagues and I found ourselves designing and then implementing a long term sustainability strategy for a retail chain that had 15 existing hypermarkets and plans to open 60 more over the next 10 years. In consultation with our customer we decided our aim would be to minimise the environmental impact of their business operations to the greatest extent possible. While the energy the stores used to run their refrigeration, lighting and air conditioning systems and the greenhouse gas emissions associated with producing that energy formed the largest part of the environmental footprint, there were a number of other significant contributing factors. Whilst we
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essentially had to learn about many of these areas as we went along because they were completely new to us, we eventually succeeded in designing a raft of projects to reduce water usage, store waste streams, product packaging and refrigerant gas usage to name a few. We also created and then delivered training in basic sustainability concepts to the chain’s management and staff, as well as communications for external stakeholders, undertook the US-based LEED green building certification and a rather ambitious voluntary emissions reduction (VER) project. As a result of this sustainability programme overall we managed to reduce carbon emissions over ten years by 500,000 tonnes of CO2-e. As you can probably tell, that’s something I’m still pretty proud to have been part of. Fast forward to 2012 which is when I found myself now back in New Zealand and becoming more actively involved in my family’s business servicing the Abel Tasman National Park. It seemed to make sense that I would apply my experience in sustainability to our business so we could formalise and start to monitor the things we were (cont’d)
