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OUR JOURNEY TO ZERO CARBON
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.
Our 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 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)
There are currently two zero carbon commercial operators in the Abel Tasman.
already doing to operate sustainably. One of the key things I had learnt during my time in consulting was that implementing sustainability measures wasn’t neccessary a cost to a business. If pursued carefully these projects almost always improved rather than reduced a business’s profitability. That was my experience with the retail chains such as Wal-Mart and Tesco. These companies didn’t have highly sophisticated sustainability programmes just because their customers demanded it of them, and would potentially shop at their competitor’s stores if they didn’t, but they were also reducing their energy and other operating costs in the process.
I started the sustainability project for our Abel Tasman businesses using the same methodology as we had employed in China for Auchan. We identified our largest environmental impacts, which not surprisingly turned out to be the petrol and diesel used by our water taxis and other company vehicles, the electricity, natural gas and water we used in our buildings and the waste generated by our business operations and our customers, particularly our guests staying at the Marahau Beach Camp. The next step was to gather the data, on an annual basis, for all of those inputs to our environmental impact. We gathered the fuel data in litres by fuel type, electricity in kWh, water usage and waste to landfill in m3. Once we had the data in absolute terms we defined some metrics to assess our current efficiency rates and to track our performance in the future. I had learnt through my work with retail facilities that taking data in raw terms and comparing the difference between months or years did not provide meaningful comparisons. Many variables, such as the number of guests we were transporting on our water taxis have a significant impact on our fuel so the metric to track and measure our progress needed to reflect those variables.
During this process I realised that operating 15 smaller water taxis as opposed to a couple of large vessels was inherently more efficient. The demand for water taxi services in the Abel Tasman is extremely seasonal with around 80% of the demand for those services coming in five months from November to March. With 15 smaller water taxis each of which can transport 18 passengers we can modulate our capacity to match that demand. This is the same modular approach I had used in my previous life in facility engineering, the principle of which is to precisely match demand with supply. For example, we would do everything we could to supply a supermarket sales area with precisely the right level of light according to the time of day, and just the right amount of light: Not too much light to waste energy and not too little light to necessitate the use of head torches for customers to find what they were looking for. Applying this approach to water taxi services we can use one boat in the middle of winter when the demand is at its lowest
Brendan Alborn, owner and Commercial Director at AbelTasman.com.
and then scale up that supply as the demand increases by adding a boat, and then another boat etc. etc. during the busier times. If you contrast this with having one large boat with a 100 passenger capacity you’re running very efficiently at your maximum loading but not when you have 10 passengers. And the demand curve for water transport services has a short peak and then scales down at either side of the peak so the graph looks much like the drawing of a mountain. If that demand line was flat, at 100 passengers per day, then clearly the one large boat would be the most efficient way to meet that demand.
Other things we had already made good progress with well before we started formalising our sustainability strategy focused on fuel efficiency for our water taxis. We were progressively swapping out the 225hp Honda outboard motors for the new, more efficient 250hp models. Digital gauges were being fitted to water taxis so the skippers could monitor fuel economy in real-time and make adjustments as they drove their boats. In 2017 we had invested in establishing our own purpose-built marine engineering workshop so our boats and vehicles could be maintained and serviced inhouse. This resulted in the lifespan of our outboard motors being more than doubled and to more efficient fuel economy across the board.
We also had a trailer custom-built for the Marahau Beach Camp so customers could easily separate recycling and it could also be transported to the Motueka refuse centre. We had also implemented smaller efficiency projects such as installing higher efficiency plumbing fixtures and high efficiency LED lighting fixtures in our buildings.
In early 2019 I found myself, not for the first time in my career, running out of ideas for what we could do next to push things forwards in terms of improving our environmental sustainability. It was clear that we had pushed the current technology about as far as we could. In the absence of being able to source motors to power our water taxis using a renewable energy source we were going to continue burning fossil fuels to operate our business.
To be perfectly honest, I had seen the concept of ‘off-setting’ environmental impacts abused by some pretty significant international businesses. I’d been frustrated to see that rather than carrying out the harder work of actually changing things internally within their businesses to op-
Abel Tasman AquaTaxi.
erate more efficiently some companies had simply made a donation to the sexiest charity they could find. Bam, donation made, job done - now let’s get back to business as usual.
So, it was with some reluctance that I realised we would need to offset the balance of our carbon emissions, at least until Elon Musk found the time to invent an e-boat. Once this decision was made it was relatively straightforward to find a local entity to help us with our project. Through a personal referral we engaged EKOS to certify our carbon footprint. We chose EKOS because they are a local non-profit organisation and they had a couple of carbon offset forestry projects located within our own region. It was important to me that we could see and touch the trees we would be investing in and we did not want our investment to disappear overseas to a mystery offset project.
Completing EKOS’s carbon calculator template was not at all difficult and we already had most of the data for the various inputs on file such as fuel and other energy usage. With some guidance from EKOS as to which were our scope 1 (direct) and scope 2 (indirect) carbon inputs, we finalised our data for the financial year from 1 April 2018 to 31 March 2019. EKOS did the maths to convert these inputs to tonnes of CO2 equivalents (CO2-e) and contracted a third-party agency to certify our emissions as they exceeded the threshold at which EKOS could complete that certification internally.
We decided to offset 100% of our carbon footprint by investing in the existing Uruwhenua native forestry project located about 45 minutes drive from our base in Marahau, just over the Takaka Hill in Golden Bay. I drove over to see the forest myself and was only satisfied when I met the owner personally and could run my hands over the bark on a few trees.
This initiative was a significant cost to our business but it is a decision that we have not regretted. If we truly believe enjoying our stunning natural environment and protecting it go hand in hand then we need to make tangible moves to reduce and mitigate our carbon footprint.
