Managing sustainability

BOULDER — Sustainability directors at local companies oversee recycling programs and tune up their buildings’ energy-efficiency scores, overhaul supply chains and support employee efforts at volunteerism.

But ask those folks exactly how many dollars such measures contribute to their companies’ bottom lines, and things can get fuzzy. Marketing plays a big role in today’s sustainability efforts, many of them say, making savings hard to quantify. Doing something because “it’s the right thing to do” — the goal of a $1 million emission reducer bought by Ball Corp. in the 1990s — also does not necessarily carry a return price tag.

Front and center in the sustainability report released in May for publicly traded Ball Corp. (NYSE: BLL) is the company’s 6 percent return on investment to stockholders in 2011.

SPONSORED CONTENT

Commercial Solar is a big investment, but not an overwhelming one

Solar offers a significant economic benefit for commercial property owners while also positively impacting the environment and offering a path to compliance for new municipal requirements like Energize Denver. A local, experienced solar installer will help you navigate the complexities of commercial solar to achieve financial success for your project.

Ball Corp. makes packaging; its subsidiary Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Broomfield makes aerospace goods and services. The company’s total sales increased to $8.6 billion from $7.6 billion in 2010.

The company has installed monitoring systems to understand its machines’ energy consumption, said Bjoern Kulmann, Ball’s director of sustainability. The company has exceeded its 10-year goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 16 percent, according to the sustainability report.

The company ended its plastic packaging business and became the world’s largest producer of aluminum slugs. Total waste recycled from the company increased from 37 percent to 47 percent, according to the report.

Actual returns related to sustainability are important to Ball, but so are more intangible aspects, Kulmann said.

“Financial metrics are a very important business aspect of this,” Kulmann said. “But other aspects such as image or reputation or attraction and retention” all are important.

Some “green” projects don’t pencil out financially for a corporation but are done anyway, said Scott McCarty, a Ball spokesman. For example, the company in the 1990s spent about $1 million on a piece of machinery that reduces emissions from a plant in Golden, McCarty said. That’s a benefit for all of its workers in Colorado, as well as residents of the state, he said.

“We talk about the ‘triple bottom line’ of economic, environmental and social responsibility,” McCarty said. “There are some things we do because they’re the right thing to do.”

Western Disposal Services Inc., a trash-hauling and recycling company based in Boulder, won’t do something if it’s not profitable, but realizes that the industry is changing as customers want to be more recycling- and composting-conscious, said Sarah Van Pelt, its environmental coordinator.

Adding recycling and compost services for customers while reducing trash services doesn’t necessarily make company revenue go up, Van Pelt said, without giving specific financial information.

For example, Western Disposal makes 20,000 cubic yards of compost per year, some of which is given away to customers, she said. Western Disposal also sells compost to other companies, which bag it and sell it to hardware stores.

“We’re a for-profit company,” Van Pelt said. “We wouldn’t have gotten into running the compost facility if we didn’t make money on it, but some years are easier than others.”

On another front, Van Pelt has started a recognition program of local restaurants that divert waste from the landfill, but the program essentially is a marketing tool for Western Disposal and the restaurants, she said. Restaurants such as Frasca Food and Wine, Salt, Lucile’s and Turley’s in Boulder and Colterra in Niwot all divert more than 70 percent of their trash to compost and recycling, Van Pelt said. Other Boulder restaurants diverting large amounts of trash from the landfill include The Cork, Foolish Craig’s, Snooze and Rio Grande.

At the University of Colorado-Boulder, Moe Tabrizi, campus director of sustainability, works on a wide variety of projects, including potential cost savings of energy efficiency standards on new buildings.

The $48 million Wolf Law Building initially cost $330,000 more to build to a higher energy-efficiency standard, than a typical building built to campus construction standards, for example, Tabrizi said. The LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold standard from the U.S. Green Building Guild, a nonprofit group, includes water- and energy-conservation measures.

After special water fixtures were installed, along with carbon dioxide sensors, thicker windows and other energy-saving measures, the building has returned an estimated $250,000 in savings per year compared with any other typical building on campus, Tabrizi said. Utilities cost far more at the older Fleming Law Building, for example, he said.

“With the premium that was spent, we gained it back in two years,” Tabrizi said, “ … when typically we would invest in a three- to five-year payback on pure sustainability and conservation.”

Tabrizi’s annual budget is about $250,000 per year, which is used for items such as recycling programs.

Hotel Boulderado in Boulder has made significant changes to energy efficiency, saving an average of 8 percent in utilities each year during the past three years, said Laura McKown, the hotel’s Green Team chairman and executive housekeeper. Programmable thermostats have been installed in all of the rooms, and waste has been reduced 72 percent in that same time period, she said.

“Clients and guests are concerned about environmental issues,” McKown said. “They’ll ask questions like, ‘Do you recycle?’ and ‘Do you change your sheets every day?’ and sometimes they make their decisions to stay with us based on our policies.”

Since the new thermostats were installed in the past three months, McKown said, it’s too early to know how much the hotel is saving on utilites, however. Trash and recycling pick-up costs similar amounts, she said.