Aged care facility embeds sustainability

Jodie Rutherford is first to recognise the irony. As the Sustainability and Environmental Manager for Baptist Community Services - NSW & ACT (BCS), her ultimate aim is to get sustainability so embedded at BCS that she makes herself redundant.

“We did not know where to start,” says Rutherford. “The catalyst was that we decided our two new developments had to be energy-efficient, with better water and waste management. We then realised we needed to change our whole organisation because we could not have a flagship, state-of-the-art building and pay no attention to sustainability elsewhere.”

BCS used the Sustainability Advantage Program to produce a strategy that covered four different areas of the BCS business - people, resources, buildings and supply chain.

The BSC headline goals are ambitious. It wants to reduce the use of fossil fuels and cut potable water use by 2% a year to 2020; and divert 50% of non-contaminated waste from landfill.

BCS operates many buildings that are over 30 years old. Most have been retrofitted with energy-efficient lighting and electricity submetering to reduce energy consumption. Submetering allows BSC to use software to measure energy use in individual areas of a building in real time, monitor patterns of consumption and identify areas to improve. This will help BCS set new energy-use-per-day benchmarks. Electricity consumption reports are available on their website, with hourly data, power factor and C0₂ reporting for all major sites.

Its new building at Kellyville BCS expects to save $500,000 a year, at current energy costs, after investing $4.5 million in a gas-boosted microturbine plant that will provide heating, cooling and hot water, and generate a significant amount of renewable energy.

Elsewhere, BCS has introduced many environmental measures, including new laundry processes to reduce water and power usage; energy-efficient lighting; light sensors in corridors and staff areas; water-efficient tap ware and toilets; rainwater tanks; solar hot water systems; and power factor correction to reduce energy demand.

The further BCS looked, the more changes it made. The organisation reduced travel by using web conferencing. Replacing face-to-face meetings has minimised air and road travel, especially in regional areas. This improves work-life balance for staff and cuts accommodation and travel costs. BCS also changed its company vehicle fleet from six-cylinder to more fuel-efficient two-cylinder cars.

While revamping business practices was relatively straightforward for BCS, helping its community clients, who live in their own homes, was more difficult. BCS field workers visited people to help them understand how they could save money by being more sustainable at home. BCS extended this outreach to its Food 4 Life program, a network of six shops where clients can buy nutritional food at cheap prices. BCS trained its shop assistants in basic energy and water efficiency so they could advise clients on how to reduce their electricity and water bills.

“Many of our clients are older, disadvantaged and sometimes socially isolated, such as widows or single parents,” says Rutherford. “They are people who sometimes fall through the cracks. For me, these were great projects to work on. Apart from making changes to our organisation, we could help change the lives of people who depend on us.”