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Our Green Programming:  Tracking Our Eco-Footprint

Before an organization can take action to minimize its effect on the environment, it has to know what its current impact is. Making such an assessment is a complex, expensive, and time-consuming process, but for an institution like Longwood Gardens that takes environmental stewardship seriously, it is essential.

“Last year we outlined our sustainability strategy,” says Mark Winnicki, Director of Facilities & Technology. “As we looked at our planning processes and sustainability best practices, we realized that we didn’t have a baseline. We engaged a consultant, Five Winds International, to assist us in defining our eco-footprint.”

The first challenge was deciding whether to focus on major factors or include every last detail. “We went through a long laundry list of items and decided to concentrate on the major contributors,” Winnicki says. “We looked at solid and water waste streams, recyclables, our air emissions, energy consumption, fuels, and our greenhouse gas sinks [how vegetation and soils act as naturally occurring buffers that use up the gases].”

The conclusion was surprising—and sobering. “We thought that our open space, trees, and environmentally friendly processes would offset a lot of our consumption, but it turned out to be a small percentage. Attacking the problem with carbon sinks or carbon credit is not enough. Even though we are doing wonderful things with composting and soil management, the amount of CO2 sequestered is minor compared with the total. The only real way to change our eco-footprint is to reduce consumption.”

The top three targets are Longwood’s boiler/heating system, electricity, and transportation fuels. “Seventy-two percent of our CO2 emissions come from the natural gas that we consume for heat,” Winnicki says, “and the other 4% from fuel oil, with 23% from electricity. That knowledge is really going to help us focus our efforts and resources. We do have glass buildings that we’re heating, and we’re accelerating the process of looking at alternative heating methods, as well as different designs and materials for future buildings.”

Lessons learned will be shared with other horticultural institutions. “One of our goals is to create a sustainability index for public gardens,” says Winnicki. “There is very little standardization and few benchmarks. We want to provide the methodologies and measurement tools so they can measure their performance and reduce their eco-footprint as well. It’s exciting to think of the long-term possibilities.”

For more information about Longwood Gardens’ sustainability practices, visit http://www.longwoodgardens.org/SustainabilityatLongwood.html.