The story below is from our March/April 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
Local organizations and businesses are prioritizing sustainability for the region’s future.
Aila Boyd
9th Street in Southeast Roanoke was renovated late last year as part of the city’s “complete street” initiative. The street was modified to accommodate all users. Notably, bike lanes were added.
Sustainability is a broad concept that can mean many things to different people. Despite its many tentacles, dedicated groups of individuals across numerous organizations in the Roanoke Valley are tackling both internal and external projects one at a time in the hopes of charting a more sustainable path forward.
The city of Roanoke has been leading the way towards a more sustainable future since it started focusing on climate action in 2006.
It’s important that cities address sustainability concerns, Roanoke City Council member Trish White-Boyd says, because of the topic’s wide-reaching impact on matters related to the environment, economy and social well-being. “By prioritizing sustainability, a city can position itself for long-term success while safeguarding the well-being of current and future generations,” she stresses.
Up until recently, the city has focused on internal sustainability efforts, such as its buildings and fleet.
At the Noel C. Taylor Municipal Building, several sustainability initiatives have been adopted, including automatic lights that go out when there’s no motion and dimmer switches so that rooms aren’t being over lit. “Some of them sound pretty minor, but they add up,” Wayne Leftwich, planning manager for the city, says. The city met a Better Buildings Challenge goal in 2018 in which it was able to reduce its energy use for city buildings by 23%.
Streetlights are one of the city’s biggest uses of energy. To curb that use, it has partnered with AEP to install new LED streetlights. The city pays the bill and AEP installs the lights and helps with maintenance. Leftwich says the switch will help “dramatically reduce” the amount of energy that is being used. While the conversion process is slow going, the goal is to have all LED streetlights in the future.
In addition to working on streetlights, the city has also been focusing on “complete streets,” meaning that streets are either developed or modified in a way that accommodates all users, including vehicles, bikes, scooters and those on foot. Brandon Avenue and 9th Street are two recent examples of complete streets. “We went in and took it down to two primary lanes and added bike lanes,” he says of the two streets. “We’re also working diligently to connect neighborhoods to greenways.”
Courtesy of Virginia Western Community College
The STEM Building on the campus of Virginia Western Community College has solar preheat of water heaters.
The city also hopes to focus resources on building up the local electric vehicle infrastructure. While a large portion of the infrastructure will be taken care of commercially as more businesses recognize the importance of offering EV chargers, the city is actively looking for grant funding to expand EV infrastructure in the public realm, including downtown, library and Berglund Center parking lots.
To help make communities more climate resilient, the city has been engaged in a substantial tree planting effort for quite some time, but the effort has been boosted by American Rescue Plan Act funds. The Northwest part of the city has been targeted for tree planting due to it being a “heat island” because of the lack of preexisting trees. “Tree planning in urban cities like Roanoke has become a priority due to its multifaceted benefits for the environment, public health and the overall livability of urban spaces,” White-Boyd says.
One of the other big efforts city residents may have noticed was the 5-cent bag tax the city enacted in 2022 to incentivize shoppers to bring their own bags with them. The taxes collected have been used to purchase reusable bags for those who receive federal benefits.
Leftwich describes the city as “just getting started” when it comes to its efforts to engage external stakeholders. In December the Roanoke City Council approved a Climate Action Plan as part of its 2040 comprehensive plan, which focuses on establishing a healthy environment.
“It’s the first formal effort—we’ve taken what we’ve tried to do internally and then tried to focus it out in the community as well,” he says. “We’re going to continue doing the things we do internally to reduce municipal emissions, but we’re also trying to do a certain amount of outreach, education and connecting people and businesses with resources so that they can also move towards reducing their community emissions as well.”
Courtesy of Carilion Clinic
Carilion Clinic holding an electronics recycling event.
The plan calls for a business liaison who will help connect the community with resources. “At this time, there are tremendous resources for both individual homeowners and businesses to upgrade their facilities to have lower emissions,” he says. “We see our role as helping to facilitate and educate folks on what those resources are.”
The resources that are currently offered include rebates for things like energy efficient HVAC units. “We will help homeowners and homebuilders discover those rebates so that we can have more efficient buildings,” he explains.
Leftwich stresses that it’s important to get buy-in from city residents on the numerous sustainability efforts. “We know that we are unfortunately in a place and time where we have put out a lot of carbon emissions into the environment and we’re starting to see the effects of global climate change. We want to play our part,” he says.
The reduction of emissions, he adds, goes together with the region’s emphasis on the outdoors for recruitment and tourism purposes. “We really see our clean air as part of our marketing pitch for why businesses should locate here and why people should locate here. We want to make sure we keep that clean air. No one wants smog,” he says.
Many of the region’s higher education institutions, Virginia Western Community College being one example, are also taking sustainability quite seriously.
“Virginia Western sees sustainability as enrichment of the designed environment to support generations,” Kevin Witter, director of facilities, planning and development at the college, says. “Our strategy for a sustainable campus includes the operational initiatives of resource management and active environmental stewardship by design. This entails planning buildings, landscape areas, infrastructure, storm water, parking areas, facility use and facility scheduling for sustainability. Sustainability is incorporated by intentional design and is an organizational principle incorporated into all campus projects.”
Like the city, the college is updating its outdoor lighting with LED bulbs. Additional sustainability-related replacement efforts include the replacement of single pane windows with thermal windows and frames in the Hall Family Business Science and Humanities buildings, chiller and boiler replacements that use the latest energy efficient units in the Brown Library and gymnasium and a campus-wide building automation update for HVAC system controls and sensors aimed at improving energy efficiency.
Notably, the newest building on campus, the STEM Building, has solar preheat of water heaters. The Strauss Family Student Life Center is another example of the college’s commitment to sustainability, having earned the LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, certification.
Courtesy of Carilion Clinic
Sara Wohlford
Another example of an organization going all-in on sustainability is Carilion Clinic, which formally launched its efforts back in 2015 when it established the role of director of sustainability, which Sara Wohlford occupies.
“One of the biggest benefits of having a dedicated sustainability staff is that it keeps things from being pushed off the edge of the desk. It allows us to track programs so that we have this whole picture of sustainability,” Wohlford says.
In the past two years, the healthcare system’s efforts have primarily been concentrated on three areas: leaner energy, reducing waste and greening the operating room.
To ensure the seven hospitals are keeping an eye on leaner energy goals, a group of leaders gets together every other month to discuss the energy conservation projects they’re working on at their respective facilities. “The majority of the work we’ve done up to this point has been LED lighting upgrades at all of our facilities and HVAC optimization, trying to keep our buildings running as efficiently as we can,” Wohlford explains.
To reduce waste, the department of sustainability is constantly looking for ways to increase recycling across the system. Some of the recycling programs include mixed recycling at all hospitals and clinical plastics recycling in the operating rooms, as well as recycling for soft plastics, batteries and electronics. “We’ve pretty much maxed out all of our recycling opportunities we have,” she says.
Greening the OR has been one of Wohlford’s key areas of focus in recent months. One of the easiest ways to green the OR has been to reduce the volume of blue wrap, a petroleum plastic that is used for the one-time sterilization of surgical instruments, that enters landfills. The system is now moving towards using rigid sterilization containers. The wrap accounts for roughly 19% of the OR waste stream.
“To this point, we’ve been able to keep over 6,000 pounds of the blue wrap out of the landfill, which has just been really exciting.”
Courtesy of Carilion Clinic
Carilion New River Valley Medical Center’s 4,000-panel solar tracking system provides the healthcare system with energy savings, as well as earnings from the sale of Solar Renewable Energy Credits.
The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions has also been integral to greening the OR. Wohlford worked with the system’s anesthesia leadership to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the administration of anesthesia by over 25% during the first year of data collection. The reduction was accomplished by purchasing new equipment and reducing waste in the delivery of care. She anticipates the downward trend will continue in the future.
Wohlford stresses that her work on sustainability ties in nicely with the system’s mission. “Community health and environmental health are inextricably linked. You can’t untangle the two. As clinicians and healthcare practitioners, we know that a negative impact on the environment is a negative impact on health.”
Going forward, Wohlford’s work will be guided by a report the system commissioned that offers a greenhouse gas accounting for scope one, two and three emissions. She describes it as a “massive undertaking,” which will help the system wrap its arms around its emissions, where they’re coming from and opportunities for improvement. “It will really help us focus our resources and brainpower,” she says.
Wohlford is especially interested in addressing the scope three emissions, which considers emissions generated from patient commutes. The 2023 expansion of virtual healthcare options, she says, should help address these types of emissions.
The story above is from our March/April 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!