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When enjoying a bowl of ice cream, sustainability isn’t usually the first thought on your mind. Perry’s Ice Cream doesn’t see it that way; this organization has green on the brain, and not just when they are making “Mint-Ting-A-Ling.”  I got the chance to sit down with Gayle Perry Denning, Director of Sustainability, and Marissa Wilson, Communications Manager for Perry’s, to talk about the Perry’s culture and how sustainability plays a key role in how they operate.

GrowWNY: Thank you both for taking the time to speak with me today. First, I’d like to talk about your role as Director of Sustainability, Gayle.

Gayle:  Perry’s has always been very conscious with their resources and very resourceful. We’ve been in the mode of continuous improvement for 95 years. Perry's has a long history and tradition in sustainability. Once sustainability started getting more of an environmentally inclusive role and getting more formal as a business practice, we decided that we needed a dedicated sustainabilty person.  So that’s when I came in back in 2010.

A lot of what we’ve been working on is education within our internal community. That includes creating awareness and building a base knowledge at all levels, because our sustainability team can’t be everywhere and do everything.  We’re a relatively large company now and we’re trying to educate across the organization and help everyone realize that they have a role in sustainability.

Marissa: Gayle leads our sustainability team and there are nine of us from across the company and we all represent different areas.  At first, we met every other week to develop our team, and now we’ve moved to quarterly meetings. It's important to get together and talk about things that are going on, work on the goals, and develop recommendations for our executive leadership team. In previous years, we did a lot of brainstorming.  We came up with recommendations and met with our executive leadership team to present those ideas, and the goals and projects came down back through the organization.

Gayle:  It works out so much better.  Like Marissa said, we’re down from meeting quite regularly to once a month because it’s becoming part of our culture.  It’s happening everywhere, and everybody is thinking about it and doing it in their jobs.  It’s a nice thing.  It allows us to do more planning for the longer term.

GrowWNY: I’ve done quite a few of these interviews, and a lot of it just comes down to people saying, “It’s a behavior change.”  I think it’s great that you focus on creating that culture, because after that behavior is in place, it’s smooth sailing.  It becomes inherent.

Marissa: Another great project our team is working on, and I was on maternity leave when they did most of the work, is a shared-learning process. It’ll take two to three years to complete it but the goal is a meeting with every department in the organization. We give them sustainability planning pre-work, discuss ways they can weave sustainability into what they are doing and share best practices across the organization. We talk about successes, challenges and learning experiences. Then we follow-up throughout the year to keep the conversation going.

GrowWNY: Excellent.  Would you mind going into some examples of sustainability efforts at Perry’s?

Gayle:  Wow, we’ve got lots.  (Laughing).

 

Marissa: We could talk about the lighting project.

Gayle:  We did, as probably most companies when they start on that more contemporary-sustainability journey and the environment is a big part of it, is we looked at our lighting.  We remodeled this conference room last year, and we did all the LED lights in here.  We’ve done it in other offices, as we’ve been remodeling and going along, but our biggest contribution in that area has been our warehouse.  We redid all of our lighting in the warehouse, and it has motion sensors, so they’re not running all the time.  It has the LED lighting in there, which is great, because they survive and last a lot longer the colder the temperature is, so we should get a good, long life from them.

Right now, we’re in the process of doing the same project up at our dry warehouse. We have a dry warehouse on Main Street, where all of our dry materials are kept before they are sent here for manufacturing or before they’re loaded on a truck to go out. That upgrade is in the process right now, as we speak.  There are a few office areas that will be left to be converted, and that’s it.  I would say 95 percent of our campus and buildings are converted with the rest to follow in the next few years.

Marissa: Another big project that’s been underway, is converting to handhelds that our team members in the field can use when they’re placing orders.  It’s going to eliminate a lot of the paper waste that we’ve had for not only those external team members and their orders, but then even reaching into internal support teams.

We’ve also had many smaller successes with team members simply questioning the status quo when they see an opportunity for sustainable improvements. For example, our Customer Service Team is always looking for ways to reduce waste. For years, they’ve had a printer that prints out the call sheets and the orders for the day.  They were noticing that the paper, when it prints, it moves up and that it just creates an extra page of wasted paper, so they worked with IT and they said, “We don’t need to have this extra paper, let’s fix this.”  So I think it’s just like it’s becoming more and more top of mind with everybody across the organization, which is really great to see.

GrowWNY: What advice do you have for other organizations looking to start a sustainability program?

Gayle:  First thing is to be patient.  It does take time.  I was just speaking with someone who consults on sustainability, and he was saying that the size of our organization we could expect it to take 15 years to fully integrate sustainable business practices. We have a wonderful tradition in using our natural resources wisely and being efficient and always caring for our community and our team members. We still figure it will take us 10 to 15 years to get to where everybody is firing on all those three sustainable cylinders.  So be patient; it will come.  Communication and education are so important, and it does take time.

Marissa: That’s really how we’ve looked at it.  We’ve developed our long-term vision, and next we will be focusing on the steps to achieve our vision for a sustainable “state” for Perry’s Ice Cream.  We were fully aware that we were not going to be 100 percent perfect in year one, but every year we are seeing growth and the differences in our team members and the decisions that are made across the company.

GrowWNY: I was wondering if we could maybe talk more about your connection with the community and the local farms that you work with and how that’s been a big part of Perry’s.

Gayle:  Well, our relationship is more with O-AT-KA, which is a coop of local dairy farmers.  We have a great partnership and business relationship with them.

Marissa:   98% of our dairy ingredients come from within 50 miles of Akron.

Gayle:  So we’re definitely one of the biggest customers of local farmers, maybe us and probably Upstate themselves are really the biggest local dairy supporters.

Marissa: Additionally, we work with local suppliers and vendors whenever possible.

Gayle:  There have been local sauce companies from the Derby area and things like that, so if we can find something that meets our criteria locally, then we do.  That’s our first choice, if there’s a local company to support.

GrowWNY:  Is there anything else you would like to share?

Marissa: Over our 95 years, we’ve kept our entrepreneurial spirit.  Perry’s has been in 13 different businesses, and as opportunities have changed with the times, we’ve adapted and grown into different business segments.  For example, before people had refrigerators and freezers at home, Perry’s had a meat-locker business. People would come and store their food here, and as they needed it, they would take it out and use it for dinner, for parties, etc.  Obviously, as refrigeration became popular in people’s home, that business wasn’t relevant anymore.  But it’s just really interesting to see how over the years, we’ve been nimble enough to take new things. But we also knew when it was time to say, “Okay, we need to let go of this,” and we moved on.  It’s key to our business sustaining for four generations.

Gayle:  Adapting is a good word.  We are very good at adapting, and we have adapted well over the 95 years, and we will continue to.  That’s the other thing, too, as Marissa mentioned about the fourth generation.  Only two percent of privately-held companies make it to the fourth generation.  Only two percent.  So even the fact that we’re still here and we aren’t part of a bigger food company is surprising, and how nice for western New York.

To learn more about sustainability at Perry's, click here.

If you’ve driven by the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus (BNMC) lately, you will have noticed a lot of changes. BNMC has a lot of completed and ongoing projects that are bringing sustainability to life on its 120 acre property. To learn more about some of these green projects, and to hear about the BNMC’s approach to sustainability, I sat down with Project Manager Mark McGovern (MM) to get the inside scoop.

GrowWNY: Thank you for taking the time to meet with me today. I’m excited to talk with you about your role here on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, some of the projects that you have been working on, and especially how sustainability plays a role in the projects.

MM: My role, predominately, is on infrastructure development projects, with both BNMC as an entity unto itself and the BNMC as a collective geography of 120 acres. Often in my role, it’s easier for us to think of sustainability on the capital end, as far as building something sustainable as it is to try to change people’s culture for thinking about sustainability. With that said, there’s a couple of projects that we are working on that are moving in that direction, to get people thinking about sustainability.

One of the challenges we have is transportation and parking. This is a good example of sustainability for the planet. We’re on a fixed asset—the big blue ball we sit on. We [BNMC] are on a fixed asset with the 120 acres we sit on, so we can’t continue to build parking because we will displace other opportunities for development. So, we recently constructed the largest parking structure in the City of Buffalo. It has 2,043 spaces to accommodate some of the demand forthcoming at 134 High St. When we looked at that as a sustainable asset, we took some serious cost-benefit analysis and put some money into it from a green perspective to make it last longer. For one example it has all LED lighting in the bays, there are ten electric vehicle charging stations in the ramp, we currently have a request into NYSERDA for some support for 450 KW solar ray on top of the ramp. It’s nine levels high. We made structural accommodations to columns and the foundation to support a large solar install. We’ll probably hear back about that by the end of [February]. Likewise, concrete is a pretty sustainable, green, long-lasting product that was produced locally.

That’s one aspect; so we build a big parking ramp! Also, what we [BNMC] do is encourage people to search out other options of getting here. We promote car sharing; the use of transit, there is an NFTA station right on our campus. We’re getting ready to launch, in the spring, a Social Bike program that is similar to the car share concept. You sign on for a bicycle; it’s solar, so the GPS unit on it is powered by solar, as is the credit card that you charge with. I think we are planning on deploying about 75 of those this spring. That will be a big launch.

We also have ten electric vehicle charging stations in the ramp, and 21 campus-wide. We’ve seen a fairly decent use of these. There are people who commute within that 30-35 mile range, it’s ideal because we don’t charge you for the electricity—we can’t charge you for the electricity! You are essentially getting free ‘gas,’ free power, free energy for your commute.

Right across the street at 589 Ellicott St., at the south end of the lot, is a piece of green infrastructure: a bio-retention facility, which we recently constructed. That parking lot used to be intersected by two roads, one heading east-west, and the other heading north-south. Eventually as Trico became larger and larger, it needed more parking so that lot was cleared, hence what you see out there today. There are no drains in that parking lot; it all kind of sheet drains down to the south end. It used to jump over the curb and into Goodell St., and then away to the Buffalo River. We’ve now intercepted that water, with the bio-retention facility, which is probably 240 feet wide by 25 feet across. The idea is to retain the first 1.25 inches of rainfall on site, before it’s released to the sanitary storm sewer. It has a jellyfish filter, made by Imbrium Systems, which takes out all the dissolved solids and pollutants off the lot. And there is a significant amount of “greenscaping” too, to improve the aesthetics of the place.

Additionally in that lot, we are putting a series of new light poles and luminaires in the lot. They will be totally powered by a thousand watt, 5 foot vertical wind turban on top of the 25 foot pole, and a 24 watt solar panel on the pole. So all the battery surge will be in the base of the pole. Lummi Solara is the company that owns the technology, and those poles you see out there now will go away and we’ll make an attempt to light up that parking lot only with renewable energy as far as the Lumaire. We’re hoping it’s going to work. The technology has been tested in Brooklyn and so forth, so that should be complete by May or April. So it’s kind of exciting.

GrowWNY: Thank you for sharing a lot of great examples of what BNMC is doing. I know you had mentioned that a lot of these projects are trying to get people to make more sustainable decisions right as they’re walking through the doors. What advice do you give to others when it comes to being sustainable?

MM: Yeah. A lot of what’s going on is within buildings that are sustainable is not obvious to a lot of people who aren’t in this mode of building things. But now-a-days, it just makes such financial sense to construct, build, and operate in sustainable and green perspective. There’s a lot of information out there that doesn’t take much research. You can inform yourself of these options and then how to go about it. I guess initially, it comes back to, you’ve got to have some type of willingness or belief that sustainability is something of value. And as we become more populated as a planet, and there are more of these buildings going up, and more vehicles going down the road, that to sustain ourselves we have to think of things like the laws of physics. “For every action there is an adjoining reaction. Energy is not created or destroyed, it’s just transferred.” So nothing really ever goes anywhere, we’re just kind of moving things around.

GrowWNY: So if you had to define sustainability, how would you give a definition for it?

MM:Sustainability I think it’s a buzz word, and it’s kind of popular now, and everybody wants to hop on it. I think it starts with an awareness and acceptance that a) we are on a limited kind of existence as far as the geography of the planet is limited as far as resources and space. We’re not going anywhere. That which is in the ground and we consume, is not going back into the ground in the same shape or form for a reusable process, for millions of years in some cases, as far as carbon.

And b) the belief that energy and matter is not created or destroyed, it just kind of shifts. So if we accept that, then the realization that we’re going to be here for a while, our children are going to be here for a while and nobody’s going anywhere. We need to try to make intelligent, informed decisions about ways to sustain the planet ourselves and all that comes with it as a collective unit.

The way sustainability is going to be successful is when people will realize that it’s going to be financial benefit, and that it’s economically feasible. A lot of pie in the sky ideas are not economically feasible. But a lot of returns on investments in infrastructure, and the payback going forward, makes the initial outlay more palatable for people, especially when you’re renovating or constructing the buildings. And there’s a lot of incentives for green and sustainability issues. Folks like NYSERDA and so forth, are financing that gap between, okay you’ve got a T12 lamp, why not vote an LED lamp. We’ll finance 50 percent of that gap. You’ll get the payback in 3 years. As they should be financing. The government’s been financing oil and gas explorations for 40 or 50 years, why shouldn’t they be subsidizing some of these more sustainable and global issues.

GrowWNY: So bringing it down to like a very very basic level, like in my home, what are some tips that I would want to look into in my sustainable effort?

MM: Well, doing more with less. You always see people replacing windows in their houses; this is one of the first things people always do. Well, that’s not always the most cost-effective return. Installation in the attic or walls is exponentially more beneficial than replacing windows right at the get-go like people normally do. Turn the thermostat down, putting an inflated blanket around your hot water heater, riding bikes to work, and stuff like that. Recycling is one of those things that just blows my mind, that here in the city where it’s such a low return of recycling. We live off by Parkside, and we’ve been there for about 2 years. I compost and I recycle and always, always my recycle bin is full every week I’ve got to have it out there, and I don’t take my garbage out every week. I think people might be conscious of what you’re purchasing and what you’re supporting. A lot of times, people select products, and I’m talking basic products, like packaging of groceries and so forth. When you look at what you consume and what you’re left over with, you should have consumed more and be left with less, but it’s not always an option in some stores.

Mark also gave us some really great insight about the projects going on at BNMC. Want to hear more? Stay tuned for a conversation with Mark about the “SmartHome Buffalo” project!

This Friday, February 22, UB will launch its Sustainability Film Series with the Oscar-nominated film, "Beasts of the Southern Wild." The event begins at 6:30 p.m. in Room 330 in the Student Union on the North Campus. The evening will include a panel discussion with students who participated in UB's alternative winter break trip to Southern Louisiana. Check out this video to learn more!

Do you consider Valentine's Day to be a commercialized Hallmark holiday, but would be secretly disappointed if your partner forgot? Are you of the mind set that you can't green your Valentine's Day plans because you waited until the last minute? Don't worry, planet-friendly procrastinators. This blog is for you. Don’t just “Be Mine” this Valentine’s Day; strive to “Be Green” and show your love and appreciation the eco way! There is no reason that you can’t treat yourself to a Valentine’s delight on this day either.