As a member of the Bentall Centre’s Forever Green Tenant Team, I was excited about our recent tenant-wide green fair. This was the first major event hosted by our committee, which is comprised of tenants dedicated to encouraging environmental sustainability at the Bentall Centre Towers and beyond. 

This committee was established in response to Bentall’s desire to transition their Forever Green program from an operationally based, landlord driven program to more of a behavioural based, tenant collaboration.

The Forever Green Tenant Team started as a focus group on tenant sustainable practices in February of 2008. After creating an action plan for the next year and breaking into sub-committees to speed up the process, we decided to hold a trade fair on August 13 and 14 for the Bentall tenants featuring vendors with sustainable products and practices. Our eco-fair was free of charge and open to the public and featured everything from sustainable options for carpeting, furniture, office supplies and lighting to carpooling, carbon offsetting and organic grocery delivery. The event was a one-stop shop for tenants to take the work out of researching green practices.

The o·vert committee had a table at the event to talk about our efforts to make our corporate practices more sustainable. Unlike traditional trade fair set-up, we made a conscious effort not to have any handouts as we felt most people would take a flier without reading it and ultimately throw it in the garbage. Instead, we discussed our initiatives to date, promoted our new website, and handed out business cards. For those interested in green office spaces, Kevin Hanvey led tours of our LEED gold certified head office.

We also had trouble brainstorming what kind of freebies we could give away to attendees; we didn’t want anything that was gimmicky and ultimately useless or with packaging that would go straight in the garbage. Many promotional items available are made of unsustainable materials in developing countries and are shipped to North America where they end up in landfills. We decided to hand out vegan cookies from one of our favourite local catering companies, which was a good way to entice passers by and a good conversation starter: one of our initiatives is to support local business and to use dishes and cutlery for catered meetings so as to reduce waste.

I would say that by reducing some of the frivolous gimmicks we were able to have meaningful conversations with attendees. It was also interesting to see people’s reactions to the fact that we weren’t selling anything, but that we were merely there to provide information and act as a resource. I look forward to more opportunities to interact with other professionals and talk about our successes and setbacks and continue to inspire and agitate green practices at home and in the workplace.