The Greening of Tilbury
By Chris BryanEditor
Aug 17 2007
Can an environmental networking project help an industrial park become a neighbourhood?
Take a drive through Tilbury Industrial Park, and the word “community” doesn’t easily spring to mind.
It’s a quiet engine, with hundreds of businesses doing their work largely in isolation.
Passing through, it seems almost devoid of people. There are cars aplenty, of course, but it’s more a domain of hulking warehouses and manufacturing facilities with few windows. Big rigs roaring through to deliver freight. There are few trees, here, and definitely no parks. Sidewalks are non-existent.
And the main artery to get in and out—River Road—is often backed up in a mind-numbing traffic jam.
Yet Patricia Fleming sees enormous potential in Tilbury.
As executive director of DRS Earthwise Society, she sees most things through an environmental lens. And environmentally speaking, Tilbury is home to a number of significant challenges.
Yet with those challenges come huge potential for gain.
Fleming points out a fact she says often shocks people: there are more than 650 businesses in Tilbury. They range from businesses with just one employee to massive, world players such as Canadian Autoparts Toyota (CAPTIN), which manufacturers aluminum wheels for the auto giant.
Each year, Tilbury businesses use more than $11 million in electricity and $9 million in natural gas. They also use more than two million cubic litres of water, require more than one million truck trips and release more than 57,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the air. Most employees in the area drive to work.
Imagine what it would be like if they worked together to save energy and reduce the amount of resources they use. They’d save money, something businesses like. They’d help the planet, something Fleming and others like her are keen on.
And along the way—who knows—they might even build Tilbury into something different.
A community.
How it started
In 2004, Patricia Fleming got a call from someone at the GVRD.
They were looking for a pilot project for Eco-Industrial Networking, and had pinpointed Tilbury as a great place to turn this abstract concept into something concrete.
Simply put, Eco-Industrial Networking is a member-driven initiative that facilitates environmental, social and economic improvement of a business area. It involves developing collaborative business relationships to improve production efficiency, investment, global competitiveness and business performance, while fostering community and ecosystem health.
Fleming refers to it as the “triple bottom line benefits”—people, planet, profit.
Although there are some common approaches to eco-industrial networking that have been used in other places in North America, the only real limitation is one’s imagination.
As a non-profit, environmentally-oriented group based in Tilbury, DRS seemed the ideal organization to take the lead. Fleming embraced the idea, and in the following year, DRS hosted a number of information sessions, explaining the principles of Eco-Industrial Networking, and what they hoped to achieve. Some big players got on board, becoming partners in the project, including CAPTIN, Nature’s Path, Taylor Munro Energy Systems and Pistol & Burnes. As well, the Delta Chamber of Commerce is a member of the advisory committee and co-chair.
But for many businesses, turning great intentions into tangible action is a huge leap, and it’s sometimes easier to continue to be carried by inertia.
“The businesses who attended were interested in the concept,” Fleming says. “Most businesses, however, have difficulty officially investing resources.”
Come together
One of the greatest challenges for the now-named Tilbury Eco-Industrial Partnership (TEIP) has been simply finding out who else is out there. There’s no single organization that links the businesses together—like a Tsawwasssen or Ladner business association—and there’s no directory that acts as a one-stop resource for all the businesses in the area.
It was something Dawn Van Zant found frustrating.
She’d moved her office to Tilbury from Tsawwassen in March 2006 and had hoped to continue her practice of “shopping locally” but was having a hell of a time doing so.
“A lot of times when we needed a service, we literally drove around to find it,” says the owner of Investor Ideas, an online investment research company.
And shortly after setting up shop, she took a group of investors seeking emergent “green companies” on a tour and was surprised when one of the stops, at JER Envirotech, was literally five minutes from her office.
“It’s a very disconnected community, but a very powerful one,” she says. “There’s a lot of big players out here.”
To combat this disconnect, Van Zant is contributing to TEIP in a simple way—she’s creating an online directory of businesses (www.tilburyindustrialpark.com) that now has 150 listings and is growing every day. It can be searched by company name or by category, and surprising facts are revealed such as the fact Tilbury has eight restaurants and there are at least six graphics and sign companies.
Van Zant hopes people in the area in search of an accountant, say, will check the site and might also find a connection to a paint supplier they’re also in search of.
“There’s so many ways we can work together. The power of one becomes the power of 600.”
Over time, the goal is to also use the web site as a forum for more environmental networking.
Starting small
Although it’s been three years since the first meeting, TEIP is still in its infancy. And Fleming acknowledges that a project like this requires patience.
But with the foundation becoming well formed, there are some more ambitious goals on the horizon.
At the moment, DRS is working with TransLink to identify barriers that prevent more Tilbury employees from using transit or other alternatives to the single occupant vehicle, such as the Jack Bell Rideshare program.
They also soon hope to offer an employee bus pass program, similar to the university U-Pass program, that will provide transit riders with a 15 per cent discount.
In the fall, DRS is hosting another networking event focused on something called By-Product Synergy. In a nutshell, this involves identifying situations where one company’s by-products, or waste, can be used as a resource for another company.
This process saves the first company money through reduced disposal or recycling costs, and saves the second company money on the cost of purchasing the materials.
For example, a company participating in an Eco-Industrial Network in Burnside, Nova Scotia, that received goods on European-sized pallets found a company nearby that could use the same sized pallets for shipping their goods. Similarly, a refinery in Texas found an asphalt company to purchase their residual oil.
The upcoming workshop will help businesses identify these types of connections that can improve their bottom line, Fleming says.
It’s about people, too
The idea of eco-industrial netorking also has a social aspect, too, Fleming says.
Along with the idea of transportation—which can’t be avoided at Tilbury—comes an equally signficant issue tied in with the livability of the place.
“You get into the whole planning and design of the entire complex,” Fleming says, pointing out the lack of sidewalks or bus shelters. “We’d love to look at projects to landscape retrofit the entire industrial park.”
“So people could enjoy the landscape without being mowed down by a truck.”
For now, there’s still much work ahead.
But Fleming is confident that slowly, businesses in Tilbury will grow to understand the principles of Eco-Industrial Networking, will begin to employ them, and will see the clear financial and environmental benefits.
“We’re building a foundation here,” she says. “The fact we have a steering committee that’s growing and have partners like TransLink, BC Hydro and the National Research Council is a good sign.”
“I hope in five or 10 years from now Tilbury will be regarded as a leader in Eco-Industrial Networking, and Tilbury businesses will be realizing the tangible benefits, and that the project will begin to take a comprehensive look at livability at Tilbury.
“I feel optimistic that the hard work will soon be paying off.”
To find out more about the Tilbury Eco-Industrial Partnership, visit www.drsociety.bc.ca/TEIP_index.htm.