When we decided to close down at John Street and build ourselves a new gym in a new location there were as a lot to decide on when making the change. We knew what we wanted to do to make the gym good for climbers. We also knew what we wanted to change about how we operated to make the impact of the gym lighter on the planet.
We knew we wanted to be downtown and easily accessible by bike and transit. We chose downtown for the transit options and in our proposal to the city we asked for a sidewalk bump out for bike parking. The design and construction (and then installation of bike racks) was a $40K choice we knew we wanted to make. (Personally we feel the city should participate in the cost of bike infrastructure, especially since the bump out and bike racks became city property the moment we opened our doors. Tell your city councillor bikes are important!) We hope climbers will support us in our downtown location and leave the car at home some of the time.
We wanted to build as green as we could. Our walls are super-insulated concrete panels made locally and with a very long expected life span. They have good thermal mass, so heating and cooling needs are lower than they were at John Street! They are even movable and could be reused in a different location! We use no carbon based fuel in the building to operate - at John Street we used propane and hated it. Heat and cooling is from a heat-pump and electricity is the best option in BC for lowest-impact heating. Water heat is on demand and all toilets etc are low flow. We used as many recyclable materials in the construction as possible.
Lighting in the new gym is all LED. Thanks to our big window and natural light, they are all ‘light harvesting’ which means that the building knows how much natural light is available and turns down the electric lights when not needed. The close lights even turn down more than the ones far from the window.
We even made some small changes to operations to reduce waste. We’ve decided to stop selling drinks out of the fridge to save on energy and to keep plastic out of the landfills. We’ve tried over the years to switch to only glass bottles, but water was always a problem. The only glass water we could source was from Italy - not exactly an environmentally friendly product! So instead we have no drinks for sale at all and a free water fountain serving up Victoria’s tap water.
We installed air dryers in the bathrooms and put the paper towel dispenser just a tiny bit farther away than the air dryer to encourage less paper waste. We hope to be able to compost in the future, but commercial composting services are all designed for restaurants and high volume businesses. When we can get composting we will.
We are always looking for ways to keep it green at Crag X and welcome and ideas you have for us!