Behind the Scenes of the Green Certifications at Exhibition Place | S5 E5
Laura Purdy, General Manager at Exhibition Place in Toronto, joins Earth Care for episode 5 of the Sustainability in the Live Music Industry Series.
Exhibition Place, located in Toronto, Ontario, is Canada’s premier destination for conventions, exhibitions, events and entertainment. The building’s history dates back to 1750 and was properly established in 1879. Fast-forward to present day, Exhibition place has grown into a world class venue that hosts numerous trade and consumer shows each year, including the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE)! The event space has also become a leading participant in environmental sustainability.
For the past 30 years, Exhibition Place has participated in the GREENSmart program which includes the promotion of sustainable development, environmental initiatives and leading edge green technologies and practices. They also signed the Net Zero Carbon events pledge which is a global initiative to address climate change across the events and meetings industry to achieve net zero by 2050.
Additionally, Exhibition Place is LEED Certified, which is an international symbol of sustainability excellence and green building leadership.
In this episode, Laura Purdy takes us behind the scenes at Exhibition Place to better understand the sustainability initiatives in motion. Laura explains how the site has achieved LEED certification, with Enercare Centre being LEED Platinum and Beanfield Centre being LEED Silver. We also discuss the various green practices that have been implemented such as retrofitting, district energy systems, green roofs, waste management programs and rescue bees!
Episode Transcription:
Sarah Christie
Laura Purdy, thank you so much for joining Earth Care and being a part of our Sustainability in the Live Music Industry series. This is selfishly really exciting for me because you're the only guest on this series that is in the same city, right in Toronto. And so it's very cool to know that sustainability has made its way to Toronto as well. And on such a large scale, how's your week been going so far?
Laura Purdy
It's been incredible. I mean, as you can see behind me, we are moving in Canada's largest home show, the National Home Show. And so you'll see, you might see behind me things moving around and trucks moving around. We're in the middle of the move in, but it's an exciting week. It's really one of the highlights of the year for us at Exhibition Place.
Sarah Christie
So if anyone hasn't been to Toronto before, can you paint the picture of just how large Exhibition Place is?
Laura Purdy
Oh, absolutely. We are 192 acres located on the shores of Lake Ontario. So in and of itself, we are almost a little mini city inside the City of Toronto. We have Canada's largest convention centre. We have Canada's largest soccer stadium, a hockey arena. We have the banquet hall. We have, you know, Medieval Times, tenants, parking facilities for about 6 ,700 cars. And, you know, a million square foot convention centre and exhibition centre and a conference facility in Beanfield Centre. So we are a little mini city inside the City of Toronto.
Sarah Christie
It's true. And then you see all of the initiatives that have been put in place with this LEED certification. I used to say this about makeup and it's a funny comparison that'll make sense hopefully. But you know, back before almost every makeup brand was cruelty free, you just wanted that one major brand to go cruelty free and then everyone else would do it. And it seems like, my goodness, if Exhibition Place can do it, you know? So if someone is hearing LEED certified for the first time, can you just break down what that means?
Laura Purdy
So the LEED certification is a certification done by the Canadian Green Building Council, which governs all of buildings across the country for sustainability. And LEED stands for Leadership in Energy Efficiency and Design. And there are a couple of different ways to achieve LEED certification for a commercial or residential building. And there is a scorecard that you have to...look at for LEED certification and it's kind of like the Olympics. So it's, you know, certified bronze, silver, gold, platinum. So Olympics plus. And you need a certain amount of points to get to each level. And those points are evaluated based on everything from either a new build or an existing building. And they have a different level of reporting that you have to fulfill for each kind of construction.
For Enercare Centre, of course, we embarked upon the LEED certification when we were many years old. So we opened our building in 1997, and the first time we applied was 2014. So we were applying under the existing building, and it's called LEED O+M existing building operating and maintenance. And all that to say is there is a consideration that the building isn't new construction.
So you're retrofitting existing aspects of your energy efficiency in the building to bring it up to standard. That would mean that it is a sustainable building. And it's actually, in some cases, more difficult because you're retrofitting an existing structure. And for us, you know, we have a million square foot building and we embarked upon this practice of upgrading and renovating and bringing in new sustainability options into our building. So we first got our LEED certification in 2014, and that was a LEED Gold certification, which we were very proud of. And every five years you have to renew. So it's not a one and done. It's something that you need to continue to perform in that manner that is sustainable. So our last certification was in 2019, and we were very successful in achieving platinum certification.
And our adjacent structure in Beanfield Centre is actually a LEED Silver building. And it's unique in so much as it is a heritage building. So if you've come to City of Toronto, you've seen Beanfield Centre, it's a gorgeous Art Deco building.
Sarah Christie
Wow.
Laura Purdy
but it is 100 years old. And we renovated that in 2009 and were able to apply for LEED certification and we were able to achieve a LEED silver certification, which for a heritage building, it's the only one of its kind in the country that has achieved LEED certification for a heritage structure. So we're super proud of that. And of course, for us believing in the benefit and the power of sustainable buildings and construction. Every time we have a new construction, a new building coming on site, we are asking that our tenants in those structures are LEED certified. So for example, Hotel X on the site, when they built their new structure on the site that's just adjacent to Enercare Centre and Beanfield Centre, they're also LEED certified.
Sarah Christie
Now, from my very amateur knowledge of retrofitting, that's the more sustainable approach. It's harder, as you said, but it's the more sustainable approach to kind of use what you have and build upon it, which is an incredible task in and of itself. When I hear a hundred -year -old building tied with how much space is at Exhibition Centre, I just think, how do you...heat and cool that kind of space. What is the system like over there?
Laura Purdy
So we have a really unique system for heating and cooling. We have created in Enercare Centre what's called a District Energy Program. And a District Energy System is a heating and cooling system that allows us to not only heat and cool this building, Enercare Centre, but we also heat and cool Beanfield Centre and Hotel X. So when Hotel X was constructed, they actually don't have any mechanical on their roof.
If you have the fortune of going up to the roof, there's a gorgeous bar and an open water pool on the top of their hotel structure. That's because we actually provide all the energy to heat and cool the hotel. And that's through our district energy system. So it's very complex in terms of engineering, but essentially we have a gas -fired system that allows us to heat and cool multiple buildings at the same time.
Sarah Christie
Wow. And now what about the green roof? What role does that play?
Laura Purdy
Yeah.
So we have both a green roof, multiple green roofs, and we also have light reflective roofs. So the benefit of having a structure that has a green roof, for example, or a reflective roof is that we are reducing the urban heat island effect. So what that means, I guess in simple terms, if you think of the summertime and you think of the sun beating down on grass versus a paved asphalt surface. You know that you can walk on the grass on your bare feet, but you can't walk on the asphalt because it's too hot for your feet. And the asphalt actually gives off heat. So you're contributing to the urban heat island, right? Whereas the grass absorbs the heat and in cooling itself and in photosynthesis and everything, it actually reduces the urban heat island effect.
So when you think of that in terms of a roof structure, if you have a white reflective roof, which we have here for part of our roof at Enercare Centre and for Beanfield Centre, it's reflecting those light waves back into the atmosphere and not allowing that heat island to pool and to heat the ground level. And for the green roof, obviously, not only does it absorb water, but it grows and it contributes to photosynthesis and the oxygenation of the of the air and also reduces the heat effect. So we've just added 100 ,000 square feet of green roof onto Enercare Centre and we've just completed that this fall. It's fantastic. And we also have a white reflective roof on both buildings. We also have a green roof, well the hotel has a green roof. We have a separate green roof here on one of our exhibit halls, on top of our exhibit halls.
You know, these are great opportunities for us to contribute to the sustainability of the city. We also have really great things on our roof. We have our own colony of bees, which are rescue bees. So when people call to try to get their bees removed from their homes or their commercial areas, instead of destroying the bees, there's a bee rescue organization. And they actually save the bees and bring them here.
So we have a colony of bees that are on, they're living on our roof and they make honey for us. We use it in our culinary just another great aspect to looking at how we can be more sustainable in different ways.
Sarah Christie
I had no idea that that was a thing. I know that, you know, I've seen those videos on TikTok of professional bee removers going in and clearing the hive in a safely manner, but I didn't know where the bees went after that and they're all at exhibition place. That's very nice.
Laura Purdy
Yeah, they're rescue bees. We call our honey second chance honey and they stay in the hive and then they pollinate the landscape that we have because we have a very environmentally responsible landscape program here at Exhibition Place. We have over 2 ,700 trees on our site and gardens. And so it's great to have the bees here because they have their own little home and their own area to pollinate.
Sarah Christie
Now, what about the waste management that's put in place? Because this is, again, you know, you're getting ready for a major event right now. I can only imagine the what's required to set up the event and then what might be left afterwards. So how does that work?
Laura Purdy
Yeah, Sarah, you need to understand our business of trade shows in particular are, it's a very messy business. There are a lot of materials, equipment. I mean, you look behind me, you can see all the booth setups. There's lots of materials that come in for a trade show. Some of them, in some cases, and in many cases, they were single use. So one of the first thing is, is we're trying to work with our clients to try and encourage reusing. We're trying to encourage more than a single use operation. But inevitably, there's a lot of garbage. We have five and a half million people that come to our site for over 1 ,760 events a year. So you can imagine the level of waste that is generated not only from materials, but also from food, food waste as well. So we embarked on a program of waste management to look at how we can apply different streams of collection to try and avoid putting waste in the landfill. So this started 20 years ago. To be fair, we've been on this journey of sustainability for over 20 years. We started in 2002. So if you remember when the city of Toronto was actually sending its garbage to Northern Ontario and to Michigan, And the then mayor, David Miller, was saying, you know, this is not, pardon the pun, sustainable. We can't continue to take our garbage and send it off to other communities. We need to be more responsible. And that's really when the city took a look at trying to do waste diversion and composting and recycling in our homes. And that's where the grey bin came in and the blue bin came in, into our homes. And, we took that as a challenge here at Exhibition Place and said, well, we have a million square foot house. How can we be responsible? So we actually created four streams of waste removal. So we compost, we have recycling for what you would typically know as paper and glass, although we recycle probably about 14 different streams of recyclables. And then of course we have trash, right, because there's some things that are just aren't recyclable. And so throughout our grounds and our buildings we have these four waste streams that we collect. And then we ensure that they're sorted so that there's no cross -contamination and then we divert from landfill where possible. So we've been over this span of 20 years very successful. We're over 80 % of waste diverted from landfill.
And the waste that we do collect ultimately, we put into special compactors to reduce the volume and size of that waste so that we're taking trips to landfill more infrequently. And then when we are, they're already in compacted shapes so that we're not taking as much space in landfill. But our diversion rate at 80 % is really leading in the convention center industry. And it's significant, it's probably more than you do at home.
Sarah Christie
That's incredible. I can speak to the fan aspect of leaving a big venue and you kind of glance at the garbage and the recycling and you go, is that being sorted? It is. That's so hopeful.
Laura Purdy
It is being sorted. And not only is it being sorted, when you look at things like our food service, for example, we're often serving our food in compostable disposables. So the cutlery is compostable. The plates are made of bamboo or corn based and they're disposable, but compostable. When you go into our washrooms, for example, all the hand towels that we use in our washrooms, are actually sent up to a farm up in Northern Ontario. They lay them out in the field and they compost. So there's like zero waste that comes out of our washrooms. We have low flow toilets, we have low flow water as well. So really for us, it's every little step along the way. How can we take something and make it more sustainable? The lights that you see behind me in the exhibit halls, those are all LED lights.
We retrofit on the lights in the entire building to LED. And again, the consumption levels considerably less when you're looking at LED and also your heat throw off is considerably less, which means you're heating and cooling your building considerably less, right? There's an effect to everything.
Sarah Christie
Of course, it's all connected. Now, talk about 20 years in the making, this major sustainability project. Have you been able to pull numbers and see what kind of footprint you've reduced?
Laura Purdy
Absolutely. I mean, we do actually have measurement tools that we use for our energy and talk about how we reduce our carbon levels, how we reduce our electrical consumption. We have photovoltaics on some of our buildings, how we reduce the consumption. We have geothermal, for example, that reduced our energy use of gas by 98 % in one of our buildings on site because we use geothermal. That's one of the things about sustainability, you have to be able to measure it. So you have to have a benchmark to start, and then you measure as you go along. And for our shows and our events, you know, if they're looking for a report card, we can actually give them a report card on consumption.
Yeah, so they can look at their own environmental impact. You know, we have the opportunity for our shows to buy what's called an REC, which is a renewable energy certificate, which is a green, basically you're buying green power. And, you know, we're looking to expand that program this year and offering it to all of the exhibitors within our shows as well.
Sarah Christie
It's just so cool to know that all of this can be done and is being done on such a massive scale. It's been such a pleasure learning more about Exhibition Place and having you join Earth Care. And truly, if someone listening hasn't been to Toronto before, I can't recommend enough, you know, going to check out Exhibition Place because that whole area is so spectacular. And now after this conversation, I mean, you're just going to love it that much more. So thank you for sharing your time.
Laura Purdy
It's my pleasure. Thank you very much for having us.
FINISHED.
