Greening The Cultch Includes Shades of Gray

At The Cultch we pride ourselves on presenting professional performing arts with minimal impact on the environment. With the aim of making our building the best in environmental practice, we are actively taking steps to reduce our ecological footprint and adopt new “greener” alternatives.  As remaining sustainable requires a constant evaluation of our methods, we are pleased to release our first “Greening The Cultch” dispatch. This is the first of many missives from our Director of Operations Terence Van Der Woude, in which he will put The Cultch under the microscope and take a look at our many efforts to remain environmentally friendly.

Greening The Cultch Includes Shades of Gray

By Terence Van Der Woude, Director of Operations

Cultch Balcony Hallway

The Cultch is such a unique space. It has a soul that reaches back farther than any of us alive. It has witnessed all the highs and lows of people’s lives and is now witnessing the retelling of those dramas through live performance. I cannot think of a more fitting place to be able to claim to be the first LEED-certified performing arts building in Canada. And I feel very fortunate to be able to share and explore the significance of what that means with you.

Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) is an internationally recognized green building certification system, providing third-party verification that a building or community was designed and built using strategies intended to improve performance in metrics such as energy savings, water efficiency, CO2 emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts.This system was created by a body of architects in the United States with the goal to shift the ideology of how we live with and affect our surroundings. It is a framework of standards that are defined and awarded by silver, gold and platinum certifications of which The Cultch is going for the silver. It is stringent and precise and when an aspect of the building meets these codes, a point is awarded. For example, all the building material wastes during construction of The Cultch were sorted on site and all metal, wood, cardboard and gyprock were recycled and kept out of the landfill. I overheard a few times from some of the managers that they felt like they were spending more time on waste management than anything else. For all our efforts, we probably diverted 70% of the construction wastes and received a LEED certification point. The goal is to get enough points to reach silver level.

Cultch Breezeway

Like all things that are being created and tested, the LEED certification has some flaws and shortcomings. Sometimes low environmental impact solutions create outcomes that are complicated, expensive and even ineffective when compared to traditional building practices. The framework of these solutions place real limitations on what fixtures and products can and cannot be used (which architects can find to be very frustrating).

So how do we, the administrators of The Cultch, embrace the spirit of LEED? As with all things new, it happens through creating strategy, taking actions, measuring results and gathering insight to reach that goal of achieving the best performance possible with the least impact on the earth that we all depend on. It means we have to be willing to change and learn a different way of everyday routines and adding long-term sustainability to the top of our priorities. In my coming articles, I invite you to join me as we explore the steps The Cultch is taking to achieve a greener world.