Green Opportunities Ripe for the Picking

But having someone on your side to help understand the regulations isn’t a bad idea. “We have very good environmental professionals in the area who will represent their clients well,” Cantrell says. “The agency’s not infallible, we do make mistakes. Having a professional represent you may point out some things that we might miss.”

“Our green industry, then, is more than ecotourism, more than environmental consultants. Most engineering firms have a firm environmentalist, like most law firms involved with land use issues have the firm planner. You’re finding a sprinkling of disciplines interrelated to each other as part of the planning and development cycle,” Daltry says.

The Profits of Environmental Protection

While laws and regulations are inherent in the realm of environmental management, they are not solely responsible for the “greening of industry.” A number of industries have discovered the benefits of implementing environmental management practices, says Bill Hammond, a member of the environmental studies faculty at Florida Gulf Coast University, whether through lower costs, higher profits, or potentially stronger positions in the stock market as a “green investment.”

Those in the building and development industry, in particular, have discovered the benefits of managing the environment. The industry is one of the most heavily regulated “because they touch all aspects of the permitting process,” Daltry says. However, Cantrell points out, “There is a self-motivation that aesthetically pleasing developments with a good, clean environment associated with it retails for more. There’s also a need to meet the state’s water and air quality requirements. Those things are very compatible; industry is discovering that in doing the latter, they’re actually producing the former.”

At the forefront of this trend in Southwest Florida is The Bonita Bay Group, founded by David Shakarian, the same man who founded General Nutrition Centers. “He was in the business of healthy living from a food point of view,” says David Graham, vice president of planning and development for the group, “so when he started this development, he brought that philosophy with him.

Shakarian launched his new community development business around 1982 and the first community was designed around the site’s natural elements and with consideration to environmental principals.

The company quickly discovered how profitable this approach was. “People really appreciated that,” Graham says. “People would pay as much, if not more, to be abutting a preserve as they would to be abutting a golf course. All of a sudden, they learned the lesson that preserving the environment and trying to ‘design with nature’ is actually a profitable way to go. It probably gave them a competitive advantage in the early days and their profits were better because of it.”

It costs more, he says, “but what the company has found is that you make more when you preserve those features.”

Other developers have learned the same lesson and it’s common now for communities to use their natural features as selling points.

Bonita Bay Group, WCI and others have discovered that environmental considerations are so important that they have full-time corporate officers whose sole purpose is to attend to those matters. “They now know that it’s extremely important and now there’s a full-time upper-level management person assigned to that very thing,” Hammond says.

Bonita Bay also retains its own maintenance staff, trained in environmental management practices. The training has been a result of trial and error, however, and Graham is among those who would like to see regulatory agencies offer courses in landscape maintenance, so the work could be contracted out to other companies.

“That’s just the tip of the iceberg that two of the largest developers in Southwest Florida have built internal structures to look at green management and green philosophy mindset for employees internally as well as externally,” Hammond continues. And he doesn’t believe it’s just in response to the regulatory environment. “I don’t see it as regulatory because that’s been around 40 years. I think it’s an internal shift in policy. We’ve seen it coming in the demand in houses. People are demanding more environmentally sound design and products in houses. And I think it’s a wake-up call to those that are building houses that they start looking at not only the house we build, but what kind of company are we?”

Even developers with good environmental management practices, however, face criticism for enhancing sprawl.

“The argument against them has been ‘Well, they’re still moving into our open space.’ Well, that’s regional population growth,” Daltry says. “In our area, what has added edge to the growth debate/dilemma is the commitment of large breadths of our land to subdivisions approved in the ‘50s and ‘60s before the light dawned. Those subdivisions are using up land that could be better developed reducing pressure on remaining open lands. But they’re in development patterns that have become antiquated so it’s easier for new development to go to unaltered lands than it is for them to try to redevelop those platted lands,” Daltry says.

“Growth is what drives our economy in this part of Florida and that growth is here because of the environment,” says Cantrell. “The key is to ... make growth compatible with a clean environment. At some point in time, that is going to have to translate into less of a reliance on developing new property and more of a reliance on redeveloping existing properties.” That, he explains, is “sustainability.”

Turning Concerns into Business Opportunities

Other environmental problems and issues are related not so much to new development as to old, and that is where more challenges and opportunities lie, says Dick Anderson, director of sales and customer service for Mariner Properties’ mitigation bank at Little Pine Island. Anderson also is a founder of the Southwest Florida Council for Environment Education, Inc. “Once the natural systems that are out there in the environment working can be married to economic forces, that’s when we’ll have some real dynamic win-win situations,” says Anderson.

For example, he says, if the water quality in Estero Bay is degraded, then what are the reasons? “Is it because of new growth or older, poorly located and planned facilities? … But we’re not really looking at those because they’re not being permitted now; they already exist. … It’s an opportunity for science, for public agencies, certainly it’s an opportunity for private business,” he says.

Businesses and communities in other areas have tackled those kinds of problems and we should be learning from them, Hammond says. For instance, some California communities require developers not only to install conservation fixtures like low-flow toilets and showers into new housing, they must also pay an impact fee that is earmarked to retrofit older homes in less affluent areas.

That creates its own market for plumbers but, more important, it ideally conserves enough water so that the community or developer won’t have to spend the capital to dig another well.

There are many business opportunities for those who can find creative ways to deal with existing needs, Anderson continues. “Environmental management in our area has to do with growth management. We’ve made mistakes in the past. We get over 50 inches of rainfall a year, yet we have water shortages. We have a lot of moisture available, but we haven’t managed it so well in places for development. Environmental management, to me, translates to growth management and I believe we have more opportunities than problems,” he says.

The opportunities in “green business” reach far beyond growth management.

Hammond isn’t fond of the term and the stereotypical baggage it carries. Most people have little understanding of the concept — which really translates to efficiency. It’s simply a way of finding the “best management practice” to increase profits and reduce costs by reassessing how a business operates, and multinational corporations are among those that have implemented “green” practices to save millions of dollars.

One component includes those businesses and industries that develop products and services to improve efficiency — fuel cells to replace combustible engines in automobiles, building materials designed to cut heating and cooling costs, consulting services to help companies cut costs, while helping the environment.

One of the leaders in that field is Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute. “He’s helped major, Fortune 100 companies figure out how, just by changing lighting fixtures and changing some of the major equipment they buy, they could save a tremendous amount of energy and cut costs substantially.”

For example, Hammond says, the Environmental Defense Fund worked with McDonald’s on green business practices to cut money. “They found things like cutting napkins size — something as small as that — had a tremendous impact,” especially considering the number of napkins used worldwide by McDonald’s customers.

“By tracking how we use products, how we use resources, and looking at how we could be more thoughtful about using them more appropriately, that’s the real savings in the green industry,” he says.

There are numerous examples on a national and international scale, he continues. With the pending “energy crisis,” the American auto manufacturers are sure to follow Toyota and Honda’s examples in producing hybrid cars. Furthermore, he adds, “the projection is that five years from now, the first generation of fuel-cell cars will be out there,” which will be powered not by fossil-fuel-powered combustible engines, but by hydrogen from much more benign sources.