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the company [Sunnyvale, CA-based Bloom Energy], but it handles the maintenance and upgrades for ten years,” he says. That’s the reason why you do prototypes, he explains, “to determine the cost, the maintenance and those intangibles...The payback on these sys- tems is something like four or five years, as long as you can use the power and don’t have to sell it back,” Gibbon explains. “What we did is create a sweet spot of how much we’re producing and how much we’re able to pro- duce from this site itself.”
Will there ever be a windmill in the store parking lot? “We invest primarily in wind farms, and for individual stores, the solar pan- els are better,” he notes.
LEED-certified efforts may not always be so obvious to Safeway shoppers, but Gibbon wants to change that with an interactive com- puter kiosk station. A touch screen monitor would describe the Santa Cruz store evolu- tion, but also tell a much bigger story of Safe- way’s corporate social responsibility. “As it goes, this will be the prototype and then we’ll roll it out to all the other LEED stores, and then we’ll roll it out to all our stores,” he says.
“It’s going to talk about public transporta- tion, green initiatives and social responsibility and volunteerism. But it also will link you to Web sites where you can get other information, or it will tell you what Web site to go to, and shoppers will turn to their iPads to instantly learn more,” he envisions.
More Of A Good Thing
“We are basically taking the bull by the horns...We have modified specifications so that all of the green elements and all of the LEED- certifiable requirements are in the specifica- tions. We have updated our prototype and our documents so that the LEED process can be duplicated in other stores,” he explains.
“We’re selecting a store in each division to be the first LEED-certified store in that division, and we use it to train our internal construction and design and operational people.”
Safeway is in this for the long run. Some companies do a big advertising kick and then walk away from it and go back to doing what they were doing, he says. “We’re committed to sustainability integration in the way we build buildings. LEED and USGBC [U.S. Green Building Council, a non-profit com- pany dedicated to sustainable building design and construction], give us the mechanisms to measure common sense greenness. Eventually, we’re just going to be green all the time.” pb
[Editor’s note: Special thanks to Oscar Katov at OK Communications, Hoover, AL, and Teena Massingill, Safeway’s corporate public affairs director, for their assistance in this year’s Retail Sustainability Award.]
34 PRODUCE BUSINESS • MAY 2010
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