Dino Milacic’s world changed two years ago.

Gazing into the eyes of his newborn daughter, all those paternal hopes and dreams for her future welled up in his heart. He wanted her to grow up happy and healthy. He wanted her to be able to roll in the grass and frolic in the sunshine. He wanted her to be able to eat her veggies—or not—without worrying about toxins leaching in from the soil or water table.

But he’d read the newspaper and magazine articles foreboding a future of environmental disaster and global warming. He’d seen Al Gore’s cinematic dissertation on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth.

So he decided to do what he could to change the world.

Home would take care of itself, by watching their energy consumption, taking better care to recycle and reuse, paying more attention to what they consume and where it comes from.

Work was another matter.

The mental shift

The family business his father started in 1986, Mark’s Auto Body, is part of an industry that’s not exactly a bastion of environmental conscience. When Milacic started there in 1995 by pushing broom, the shop floor was often thick with dust, the air heavy with vapours from paint and solvents. Some of the technicians thought nothing of dipping their hands directly in paint thinner to clean them. Many of them eschewed protective masks when spray painting the cars.

Milacic started doing research. He plied the Internet and trade magazines. He talked to his suppliers.

He knew he had a long, uncharted road ahead of him.

“There needed to be a lot of changes in mentality,” says Milacic, who now runs the South Burnaby shop with nine employees.

He knew he’d have to take that road gradually.

“We’re a small local shop and by no means are we perfect in everything we do,” says Milacic.

Most importantly, he knew the journey would be worth it.

“The payoff is when I look into my daughter’s eyes at the end of the day, that’s the number one priority,” says Milacic, who’s 36. “This is a matter of doing the right thing because it’s the right thing to do.”

Saving, and making money

It’s that kind of personal commitment that’s driving many owners of small and medium-sized businesses to examine the impact they’re having on the environment.

In a survey of these businesses, the Canadian Federation for Independent Business found that 83 per cent of owners cited their own personal views as their motivation for making changes to the way they do business so they can become more environmentally responsible. Almost half also considered the potential cost savings of going green.

Milacic figures he’s invested about $40,000 in new equipment and procedures to help make his shop greener.

He started using new water-based paints and high-efficiency spray guns that reduce the amount of paint that blows past car parts and into the air by 75 per cent.

He installed a sealed enclosure for painting smaller car parts that forced the air through a series of filters to clean it of impurities.

He implemented a recycling system for solvents and antifreeze that reduced pick-ups by the waste disposal company from three 50 gallon barrels every few weeks to one 15 gallon drum filled with gelatinous pucks every two to three months.

He acquired hybrid cars as loaners for his customers.

And he replaced the inefficient hot air furnace to heat the expansive garage with radiant heating to warm walls and objects that would then warm the air around them.

Some of the changes cost no money at all, like training his technicians to separate the tape from the paper used to mask vehicles so the paper can be recycled.

Some even make a little money, like salvaging old radiators and metal parts to a scrap dealer instead of just pitching them into a disposal bin out back.

Most are saving him some money, as he uses less material and reduces his shop’s energy consumption.

Milacic says making the transition to a greener way of doing business during a recession has been tough on the bottom line; many drivers are just living with dents rather than worrying about whether their local auto body shop has hybrid loaner cars.

But by being ahead of the curve, he’s confident he’ll have a marketing edge when consumers start exercising their own environmental conscience with their wallets.

“I think the one thing they’ll be most impressed with is that I’ve taken the leap of faith,” says Milacic.

One sip at a time

For Damian Kettlewell, his leap to make The Great Bear Pub “B.C.’s greenest pub” has been more like a two-and-a-half-year odyssey.

For straws.

A longtime environmentalist and two-time candidate in provincial elections for the BC Green Party, Kettlewell only thought it right for a neighbourhood pub named after the largest intact coastal temperate rainforest in the world to set an example for sustainability.

So he started with the straws.

Kettlewell, who’s managed Kingsway pub for three years, says his customers suck through about 50,000 straws a year. That’s a lot of black plastic going into landfills, where they can take a century or two to degrade. He set out to source biodegradable straws.

But that was easier said than done. More expensive too.

In fact, lack of information to help business understand what it can do to help the environment is cited as a barrier to implementing changes by 34 per cent of businesses surveyed by the CFIB study. Added expense stifles another 26 per cent.

Undaunted, Kettlewell mapped out a 12 step program to realize his green vision.

The Great Bear became the first pub in mainland B.C. to adopt an Ocean Wise menu featuring sustainable, environmentally responsible seafood. He commissioned an audit of that menu to identify genetically engineered (GE) food and then developed eight items that are certified GE-free. He features locally-brewed craft beers on weekends and increased the pub’s roster of organic wines. He offers his take-out customers a 10 per cent discount if they bring their own reusable containers. He replaced the styrofoam take-out boxes and bowls with biodegradable ones. This past summer he gave away the pub’s used vegetable oil to a customer with a car modified to run on cooking oil. He stopped selling tobacco in the pub. He even encourages his staff members who smoke to quit.

And he finally found his biodegradable straws, after a chance encounter at a recent trade show. They’re red.

“It’s simple to us, but we’re still ahead of the game in the liquor business,” says Kettlewell. “(Going green) doesn’t necessarily draw customers in but it does help us gain more respect, especially with a younger demographic. When you’re a neighbourhood pub, you have a certain responsibility to your neighbourhood.”

Like 79 percent of the entrepeneurs surveyed in the CFIB study who believe it’s possible to grow the economy and protect the environment at the same time, Kettlewell is steadfast in his belief that his green beliefs make good business sense.

“People are starting to vote more with their dollars and make ethical choices based on what aligns with their own values,” says Kettlewell. “I think it’s imperative for business to step up and take a leading role in this transition to a lower-carbon economy.”

Following the LEED

That’s exactly what’s happening at the Westminster Centre office complex in New Westminster. Saddled with an aging building in a prime location smack dab in the middle of the Lower Mainland, the owners, Uptown Property Group, decided to go for the gold, “LEED gold” that is.

LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is an internationally recognized rating system for green buildings that is based on everything from how the building is constructed to the efficiency of its water fixtures to the landscaping around it.

Wayne Beattie, the Centre’s general manager, says reconstructing the building to LEED standards was about five percent more expensive than a normal reconstruction project, including the added cost of the paperwork and inspections required to achieve certification. But it’s helping pay for itself by attracting a higher quality of prospective tenants who are willing to pay a premium for prime space in a building that aligns with their own corporate values.

“As more and more buildings achieve LEED designation, it will be a real disadvantage not to have it,” says Beattie. In its first year since reopening, most of the Westminster Centre’s office space is leased, 85 percent of it to the BC Safety Authority.

And those tenants have been quick to jump aboard their own green bandwagon. Many of them have set up their own recycling programs to feed the building’s new recycling centre along Fifth Avenue.

They’ve installed more environmentally-friendly carpet, painted their walls with earth-friendly paint. They’ve replaced paper towel dispensers in the bathrooms with high-velocity air dryers. The Starbucks on the ground floor is recycling its organic matter, something Beattie says he’s looking into expanding to the rest of the building.

“I think it’s becoming the responsible thing to do,” he says. “Everybody should try to do what they can.”

“You can just live in your world and think it isn’t changing,” says Damian Kettlewell as the after-work crowd starts to filter into his pub.

“But business has a responsibility to help lead communities.”

“It’s like dropping a rock in a pond and it ripples out,” says Milacic, walking through his body shop, the floors now so clean his technicians could eat their lunches off them.

“Not one single person can save the environment, it has to be a team effort.”

Environmental sustainability forum Nov. 18

Small and medium-sized businesses looking to go green are often left to their own devices. But the Burnaby Board of Trade is trying to change that.

Almost a year ago, the Board formed an Environmental Sustainability Committee to help lead its members to greater social and environmental responsibility. It turns out the committee itself was leading edge, says Darlene Gering, the board’s president and CEO, as she was unable to find many other chambers of commerce across the country “engaged with green initiatives.”

“I was really surprised,” says Gering.

The committee is about to release a roadmap businesses can follow to achieve sustainability as well as a toolkit they can use to help reduce their own environmental impact.

Gering says the resource, which will be available on the BBOT’s website, will equip businesses with the information they need to improve things like their waste management, sustainable purchasing, and reducing their energy consumption and waste water. And it will show them how it all makes sense to the bottom line.

“The perception is that it costs money to be environmentally sustainable,” says Gering. “That’s just not the case.”

There will also be an Environmental Sustainability Forum for Business, on Nov. 18, 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the National Nikkei Museum and Heritage Centre, featuring a roundtable of speakers from companies that have adopted green practices into their operations. To register for the event, contact 604-412-0100 or email admin@bbot.ca.