ASHRAE NAC President
Christina Herbers, P.Eng, LEED AP
My top three goals this year as President are to elevate:
- Sustainable building designs
- Women in ASHRAE
- And Diversity in ASHRAE
I believe that our HVAC-R industry can have a major impact on reducing Carbon emissions. By designing our built environment with sustainability at the forefront, we can create a future better for our children.
I look forward to serving you as ASHRAE Northern Alberta Chapter (NAC) President, 2024-2025. I am thankful to all of the ASHRAE volunteers that I have worked with over the years, and have mentored me, and I am thankful and excited about our current board of directors.
How to Begin Your Career as a Successful Ecopreneur
In today's business environment, most large-cap companies now publish annual corporate social responsibility reports, indicating that sustainability in business is no longer optional. Entrepreneurs developing can no longer focus on long-term growth without addressing how their plans impact the environment.
Establishing a sustainable business model that attracts investors and customers involves various phases.
What makes a business green?
Green businesses do not negatively impact the environment, economy or community. Instead, they pursue the Environmental Protection Agency's goals of creating and maintaining conditions under which humans and nature can exist productively and harmoniously to benefit present and future generations.
What are the pitfalls of starting a green business?
Choose a green business idea that addresses a specific need and has long-term growth potential before adjusting your career trajectory or leaving a comfortable job that supports you financially.
Although you can research large-scale opportunities within broad energy, transportation or technology industries, you can also find inspiration by examining your daily rituals. For example, consider starting a bicycle rental company to reduce automobile and gasoline usage. Alternatively, if you love to sew, develop a line of accessories made from recyclable materials.
You can also learn from others' successes. For example, you can model your business after Patagonia, whose founder, Yvon Chouinard, promotes sustainable practice throughout every level of his company and donates 1% of all sales to environmental causes.
If you are an animal lover, draw inspiration from West Paw, which includes four-legged family members in its fight to save the planet. The company constructs toys and accessories from recyclable, non-toxic materials and asks customers to help achieve its plant-friendly goals by returning well-loved toys to its recycling center, where they obtain new life.
Ultimately, it is helpful to view any idea through a green lens before moving forward.
What are the funding options for green startups?
Green or not, every business startup requires an infusion of cash; however, choosing to be green comes with additional costs, including supplies and space. Fortunately, various funding sources can help.
For example, the government offers numerous grant programs that help launch sustainable businesses, though it can take some serious effort to get funding. You can also present your idea to private venture capitalists or angel investors who may offer funding and mentoring in exchange for equity.
Finally, when your business category does not qualify for support from the government or other organizations, crowdfunding can help you obtain donations from like-minded individuals who like your business model.
What does a green business plan include?
Your business plan must address a triple bottom line, addressing people, profits and the planet, showing potential investors how each aspect of your business will incorporate sustainable practices. It must include:
A mission statement and goals
An executive structure
Products, services and target audience
Operating and marketing plans
Financial projections
What is green marketing?
Your green company's success depends upon attracting an environmentally conscious audience. Therefore, your marketing strategy must involve every aspect of your operations. For example, you can avoid traditional snail mail marketing campaigns that waste paper with digital content marketing services.
If you’re unsure about where to begin, online marketing consultants can provide guidance to help you effectively market your brand.
Depending on your business category, you can also obtain certifications from organizations that allow you to display their logos on your materials to convey the standards you uphold.
Are you ready to start a business that sustains your future and the planet? If you’ve got an idea that has growth potential, this could be the perfect opportunity to realize your dreams of entrepreneurship. Carefully assess the pitfalls that come with startups, and get a clear understanding of where to get your capital. Create a stellar business plan, and connect with marketing pros to develop a sustainable marketing campaign. Before too long, your green venture will be up and running!
The ASHRAE NAC Board thanks Tina Martin for writing this wonderful article for us as a guest author.
Chad Von Hagen - Electronic Communications Chair 2017-2018 / 2018-2019 / 2019-2020
It has been really exciting to be part of such a passionate Board team these past two years. My current position is the NAC Electronic Communications Chair, although I have spent the majority of my time trying to learn all of the new ASHRAE acronyms.
I am also fairly new Edmontonian, having transferred up from Calgary with my wife and three girls. I currently work in HVAC Technical Sales, which has given me the opportunity to meet lots of new people.
We are truly lucky to have such an engaged HVAC community in Northern Alberta.
We have a new website!
Just for fun, I looked back through my records to see when I first became involved with building the website for ASHRAE Northern Alberta Chapter. Yeah, I'm that nerdy.
My name is Kent Signorini and I've been maintaining the ASHRAE NAC website since 2005! Since then, we've gone through four major iterations of the site, with this "new for 2018-2019" version being the fifth major change since I started.
When I came on board, our website was a conglomeration of Microsoft Word-to-HTML files, Microsoft Frontpage, hand-coded files, and some Dreamweaver thrown in for fun. It needed an upgrade for sure.
In 2006 we commissioned a new website, completely hand-coded by a contractor. Although the base code was simple enough, maintenance was a headache. Within a year or so, I rebuilt the site in Wordpress and went through two iterations with Wordpress as a base. Some of it was customized and I re-coded some of the PHP and HTML by hand to give us the functionality we needed. I had a lot of help from Jennifer McKenzie (our ASHRAE NAC administrator at the time) who helped with initial design ideas and took care of the week-to-week maintenance and updating of the site.
In 2010 we went through another iteration, this time moving to Drupal. Drupal was amazingly powerful. Many features were built into the site that we, ultimately, just never used. That version has stayed in operation for nearly eight years. Eight years! Again, it was time for a change.
All of these self-hosted sites were stored at an online webhost that provided us storage space, database access, and FTP and SSH (secure shell) access. Much of the maintenance was done at the shell command line or by using web based UNIX tools like PHPMyAdmin. For a nerd like me, it was great fun, but it was also a ton of work. No need for that anymore...
Today's websites are dynamic, clean and crisp, easy to maintain, and require little (if any) hand-coding.
The version of the website that you're reading right now is built on Squarespace; an amazing platform for website development and maintenance. I would recommend Squarespace to anyone looking for a web presence. It's easy to set up, easy to lay out, and easy to add content to.
Our new site has a simple but useful landing page with quick access to upcoming and past ASHRAE NAC events, links to a few "Featured" Nic-NACs e-Newsletter articles, lots of information on the Chapter, links to our ASHRAE Region and Society, and a simple menu system.
We've sorely missed our newsletter Nic-NACs over the past few years and now have an all-new "e" version to share with you. Visit the Nic-NACS e-Newsletter page to see both current and past articles on many subjects, written by volunteers within ASHRAE NAC. You'll find Board of Governor and Chair updates, technical articles, and more! Check back often!
I hope you enjoyed this very short history of the ASHRAE NAC websites. I look forward to seeing what can be done with this new site in the years to come.
Kent Signorini, Website/Newsletter, Past President 2009-2010