Sustainability in Small Practice
Last week we had the opportunity to guest host the Architects Declare Instagram account. We used this as an opportunity to discuss some of the challenges and opportunities small firms face when navigating the world of sustainability, and also give some insight into some of the strategies we use to meet our sustainability goals. We’ve compiled the content from those posts here for a one-stop reading.
What do we mean when we talk about sustainability?
To us, sustainability is doing the right thing by the planet and its residents, it’s thinking through the consequences of our actions and taking responsibility for the outcomes and it's being purposeful in ensuring the environment and our communities can thrive into the future.
Build your Sustainable Dream Team
As a small practice we often find that the biggest barrier to meeting the sustainability goals of our projects is our limited time and resources. Sustainable design, materials and technology are evolving and improving so quickly that it can often feel overwhelming to keep up, especially when we have such tight margins in which to deliver projects.
The best way we have of overcoming this is by surrounding ourselves with as many people as we can who are also passionate about sustainability. As such we have made it a real focus to find builders, consultants, suppliers and clients who share our agendas.
While working with sustainably minded builders has obvious benefits, we’ve been really amazed at how much we’ve learnt and developed as a firm by seeking out passionate people through all stages of the project. From engineers through to tile suppliers, we’ve been able to pool our knowledge and resources and take a lot of the pressure off ourselves to be the sole sustainability experts throughout a project.
If you’re just starting out on your sustainability journey as a firm, working with people who have been in the game for longer is possibly the quickest way to learn and grow.
By putting sustainability at the forefront of our relationships we can have open and honest conversations about how we can all improve and it helps keep us accountable throughout the process.
So while it might mean we have to initially invest more time into finding the right people to work with, we see those relationships continue to pay off over long periods of time as we all work together towards our goals.
Navigating Greenwash
Greenwashing, to us, is the act of marketing a brand, product or service in a way that makes it seem sustainable or environmentally conscious when in reality it is not or other aspects of the brand, product or service are unsustainable to the point of outweighing the sustainability claims.
It can be really detrimental by making true sustainable options hard to identify. We often waste a lot of time trying to uncover whether we can really trust a product we want to specify.
Greenwashing can also be tricky because it can be unintentional. For instance, we could be a certified carbon neutral practice and proudly promote how sustainable we are because of it, all the while still designing carbon guzzling houses. In this instance we wouldn’t be necessarily making any false claims and being a carbon neutral company would be a genuinely good thing, but overall the carbon we offset as a small business would be negligible to what we could save through applying ESD principles to our projects.
As a business that actively markets itself as being sustainable, we are incredibly sensitive to the fact that we have to deliver on those promises and meet the expectations of the people we work with.
Mapping our Sustainability Action Plan
Here’s how we’ve mapped out our Sustainability Action Plan and what sustainability looks like in our practice.
We started by dividing our sustainability agenda into two key areas: Operations and Projects.
Our operations encompass our Sustainable Work Practices (think the energy we use in the office, how we travel around, our office supplies, etc.) and our Advocacy.
For our projects, we’ve broken it down into the 6 project stages we use so as to help keep our goals manageable and actionable throughout a project lifecycle.
We then look at what we’re already doing, what we’re working towards and what we would like to be doing in the coming years with actionable points of how we’ll get there.
As a small practice we find managing the sustainability of our operations to be really achievable. This is because we can get strong cultural buy-in from our team, there is great visibility over all aspects of our business and we have greater flexibility in being able to change the way we do things.
We can sometimes struggle to implement our goals on a project front as it requires support from external stakeholders. We often find that as a small practice we’re precariously balanced between trying to do the most sustainable thing while satisfying the other demands of a project.
One thing we’ve come to realise is that a lot of our goals are reliant on the industry all moving together and a pooling of knowledge and resources. We rely a lot on the knowledge sharing of other practices so we’re very grateful to see things like @fitzpatrickpartners developing really useful tools and @breathearchitecture producing their guides for us all to use. We’re grateful to @architectseat for providing the blueprint to putting our SAP together and we’re grateful for the work Sarah is doing with @cooee_architecture to educate on what sustainable design looks like.
A rising tide lifts all boats!
1% for the Planet
To finish off our hosting week, we wanted to share our (not so secret) secret weapon!
It’s a step outside the world of architecture but is a program that continually keeps us accountable to the natural environment.
As of last year, we are proud members of the @1percentftp Initiative. This means we donate 1% of every dollar we make (total revenue, not just our profits) to help protect our environment and keep us accountable to the planet.
This is an important component of our Sustainability Action Plan as it encourages us to look up from the world of architecture and construction to look at other ways we can make a positive impact.
What really drew us to the 1% for the Planet program (and why we would encourage other small practices to get on board) is that regardless of what we do, a portion of every dollar our clients pay us is directly benefiting our planet. Every project stage is contributing to broader climate positive action.
The other fantastic thing is that it’s proportional so we don’t have to worry about over or under committing, and we can also put this part of our Sustainability Action Plan on auto pilot (a dream for a time strapped small practice).