 Environment - March 1, 2008 |
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| Green grants to boost 12 groups |
By Kevin Ma
Staff Writer
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A St. Albert group has received a grant that could start a national movement to turn paper into wood.
The city’s Environmental Advisory Committee recommended the city award the Carbon Zero Schools Foundation $720 Thursday to improve paper recycling in a local school. The foundation, run by St. Albert businessman Trevor Zahara, rewards students with trees to plant for meeting recycling goals.
This money comes from the city’s Environmental Initiatives Grant Program, said chair Jason Cooke, which funds local environmental projects. This was the second round of grants.
The foundation is a spin-off of a New Zealand group founded by Marty Hoffart, a former St. Albert resident, said Zahara, a friend of Hoffart’s. "We want to take this all across the country and have St. Albert as our home base," he told the committee.
The group’s Paper 4 Trees program would teach students how to maximize the amount of material they recycle, Zahara said. It would provide recycling bins and perform waste audits so schools can track their performance. He did not have any specific statistics, but said that about 560 New Zealand schools had signed up for the program and saved "tens of thousands of dollars" on disposal fees in the process.
Cash crunch means small grants
This program was one of about 12 the committee recommended the city support. All of them were very ambitious, Cooke said, but just one received the full amount of funding requested. The committee had about $45,000 of requests and just $14,000 in grants, he explained, so it had to make a lot of tough choices.
Paper 4 Trees got about a quarter of the money it asked for, Cooke noted. "Unfortunately at this point there were a few specifics lacking." The group had proposed to pilot its project in five schools, for example, but had not formally signed up any local schools to participate. The committee hoped this grant would help fund a smaller, one-school pilot, he said.
The Sturgeon River Watershed Initiative Society received $1,500 for a consultant, about one-third of what it asked for. The fledgling group seeks to unite governments, citizens and industry to manage the Sturgeon watershed.
The St. Albert Singers Guild got $750 to hold an eco-concert. "The theme of the concert is all types of environmental topics," Cooke said, and would partner with local businesses to spread the message of sustainable living.
The biggest grant went to the St. Albert Botanic Park — $3,000 for a computerized irrigation system. "A lot of people have already embraced the idea that you don’t need to over-water your plants," Cooke said, and this system supports the concept. When built, it will use remote sensors to pipe precisely the right amount of water needed to all parts of the garden, reducing water waste.
Several schools, including Bertha Kennedy, Vital Grandin, Outreach High, Ronald Harvey and Elmer S. Gish will get funds for garden and naturalization projects. The Big Lake Environmental Support Society will get about $1,000 for its Big Lake web-cam project, and the River Edge Enhancement Project will get $1,450 for another riverside planting.
All these grants have yet to be approved by city council. The next round of grants starts this fall. |
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