Eco Efficiency Excellence Award Winner for 2020
BC Wildlife Park selected as the 2020 Eco Efficiency Excellence Award Winner
BC Wildlife Park had their Eco Efficiency Assessment completed in Summer 2020 and since then, their management team has taken the top recommendations and systematically tackled them to improve their sustainability performance.
“The BC Wildlife Park connects people to BC’s wildlife and wild places in order to encourage a sustainable society within a healthy, natural environment. With this philosophy in mind, we pride ourselves on continuing to take ownership of the environmental impact that the Park has, by continuing to make immediate, positive changes that improve environmental stewardship and reduce our carbon footprint. Upon working with GreenStep Solutions and listening to their suggestions, we’ve implemented their recommendations alongside our existing plans to improve our environmental efficiency. The BC Wildlife Park is honoured to be at the forefront of environmental stewardship and the recipient of the 2020 Eco Efficiency Excellence Award. We look forward to continuing to make strides in reducing our carbon footprint by educating ourselves and implementing innovative ways to becoming more sustainable.”
- Jorrit Koedooder, Facilities Supervisor, BC Wildlife Park
Eco Efficiency Excellency Details
Future and in progress initiatives include ensuring that the BC Wildlife Park is accessible to all of our patrons. This accessibility upgrade also includes completely renovating exterior washrooms for maximum environment efficiency, compete with LEF lighting, low flow toilets, waterless urinal, and hot water tanks.
Removed single use paper maps, eliminating more than 120,000 paper products from annual production and replaced them with 10 large permanent park maps, alongside a downloaded able map from our website for visitor convenience.
Further to the commitment of eliminating single use products, the BC Wildlife Park will no longer carry single use water bottles by fall of 2021. Instead 4 water refill stations throughout the park grounds will be installed.
Knowing that single use plastics are harmful to the environment, all of their to go cups, utensils, and containers are all corn based and biodegradable.
Given the results of BC Wildlife Park’s waste audit, improving source separation was a top priority identified in the Eco Efficiency Report. Shortly after presenting the findings, the BC Wildlife Park team purchased additional bins to create recycling stations, placing them at entrances and along the parks pathways.
The park is now set up for success, with the ability to source separate recycling from garbage, which will improve their diversion rate and reduce the amount of waste sent to the landfill.
The second recommendation was to replace their older fluorescent lighting with LED fixtures and lamps. The BC Wildlife Park team has received quotes on these upgrades, while they also began replacing a portion of the fluorescent lighting on their own in recent months.
Lastly, GreenStep Solutions identified and discussed equipment which was operating inefficiently at the time of their visit (ice build up on condensers, AHU). Therefore, the BC Wildlife Park has since had contractors in to repair the equipment.