Green reign depends on connecting city and state
Portland has the people who design sustainable buildings. Oregon has the people who can make the parts. Success for both means linking the two
POSTED: 05:00 AM PST Monday, October 29, 2007
BY ALISON RYAN
Daily Journal of Commerce
Portland’s built a reputation as a leader in green building. But it’s not a rep the city can maintain without looking at what the rest of the state has to offer.
Sustainable industry, especially building-related industry, has serious potential in Oregon. Demand for green buildings, renewable energy options and sustainably developed products is rising.
To meet it, said Glen Montgomery, the Oregon Economic and Community Dev-elopment Department’s sustainable development liaison, linking the state’s green clusters is essential.
“When we think of a cluster, we think of a localized economy,” he said. “But the state needs to think of it as an overall umbrella.”
Since January, the state’s green building and development cluster group has worked to identify ways to help everyone – from forest growers to architects – who’s a part of the sector.
Initiatives, to be proposed as part of the Oregon Business Plan, could focus on items like developing an ecosystems services marketplace or regulatory and permitting processes.
The opportunities are there. A recent Portland Development Commission-Office of Sustainable Development study focused on the in-demand products, services and systems that could grow the green building economy statewide. Interviews with professionals like architects and engineers turned into a list of items, among them prefabricated building components, photovoltaics and third-party certified wood and value-added wood products.
“We’re really good in architecture and engineering here, but we’re lacking in the product side,” said Pam Neal, a PDC senior project coordinator.
The demand is there, Neal said. As the study moves forward, the PDC will look at how well Oregon businesses can step up on supply.
Green building teams, said Bob Wise, the Cogan Owens Cogan senior project manager on the PDC study, identified about 70 products that have potential to be produced in Oregon.
“The biggest and best idea,” he said, “was to bring together the green building industry and the forest products industries into a team.”
Green building pros’ awareness of local gaps – and opportunities – in the market is something that organizations like Healthy Forests Healthy Communities are counting on. HFHC, a network of 60 wood-products businesses across the Northwest, promotes its sustainable-practice-dedicated businesses to decision-makers like architects.
“It’s their purchase power that makes the wheels turn,” Ryan Temple, HFHC program director said. “We try to make those relationships very clear.”
Across Oregon, wood businesses have honed to the concept of local, non-corporate buying. At Green Mountain Woodworks in Talent, outside of Ashland, the focus is on small-scale production of hardwood flooring and building products made with Oregon-grown and milled woods.
“Relationship is really important, more so than getting the cheapest thing for the cheapest price from the cheapest place,” Green Mountain’s Mark Stella said.
Relationship is a big buzzword in the green building goods and services sector, especially as rural manufacturers try to connect with urban users. PDX Lounge, the Portland Office of Sustainable Development-conceived installation of sustainable goods and services that’ll go up at Greenbuild in Chicago next week, offered a chance for things to click.
Businesses from across the state made products – like Green Mountain’s stage area that acts as a showcase of different Oregon woods – for the venue that’ll play host to hundreds of architects and designers. Benefits to both could be big.
“For me, this is an opportunity to see what the PDX Lounge can do in terms of long-term economic development – is it an appropriate lever?” Montgomery said. “And I’m hopeful it will be.”
Montgomery plans to do more than hope. He’d like, he said, to do a comparative study that tests the long-term economic benefits to lounge participants, using companies that didn’t take part as a control group.
The lounge’s overall importance, Temple said, is as a gateway to a larger regional economy.
“Maybe even more relevant to these local businesses, who may not sell anything to an architect in Manhattan, is they’re getting in the mind of Portland-area architects,” he said.
“PDX Lounge could go away tomorrow. But these people have met each other, learned about each other and the value of doing business locally.”
Focus on local markets is key to ideas of sustainability, Stella said, but it’s also important to ideas of stable economy.
“We are inherently making a product that is not something that someone from china will be able to do cheaper,” he said. “By focusing on this ethic, we make ourselves insulated to the ups and downs of the global marketplace.
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