Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm very pleased to be here today representing the City of Greater Sudbury. I am an environmental planner with the City of Greater Sudbury and I coordinate an initiative called EarthCare Sudbury.
I think there would be great value in telling you a bit about the community I'm from. Greater Sudbury has a population of 155,000. We're geographically spread out over 3,600 square kilometres. We're home to a university and two community colleges. We're also known as a wet community, as we have 330 lakes in our community, each over 10 hectares in size. We're also well known for our mining initiatives, and home to the world's second-largest integrated mining smelting complex in the world, CVRD Inco. We're also known worldwide for our land reclamation efforts and for restoring our natural environment, after suffering decades of environmental devastation.
In the presentation, the next series of photos shows images taken from the same vantage point. The first one is a photo from 1971 of the Apollo 16 astronauts, Mattingly and Duke, who were sent to Sudbury to study the geology of the Sudbury basin. At that time, Sudbury was known as “the moonscape”. This is a real photo of them. But the next slides show what's happened in the transformation of our community over the last three and a half decades. It's this experience in land reclamation, or greening, that has led us to where we are today. Over 12 million trees have been planted on over 16,000 hectares of land. This land reclamation process is only half complete. It has been this recovery process, combined with some innovative thinking on the energy side of things, that has led us to where we are today.
We are a committed community. We understand environmental damage. Building upon this reputation is incredibly important to us and to our sustainability and the future of our community.
Our move towards sustainability began with some early work with ICLEI, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, a United-Nations based organization; and with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. Sudbury is one of 600 cities worldwide participating in a program called cities for climate protection. We are one of over 140 cities across Canada participating in a national campaign known as the partners for climate protection. It's that initiative that is known as EarthCare Sudbury.
The program, nationally and internationally, has five milestones: developing our greenhouse gas baseline emissions inventory; then setting a reduction target; developing a local action plan; implementing it; and monitoring follow-up and evaluation. EarthCare Sudbury was launched as our local action planning process, and we have been acknowledged by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities as a model or leader in our work around local action planning.
When we launched the process in May 2000, we launched our initiative by signing a formal declaration. By that time, 38 community organizations made a commitment to help us develop this made-in-Sudbury plan for our community. This declaration was really a social contract signed by the senior person from each of the organizations. Those signatories have become very strong champions for us.
The plan itself was developed through a multi-stakeholder consultation process and a public consultation process that involved individuals from all sectors of the community. It also took several years and the investment of time. We launched the plan in October 2003, with the signing of a second declaration by 93 community partners at that time. These partners, as part of their commitment, agreed to help us implement the plan, both within the community and within the organizations, where possible.
Although this plan was initially intended to address the issue of climate protection and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, we very quickly realized it was really about becoming a sustainable community, one that addressed issues such as improving the quality of life for residents in our community, reduction of waste, improving local air quality, and enhancing our local economy. Yes, we are pleased to be making a positive contribution to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, but it was really about the local benefits to our own community.
Early into this process we realized that energy would become the foundation of our local action plan. There are a number of reasons for that, and I'll get into that in a minute.
We focused on energy because of the many opportunities that exist, one being the reinvestment of those dollars back into our own community. It would help us reduce our dependence on the outside marketplace, which is incredibly important for a more remote northern community. We wanted to be able to use this to attract new business and green business to our community, and it was also critical to helping us reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, as well.
I'll refer you to the pie chart on page 5 of my slides. We hired ICLEI energy services to prepare an energy profile for the community. We realized that we spent nearly $393 million a year on energy costs, and in the case of Sudbury, almost all of that money leaves town. So we wanted to put a plan in place to retain and reinvest some of those dollars in our community.
A number of things have happened since then that have helped to support this initiative. Council has adopted this as one of its strategic priorities, and they've created an alternative energy technical advisory committee. We're using this to position ourselves at the forefront of emerging new technologies technologies so we'll be able to move that agenda forward.
In terms of the leadership we've shown as a municipality, in the mid-1990s we undertook a strategic energy retrofit of our building stock and retrofitted 30 municipal buildings. We reduced our energy costs by nearly 30%. We reduced our CO2 emissions by 26%. We're saving the community $1 million a year in energy costs. The total aggregate payback for that work was 7.23 years.
What set us apart from other municipalities in the mid-1990s was that we chose an integrated approach. We did projects that had a payback in the range of 0 to 14 years. At the time, industry and businesses would generally look at things with a one- or two-year payback; they would never get to something with a 14-year payback. We took a comprehensive, integrated approach to this work and are now realizing the benefits and savings--as are our community and taxpayers.
Some of the technologies we implemented as a result of that strategic energy retrofit were heat pumps, recovering heat from sewage sludge; geothermal systems; and some solar walls. We are now embarking on a landfill gas utilization initiative at our Sudbury landfill.
The next slide shows one of the solar walls at one of our water treatment plants. The payback for that solar wall was five years.
I'd briefly like to touch on some of the initiatives in our community by our community partners, who are showing tremendous leadership, as well. Inco, for example, has launched a program called Powerplay, in which they invested $60 million over a five-year period. Almost 90% of that was invested in our own community. We're also working with the Mining Association of Canada, which in 2006 released a study on the opportunities of geothermal heat within underground mines in our community.
I have included the photo of Creighton Mine in the presentation, because it's a unique energy initiative. In the winter they spray water on a lower level of the mine and create an ice field, which is the size of several football fields. It's rudimentary technology that was employed at the turn of the century. They pass air over the ice and use it as cool intake air for the mines throughout the summer periods. That's one of the initiatives they've embarked on to pursue energy conservation strategies in the community.
Our Living with Lakes Centre is an initiative at Laurentian University. It's the cooperative freshwater ecology unit, which is an amalgamation of the university, the Ministry of the Environment, and the Ministry of Natural Resources. It's a research facility that is known worldwide for water quality and lake stewardship. They're actually building a new facility, starting in 2008. What's unique about this facility is that they're building it to LEED's platinum certification. LEED stands for leadership in energy efficiency and design. There are only five LEED platinum buildings in the world currently, and we're striving to be the sixth.
One unique aspect of this facility is that in the design they required that the annual operating costs not exceed what their current operating costs are for what is in existence--a number of small cottages. So their annual operating costs are about $40,000 to $45,000. This new facility, which is six times larger, will not exceed that annual operating cost.
The payback for building a premium green facility is six to eight years. The green premium to build this facility is about $700,000.
One of the other unique features about this initiative is it's the only initiative of its kind that is actually incorporating climate scenarios into the development and design in the building. They're projecting climate change scenarios up to 2050 into the development of this facility.