Strashin Developments

4 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 2 the city authorities began to take notice. In the early 2000s, for example, he received a plaque from the Toronto city council in recognition of his renovation of a historic seven-story building at 460 Richmond Street West. More recently, Strashin and Sons – through its wholly-owned subsidiary, 501 Alliance Investments – is carrying out renovations on the former Cooper Canada sporting goods factory, near Weston Road and Black Creek. The project is targeting LEED Platinum Certification through a number of initiatives, including stormwater harvesting, geothermal HVAC, high efficiency LED lighting, and insulated roofing and walls. “Starting at the top of the building, we’ve got a 298KW solar farm as part of the feed-in tariff (FIT) program started by the Liberal government,” Elliot says. “As the solar farm is part of the FIT contract, it doesn’t directly supply energy for the building but the other additions are all designed to directly improve the building’s sustainability. All the things we’re adding to the building make a huge difference but they’re not costing me significantly more than if I was simply renovating the building. I’ve already gutted and renovated five buildings previously, so I know exactly what each addition will cost.” Elliot’s renovation work can take significant STRASHIN DEVELOPMENTS amounts of time, particularly when natural disasters interfere with the original schedule. Unfortunately, the former Cooper Canada sporting goods factory is situated on a floodplain and has been impacted by three separate once- in-a-hundred-year floods. Despite the setbacks these floods have caused, Elliot and his company have remained committed to sustainable initiatives. “I’ve been involved in many new green technologies,” Elliot notes. “In particular, I started engaging with a company called Environmental Waste International (EWI) around the turn of the millennium. EWI has a patented microwave technology that reduces organic matter into short-chain carbon molecules. This technology has profound implications for a whole number of waste products.” Elliot points to the example of waste tires – the kind that accumulate in dumpsites and take numerous years to break down. “As part of my support for EWI, I cofounded a company called Ellsin Environmental,” he explains. “We were able to get some government funding to build a tire recycling plant in Sault Ste. Marie. Essentially, you have waste tires going in one end and carbon black, a material used in everything from plastics to printer ink, coming out the other. That plus oil, steel and natural gas. And there’s