Battle Creek, Michigan

BATTLE CREEK , MI CHIGAN standards to meet volume and quality discharge limits. Carl Fedders, City Engineer / Assistant Director of Public Works, notes, “Probably the most interesting project, which we’re in the pilot stages of now, is the compost project at our wastewater treatment plant to deal with biosolids at the end of that process. Sustainability is built into all the things we do. Typically, any kind of efficiency or ‘green’ solution to a problem ends up saving us money.” Feldt adds, “Back in 2006/07, the city entered into a contract with a company to assist in upgrading a lot of building elements in our city hall in our previous police department building - replacing regular lighting with LEDs; low-flow toilets; converting holiday (Christmas) lighting to LEDs, etc. Looking at the baseline costs before the upgrades took place and tracking those since 2008, there is an approx. average savings per year of $130,000. In the new Environmental Sustainability Plan, we’re looking at how to track various buildings’ electrical and water and gas usage to form baseline energy usage data to learn which areas of the building we can start addressing to improve efficiency and save money. And how to get on to more renewable energy sources. Kind of a triple bottom line.” “We’re really starting to get serious about the concept,” says Helmboldt, “figuring out how to systematically treat the whole municipality as one entity that has sustainability at heart. Part of the challenge of a municipality like Battle Creek is it’s very decentralized. There are a lot of different business units and departments with their own buildings and facilities, which means more than 100 electric bills, for example. So it’s pretty complicated to determine how much energy we’re actually using. But we’re committed with the Sustainability Plan to sort this out, by building customized internal systems to determine base lines and find ways of being more efficient and sustainable.” Battle Creek has been designated an All-