A sustainable business invents solutions to our current environmental problems – inventiveness that’s driven by a profit motive and an ability to make urban life more enjoyable. It’s a powerful concept, one that’s being adopted by some of the world’s largest companies.

For example, Wal-Mart recently started reducing waste in its supply chain, while purchasing and generating renewable energy because it has a positive impact on its bottom line. Barclays, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, and Swiss Re—financial giants all—stepped up efforts to integrate climate change into their lending policies, investment portfolios, or overall strategy, Joel Makower writes in GreenBiz.com.

Here at home, we’re leading the way on a number of sustainability efforts. One, the Cuyahoga Valley Initiative (CVI), created a roadmap to reinvent the river valley by attracting environmentally minded industry.

“The natural systems of the Valley should influence how buildings and infrastructure are restored, designed and constructed using ecological design and green building practices,” CuyahogaValley.net states.

In the new paradigm, industry restores the balance between human civilization and natural systems like the Cuyahoga River corridor. Nonprofit groups like CLEERTEC and CVI are laying the groundwork by looking at environmental restoration as business opportunity.

More than big talk, they recently launched their first project—to develop a ‘green bulkhead’—with a $1.8 million federal grant. The idea is to replace the aging steel bulkheads along the river’s shipping channel with ones made from more natural materials. The goal is reduce storm water with polluted sediments from flooding into the river, and to create a more inviting environment for both visitors and aquatic life.

CVI hopes to find a local business that wants to partner on building the green bulkhead. The lure is business development in new markets—cities around the world need bulkhead replacement, and want to reduce runoff and attract tourists to their waterfronts.

Replacing bulkheads in the Great Lakes alone is a billion dollar market place, Jim White of CLEERTEC and the Cuyahoga River Remedial Action Plan told the Michigan Land Use Institute (MLUI) in January 2007.

The $20 billion Strategy to Restore and Protect the Great Lakes which stalled in the last Congress—is being eyed by White and others who see a huge upside in market development for environmental restoration.

"The economic benefits of cleaning the Great Lakes, and investing the $20 billion, are much more than a bunch of multiplier jobs for people fixing sewers," John Austin, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution told MLUI. "It's the benefit of, and the wealth created by, the new residential and commercial development along the waterfronts. It's the tourism and recreation dollars. It's the premium someone will pay to live in a place where you can throw a kayak on top of the hybrid SUV and go to a beautiful, clean lake or river."

Rocky Mountain Institute, in its report for CVI, explains that green bulkheads are part of a Cuyahoga River restoration strategy that calls for Low Impact Development (LID). Improving the environment becomes that much more attractive when local economic benefit is realized.

Essential for improved river water quality, these solutions also can create significant new business and job opportunities for heavy-equipment operators, landscapers, laborers, designers, contractors, and others recreating the ways in which the community deals with stormwater, RMI writes. And because LID is usually relatively small in scale, its projects are readily accessible to smaller businesses with limited bonding capacity.

Updates

Jan. 28, 2008—

"We have three different designs for different applications, from a 'bucket' with plants that inserts into the grooves of an existing steel bulkhead to a full replacement," says Christopher Alvarado, senior planner at Cuyahoga County Planning Commission.

Seventh Congressional District (Springfield, OH) Rep. David Hobson, chair of a sub committee which oversees Army Corps of Engineers, secured a $500,000 appropriation to pay for design, construction and installation.

Has anyone tried this before? Not quite. There’s the “green wall” designed by Michael Singer in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but that’s a stepped back concrete wall that has plants on it.

“In terms of the Cuyahoga River, the amount of land you can use for habitat is limited because you don’t have many straight sections, you have a lot of narrow sections and with ship traffic, propeller wash,” Alvarado says.

The idea with the three designs is to get them to thirty percent of engineering and design – enough to write an RFP and hire an engineering firm, probably in marine construction with geotechnical expertise, Alvarado says, to finish the design.

The main point of the green bulkheads isn’t as much to control stormwater runoff, but to provide aquatic organisms with habitat. One of the river’s impairments deals with not enough sustaining habitat for larval fish to migrate. A big issue is dissolved oxygen and lack of shelter. This could create a green edge, but the challenge is the shipping channel – with the propeller wash, you have to contain the plants.

Cuyahoga County Planning and CLEERTEC have been experimenting with a ‘bucket’ style container that fits inside the grooves of the existing bulkheads since April 2007.

“We got the appropriation (from Rep. Hobson) in 2006. It’s taken a little longer because this is fairly new for the Army Corps. The new design had to be vetted by their designer and biologists.”

Currently, they are testing the design in the river area of the Canal Reservation in the Cleveland Metroparks. Depending on the results of that test, the group could be ready to build more bucket bulkhead attachments, this time in the shipping channel, by fall 2008, says Alvarado.

The design team includes Roger Thoma, a former ODNR biologist who’s knowledge of larval fish led to his design of a fish shelf used on Lorain’s Black River. Also, Terry Greathouse, a Tri-C professor who’s habitat work led to a wetlands construction in West Creek Reservation, and Julie Rolin, a professor of biology at Cleveland State University.

The big prize would be a complete “green” replacement for the steel bulkhead. The group is working on initial designs for a section of public property below the I-490 Bridge and perhaps near the future Canal Basin Park. They hope to have an RFP for a local firm to finish the design and engineering in 2008 (with the agreement that the final design would be publicly owned).

“We’re working with Ohio Department of Natural Resources to come up with a system that is eligible for (stormwater) mitigation credits, so the property owner near the bulkhead could sell the credits or get some compensation” to offset the costs of building the bulkhead.

Green bulkheads is a project that grew out of the Cuyahoga Valley Initiative, which will look at other eco friendly “interventions” along the river, Alvarado says, including water quality improvements. For example, they’ve talked to John Todd’s company, which invented the “Living Machine” with plants that clean greywater, including the one at Oberlin College’s Adam J. Lewis Environmental Studies building, about doing river wide clean up with biological systems (which the company is working on in China).

“It goes beyond green bulkheads to an idea that waste equals revenue.”

Resources

Michael Singer, art meets green infrastructure

Metropolis Magazine, Urban eco-sustainable networks (pdf)