Modern Living Show

07/29/2024

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RDKB: a local government that serves over 32,000 residents in 8 municipalities & 5 electoral areas

07/29/2024

In BC’s southern interior, climate change isn’t some ephemeral thing that may happen sometime in the future. All of us live with the daily and often scary reality that climate change is already happening in our communities.

In the winter, erratic temperatures and unpredictable freeze-thaw cycles are destroying basic infrastructure and affecting agriculture, such as this year’s stone fruit crops. In the spring, floods frequently devastate our communities. In the summer, suffocating wild fires are now an annual event destroying homes, communities and far too frequently lives and livelihoods.

We are already in a fearsome new world.

So it’s important that whether you’re working with a brand new build or retro-fitting and re-purposing an old building, as we are doing with the Skills Centre, that we all think about reducing our greenhouse gas footprint and adapting to the new weather and climate realities.

We started with improvements to the building envelope including extra insulation and new windows and doors.

Then we looked at our energy profile. In BC we’re lucky that most of the electrical grid is hydro. To reduce our footprint further we stripped out the natural gas, installed heat pumps and a 50kW solar array.

The power that we generate from solar will go straight to the grid, and we’ll get the credits for the energy that we produce.

Altogether we expect to reduce our energy consumption by more than 50%, reduce our GHG emissions by more than 50% and cut our energy bill in half, saving us more than $15,000 a year.

07/03/2024

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In a little over two weeks, we should be moving into our new super-duper, energy efficient, all-inclusive, state-of-the-art retrofitted building. (Building permits permitting. I’m not hexing anything!) It seems like a good time to look back on the journey.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll share some of the highlights of the past 3 years that took us from idea to reality.

This project started with a short conversation about space. It was 2021, and we were delivering several special programs that we’d developed to get unemployed or underemployed community members back to work after Covid. But we were running out of space for staff, and we’d also begun to generate a small surplus from our programs.

What if we were to invest our surplus in community and buy a building to allow our organization to expand a little?

What if the building was big enough to share some of the space?

And - if the building was big enough, what about incorporating some of the services that were either unavailable or hard to access in town?

Serendipitously, the old armory came onto the market. A 23,000 square feet building that had seen better days and was contaminated with asbestos, lead, PCBs and mercury. Far too big for just us - but plenty big enough to share and also big enough to accommodate all the big dreams we had. It was also an energy hog and ripe for a retrofit.

And bonus! It was right on the river with a spectacular view across to East Trail.

Photo – the building that we bought….

05/08/2024

📣 Event Update 📣

The Modern Living Show scheduled for May 18th at the Trail Memorial Centre will be postponed. The organizing committee is looking at new Fall Dates which will be announced shortly, so keep you eyes out! 👀

We're excited to host this event later in the year and look forward to bringing together our vibrant community of sustainability enthusiasts, businesses, and experts. Stay tuned for further updates as we continue to explore the latest trends, innovations, and best practices for living a more sustainable lifestyle together!🌿

04/20/2024

Never waste a good box! 📦 We love this Bear Country Kitchen!