raining money
ALTHOUGH MOST BUSINESS EXECUTIVES TODAY RECOGnize that environmental initiatives can yield a wealth of strategic
advantages, there hasn’t been much progress on that front lately. As
for why that might be, the timing suggests that a lot of eco-initiatives became casualties of the recession: As the economic storm
clouds gathered, companies put their environmental initiatives on
hold as they battened down the financial and operations hatches for
a bout of heavy weather.
What those companies overlooked, however, was what we might
call the “green value proposition”—the benefits that eco-initiatives
can provide. Although it’s often assumed that the value of going
green lies mainly in public relations, the benefits actually go far
beyond that. Often as not, the real payoff comes
in savings that go right to the bottom line.
This important fact did not escape the folks at
one Minneapolis firm. In the teeth of a recession, executives at Murphy Warehouse Co.
invested more than half a million dollars to better manage the runoff of storm water from their
property.
That might sound like a big cash layout, but it
will bring a big payoff: The company will save at
least $68,000 a year from here on out. That
means within eight years, Murphy Warehouse
will have fully recouped its investment, and the
savings will continue, in theory, in perpetuity.
Not a bad way to do business, eh?
The story began back in 2004, when the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) enacted regulations
requiring municipalities to manage the quality of storm water. In
order to comply with the mandate, Minneapolis officials began
assessing all business properties within the city stormwater fees. One
of those businesses was Murphy Warehouse Co., which maintains its
headquarters there. The annual assessment on Murphy’s 22-acre
headquarters campus: a whopping $68,000.
Although they could have simply incorporated the new fee into
their annual operating budget, Murphy executives decided to try a
different approach. They engaged an engineering firm to design a
stormwater management system to collect and filter the runoff at
the 105-year-old campus—a move that would allow them to seek an
abatement of the annual fee.
The system, which was installed in the summer of 2008, consists of
a retention basin and three “rain gardens” that collect 95 percent of
the rainwater that falls on the site. By reducing runoff from the prop-
erty into the neighboring residential streets and
storm drains, the system helps reduce flooding
during rainstorms and thus, the potential for
sewage runoff into the Mississippi River. As it
had hoped, Murphy was able to obtain an abate-
ment of the assessment from the city.
