Sustainability and Project Management

Irrigation, bunkers, stream restoration, construction of small buildings, bridges, wash pads or tee's - there is no shortage to the type of projects happening on a golf course at any given time. This requires a sound project management strategy.

The project management definition as per the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK, Project Management Institute's flagship publication) is “the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements”. What if one of your project goals or requirements was to integrate sustainability? Would you understand how?

For some insight I've contacted Sven Riemer, a Director at Stratos, a sustainability consulting firm in Ottawa Canada. Sven leads the Public Sector Management Practice and specializes in strategic project management, performance measurement and reporting strategies. After the short interview I've included a presentation of Sven's illustrating the process he uses of integrating sustainability in to the project management process.

Video: James Baird Interview

James Baird, a turfgrass specialist at the University of California, Riverside, talks about cool- and warm-season grasses, their carbon sequestering abilities, and how these grasses respond to water. In this interview, he also offers homeowners some lawn-care advice.

Microlawns

I love grass - bamboos, bents, blues, natives, creeping, clumping, climbing the list goes on. I love using them as tools in the landscape, employing their specific characteristics in the garden, the playing field and in the wild. But there is a point where the use of grass seems redundant. Where there are more inputs required to maintain the grass than what the function of the grass in-turn produces. Case in point, the Microlawn. These attempts to deliver beautification and utility to the urban landscape seem ass-backwards to me.

I recently came across a photo-blog called Microlawns.tumblr.com that seems to share my view. Curious to learn more I contacted the creator David Yoon to learn where the motivation for his blog came from:

Microlawns started because I was doing a lot of walking to work...pretty rare for a guy living LA. I guess walking gave me lots of time to notice all the little details you miss when driving, so I started carrying a camera and snapping photos of minutiae: flowers, sidewalk graffiti, and then all these weird little leftover lawn patches. As oddball remainders of property demarcation they remind me of vestigial railroad scar tissue, slashing out awkwardly unusable parcels of land across the city. Also they're inherently absurd, because you know it's someone's job to tend to them—mowing, watering and edge trimming these purely symbolic bits of landscaping. I figured they're mysterious and meaningless anyway, so why not start creating silly origin mythologies around them? Never thought it'd get picked up by the likes of Huffington Post, Metafilter or Reddit, but that's the Internet for you I guess.

David has allowed me to repost some of his photos here, but to see a larger collection of true ridiculousness in action go to his blog. If you'd like to contribute join the Flickr Group.

Herb Graffis Business Person of the Year Award

I was reading the online version of Golfdom the other day and saw a few things I wanted to mention on Turfhugger. To begin, their special feature "Turf on Trial" provided some excellent testimonies on behalf of a number of industry professionals who debunked common accusations against golf. Turfhugger's own Chris Tritabaugh was featured to help illustrate that golf courses do not live by their own set of rules, and that many like Tritabaugh, go beyond the expectations of law.

Also in this issue, on the bottom of page six is a small blurb about how Golfdom is currently accepting nominations for the first ever Herb Graffis Business Person of the Year Award. As outlined briefly in the magazine and on their website the award is meant to recognize forward-thinking people in the business of golf. 

I began to salivate. There are not shortage of Superintendent centric awards out there, and that's a good thing, but small business in this industry (consultants, contractors, etc) produce some game changing projects, services or products that help to elevate the way our industry does business, this award is for them. 

So I've decided to contact Seth Jones, Golfdoms Editor-In-Chief, to learn more. Here's what he had to say...

Greg Evans discusses conditioning at Ealing Golf Club

In this video Greg describes the conditioning of the Ealing Golf Club, how he insists on "championship standard, 7 days a week" and the honor of being awarded a Master Greenskeeper Certificate.

10 Golf Questions Video Series

Got some time to burn? Sure we all do right now. When you do find time for some Golf and Environment related background noise check out the "10 Questions" video series produced by BunkerShot.com and GolfTV. Here's a few that Turfhugger readers will likely enjoy.

Greg Lyman, GCSAA Director of Environmental Programs

Noble Hendrix & Bill Crispin of The Golfpreserves

Dave Aardsma from Waste Management, the title sponsors of the 2010 Phoenix Open.

Mark Woodward, CEO of the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America

Part 2: The Quest for a "Zero Waste" Golf Course

This is a follow up to The Quest for a "Zero Waste" Golf Course interview I did with Josh Heptig about a month ago. This time around we start to get in to some of the financials and the nitty gritty.

Turfhugger: What is your return on investment?

Josh Heptig: Luckily in our situation we do not have any out of pocket expenses other than some of our staff's time. Our compost vessels were granted to us via Integrated Waste Management Authority (our local waste management organization), much of the lumber for the infrastructure was donated by Hayward Lumber (local lumber yard), the worm bins and volunteer labor have been donated by Environmental Protection Associates Inc. (EPA Inc., the non-profit we are collaborating with) and Eco-Rotary International (a non-profit charitable organization in the US), and the current tea brewer is owned by Nyha Roots (one of our partners). 

The rest of the costs ~ $5,000 will be captured by a grant from the Morro Bay National Estuary Program (MBNEP). We are not actually sure how much cost will be saved at this point because there really is not any data relating to actual composting or tea brewing available with quantifiable results. Our hope is to provide those figures by working in conjunction with California Polytechnic University's Horticulture Department. We anticipate the total costs to getting our facility operational to be around $27,000 with labor, grants, and hard costs. 

Currently we are spending $0 for water as we have an agreement with a local prison to use their tertiarily treated waste water and we pay the pumping costs to the tune of $70,000 annually. If we can save 10% of the energy costs for pumping the water alone the ROI would be 3.8 years. That's not including potential fertility and pesticide reductions. So a course paying for water and pumping would have an even quicker pay back.