Queen of Green

Victoria Wakefield is no stranger to sustainability. In procurement circles, she's affectionately known as the 'queen of green.' It's a well-earned moniker, considering the years she's spent incorporating ethics and the environment into purchasing policies, both at her former employer—the City of Vancouver; and her current one, University of BC.

She's known throughout the country for her dedication to social responsibility, and for her willingness to share what she's learned. In her current role as manager of logistics and sustainability, she reports to another forerunner in responsible buying, Larry Berglund.

“The whole point of sustainability is it's a collective action," Wakefield says. "So [Larry] is really implicit that I share the ideas and the successes."

So far, there are plenty of those successes to share. For one thing, the university's sustainability office was asked to operate without a budget. It's completely funded by whatever savings the team can find. They don't have a procurement person in the office, but Wakefield has a close relationship with the staff there, so the message of ethical and green buying gets through.

"The powers at the time said, 'OK, we need a sustainability office, but I'm not giving you one cent for it. So you need to find a way to save the money to create this'. It's the true model of sustainability," she explains. "And they, since their inception, saved over $25 million. Right off the bat they did building retrofits and got a huge payback on it."

Carbon neutral

Right now, Wakefield is doggedly focused on the university's requirement to be carbon neutral by next year. BC is the first province to legislate all public institutions to achieve the status.

"BC is the only province that's made that commitment...But we anticipate that everybody will want to figure out how to get there pretty quick behind us. In fact, we're getting a lot of interest from other provinces. The Maritimes are contacting us. Calgary is really aggressive...So we're networking with a lot of other municipalities and universities," she explains.

"To become carbon neutral, you have to find out where you are, reduce where you can, and then whatever emissions are left that you can't get to neutrality, you offset. And the cost is $25 for each ton."

In the past months, Wakefield has been working to find a central distribution model for couriers. As things stand now, each of the three major couriers make more than 80 drops per day. So she's trying to consolidate package drop-off and pick-up operations to dramatically reduce emissions.

Sourcing locally

As part of the university's carbon reduction plan, Wakefield is working with Acklands-Grainger to develop 'product miles'. It's an educational program to show internal clients how far products have to travel, and the environmental benefits of buying from local sources.

"We're saying, 'the product that you normally get has this many product miles, but there is a substitution'," she explains. "And those products that don't have a substitution we're pushing back to Acklands-Grainger to do some homework and find one...If 80 per cent of the products can be sourced locally-not necessarily in Vancouver, but in Canada, what are they, and what are the opportunities there?"

Aside from the carbon neutral program, Wakefield also helps champion the university's supplier code of conduct, aimed at ethical procurement.

"For so many years now-decades even-price has been the number one criteria when you're evaluating bids. And now, many buyers are frustrated with that because it doesn't tell the whole story."

Wakefield is all too familiar with the whole story. She's learned about the textile sweatshops rampant not only overseas, but right in Vancouver. Much of her time is spent educating internal customers to look beyond lowest piece price, to choose responsible vendors.

"I showed them CBC videos and we talked about sweatshops and showed them exactly what's going on in their local marketplace of Vancouver."

Wakefield got out from behind her desk and visited some of these areas. She was shocked to learn of a sweatshop just four blocks from her office, and
to discover the underground miasma of women toiling for next to nothing. Tracking the connection to various vendors wasn't easy, mainly because of frequent subcontracting. A visit to a supplier's facility might reveal a clean, decent factory. But what the buyer doesn't know is not all the products are made there. Instead, a lot of it gets outsourced.

"In Vancouver we have a large immigrant population, and there are a whole lot of moms in basements with children, doing piece-meal work. They certainly do need an income, but they need fair working conditions. When you're working with clothing, there are some dangers that you don't want in somebody's home, in their basement. They're dealing with heat and flammable products and off-gassing, and things that just shouldn't be outsourced."

Wakefield contacted the local office of the International Labour Organization, which was able to help her spot dubious vendors. Some of Wakefield's vendors also helped with her research.

"Vendors just kind of opened up and spit it out, saying 'oh yeah, there's some stuff you guys should know about. We're burying it. We're jumping through hoops, but this is what you need to know. If you want that [branded] fleece for $14, you're not getting it from here. I'll get it for you, but if you want one from here, if you're really walking your talk here, and you want no sweatshops, it's going to cost you $22. That's the reality'."

Though the piece price for these ethically-made products is often higher, Wakefield manages to offset much of the increase by going with long-term contracts. The arrangement gives vendors enough financial stability to access credit, and negotiate on price.

The supplier code of conduct drafted by Wakefield and Berglund for both the city and the university has a nosweat policy. One of the requirements in the RFP is suppliers have to provide the names of who they buy from, including the complete address. The program was embraced by the City of Vancouver, which has posted the information on its web site-a completely new idea-so the public and watchdog groups can alert the city and university if they discover vendor transgressions. But Wakefield emphasizes it's not about brow-beating suppliers.

"This is a collaborative agreement," she says. "We tell [vendors] 'we know that you may not know specifically [about your sources], but you need to tell us where you don't know, and together we'll go and investigate'."

Wakefield and her colleagues networked with like-minded companies, such as Mountain Equipment Co-op, and manufacturers large and small, across the country. They also used third-party auditors such as Verité.

"Their job is to go in and investigate,"she explains. "We said, 'tell us what we need to be aware of'. And everybody was willing to share. They were so pleased we were actually investigating this stuff."

Convincing internal clients to add ethical considerations into their buying activities wasn't always easy. But the data Wakefield had gathered on sweatshops helped make her point. And both she and Berglund started with the mindset that sustainability—taken as a complete program—shouldn't incur extra costs.

"Larry and I, right off the bat, knew [sustainability] was something new, and what the acceptance might be like. And we said 'OK, we're not going to tackle it unless it saves money'...So right away, that guarantees success, because if you go to your internal client and say, 'I'm going to get you the same product, equal or better quality, and it's going to cost you less', nobody says no. So those are the ones we targeted-fleets, clothing, office paper products, and janitorial supplies."

At the end of the day, the university's sustainability programs are a win-win—saving money, contributing to the betterment of society, and dramatically reducing emissions and waste. Clearly, Wakefield has much to be proud of, and more successful projects ahead.

Victoria Wakefield may be reached at: victoria.wakefield@ubc.ca or by phone at (604) 827-4530. The editor may be contacted at lisa.wichmann@pb2b.rogers.com

Photo by Gerry Frechette