Aspen, Colorado | C&D Waste Audit
Aspen, Colorado | Construction & Demolition Waste Audit
Construction and Demolition (C&D) debris management can be a considerable challenge for communities with limited landfill space and/or concerns about methane production in their landfill. Much of C&D debris is often bulky, heavy, and most importantly can be diverted from the landfill to be recycled or repurposed. The city of Aspen has taken this challenge head-on.
In January 2022, the Aspen City Council set a Science Based Target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 63% by 2030 and net zero by 2050. They also set waste reduction targets to reduce organic material going to landfill by 25% by 2025 and 100% by 2050, and a reduction of all waste going to the landfill by 70% by 2050. While a typical landfill fee approach is to weigh the items going into a landfill, Aspen wanted to better calculate fees based on the environmental impact of C&D materials that should be diverted, but arrive at the landfill unsorted. Using a dataset of Embodied Carbon for materials and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Social Cost of Carbon, Lotus quantified the present cost of future environmental damage from the material’s life cycle of extraction, production, transportation, and ultimately disposal. Aspen is currently in the process of applying this metric to C&D debris that originates within the City of Aspen.
Edmond, Oklahoma | Resiliency Plan
City of Edmond Resiliency Plan
Lotus worked with the City of Edmond to create the city’s first Resilience Action Plan. The plan centers city-level action around improving on current initiatives and incorporating new strategies that the city can implement to improve resiliency over the next five years. Informational interviews and dozens of focus groups helped inform existing conditions, resources, and programming in Edmond, as well as the desired future conditions for the city. All strategies were vetted and prioritized by Edmond staff. The final plan is a public-facing dashboard that will be regularly and easily updated via a google sheet that tracks KPIs. These metrics will ensure that Edmond knows it is on the right track to meet its goals.
Urban Villages and APARIUM Hotel Group | Populus Hotel GHG Emissions Dashboard
Populus Hotel GHG Emissions Dashboard
Lotus worked with Urban Villages and the APARIUM Hotel Group to create a public greenhouse gas emissions tracking dashboard in Microsoft PowerBI for the Populus Hotel. The dashboard tracks real and predicted greenhouse gas emissions and offset activities from the construction and operations of the hotel over time. The dashboard includes functionality that allows for easy data updates, transparency for specific operations (waste diversion, water, energy, etc.), and tracks whether Populus has achieved their carbon positive goal. Lotus also developed back-end calculations for the quantification of greenhouse gas emissions and documenting methods and assumptions for all calculations in a user guide.
preview of the Populus Hotel GHG Emissions Dashboard
Colorado Department of Local Affairs (DOLA) | Strong Communities Grant Program Impact Evaluation
Strong Communities Grant Program Impact Evaluation
Lotus, in partnership with Economic Planning Systems (EPS) is completing an analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of the Strong Communities Grant Program. The Strong Communities Grant Program incentivizes the adoption of policies that promote affordable housing and sustainable development. Lotus and EPS are developing a methodology and an analysis tool that assesses the environmental and economic impacts of the land use best practices that are supported by the program. The tool will provide insight into how these best practices can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, vehicle miles traveled, household transportation costs, local government and infrastructure costs. Additionally it will quantify how best practices can increase affordable housing and influence housing costs. Understanding these impacts will allow grantees to communicate the benefits of the land use best practices and provide other communities with insight into how they could benefit from implementing these practices.
In addition to the methodology and tool, Lotus and EPS will create individualized reports summarizing results of the analysis for each grantee. Lotus and EPS will also provide case studies of a sample of projects to enable DOLA to continue to communicate the benefits of the program and the included best practices.
Birmingham, Alabama | Sustainability Action Plan
Sustainability Action Plan
Lotus, alongside Hummingbird, are partnering to produce a Sustainability Plan that will promote efforts to adopt best practices that address equity, social justice, environmental justice, air quality, soil contamination, water quality and efficiency, water quantity, energy and resource use, placemaking and equitable land use, and community health. The plan will be grounded in sustainability that balances the triple bottom line of economic, social and environmental aspects
The work involves three tasks: 1) an inventory of existing conditions (socio-economic and energy efficiency and resource management inventories); 2) the development of a sustainability action plan and; 3) the development of tools to monitor progress and evaluate results of implementing the action plan.
All this work will be supported by an in-depth engagement plan including facilitating a Steering and Implementation Team composed of internal City stakeholders and external community stakeholders and a significant level of public outreach including town hall–style meetings, focus groups, and a website set up for public comment.
Commerce City, Colorado | Climate Action Grants Consultant
Climate Action Grants Consultant
In 2024, Lotus and One Small Step (OSS) worked with the City of Commerce City (C3) to support their sustainability-focused grant writing projects. Lotus has worked with C3 in the past to create their Sustainability Action Plan and support their Environmental Policy Advisory Committee. The grant writing services are a rewarding extension of this multi-year partnership, as we work to fund their sustainability goals. We work collaboratively with the city’s grants coordinator to identify opportunities aligned with the city’s goals and drive applications to completion. Lotus and OSS have helped to coordinate stakeholders to create coalitions that will improve the competitiveness of the application. Our grant writing team has also created streamlined processes to expedite the grant writing processes and has helped to create a prioritization methodology to identify strategies that will win funding. To date, we have applied for the EPA Community Change Grant, CDPHE Environmental Justice Grant, and Great Outdoors Colorado Community Impact Grant.
Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG) | Climate Pollution Reduction Grant
Climate Pollution Reduction Grant
Lotus is currently working with DRCOG to fulfill the requirements of the agency’s $1 million Climate Pollution Reduction Grant (CPRG) from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). As part of this process, Lotus supported data collection, emissions calculations, modeling, stakeholder engagement, and strategy development and prioritization for DRCOG’s Priority Climate Action Plan. Currently, Lotus is supporting stakeholder engagement and related tasks to develop the regional Comprehensive Climate Action Plan.
To date, Lotus has led and facilitated multiple community and stakeholder engagements, and facilitated an equity subcommittee. Lotus conducted an all-day workshop that brought together representatives from communities across the 12-county region to organize implementation details for the eight PCAP strategies. The stakeholder engagement process that was deployed for the PCAP and will continue for the CCAP, has ensured that a broad constituency of community members from across the DRCOG region are engaged in, and empowered to participate in the resulting PCAP strategy implementation process. The creation and participation of the equity subcommittee as part of the PCAP process helped to ensure that the final implementation details for the PCAP strategies are informed by the communities that will be most impacted by this work.
DRCOG’s Priority Climate Action Plan was submitted to the EPA with the corresponding grant application for CPRG Implementation Funds. DRCOG secured grants funds for the Decarbonize DRCOG Program, the funding mechanism for the program related to this RFP and proposal.
Deer Valley Resort | Climate Action Plan
Climate Action Plan
Lotus partnered with Deer Valley Resort to develop a climate action plan for their resort operations. The Deer Valley Climate Action Plan will help the resort address their operational carbon footprint, prioritize implementation strategies, and clearly communicate their climate action commitments to their visitors and staff. Lotus’s approach walked the client through the crafting of a set of prioritization metrics through which the resort can assess its next steps: from proactively addressing climate risks to tackling critical opportunities in their infrastructure to empowering staff to solve problems.
Lotus’s expertise in adapting climate plans to fit a specific culture, environment, and circumstance shines in this resort climate action plan. The scope of work includes workshops with the Senior Leadership Team, focus groups and informational interviews with staff, a site visit to meet with all resort departments, a business-as-usual emissions forecast, climate adaptation and mitigation strategies, and a designed climate action plan document.
Georgia Tech | Climate Action and Sustainability Projects
The Offices of Sustainability and Innovation at Georgia Tech contracted with Lotus to review, reorganize, and rewrite their existing sustainability action plan. Lotus synthesized the existing work to identify opportunities to increase clarity and streamline the narratives, goals, and strategies while ensuring the plan connects seamlessly with Georgia Tech’s overall guiding strategic plan. Through this review process, Lotus produced a revamped and designed plan that effectively communicates Georgia Tech’s sustainability goals and forthcoming work to internal and external stakeholders.
The Georgia Tech Sustainability Team also contracted Lotus to lead the creation of a Climate Action Plan. Lotus reviewed all materials to consolidate them into one plan that connects focus areas with the existing strategic plans through the narrative, as well as designing a plan that would work in conjunction with the Sustainability Next Plan. As part of this plan, Lotus developed a business-as-usual (BAU) forecast through 2050 to show projected emission changes that are relevant to the Georgia Tech campus and population. The BAU forecast was then used to model the impacts from a list of key GHG reduction strategies.
Lotus also completed a QA/QC of Georgia Tech’s greenhouse gas inventories going back to 2008. After this work was completed, Lotus created a new GHG inventory template for the FY2022 inventory that will be used in future years.
Additionally, Lotus developed a GHG emissions reduction model that quantified the emissions impacts of strategies that would provide Georgia Tech with a pathway towards net zero. The model included strategies such as: building and district energy system electrification, building energy efficiency, fleet electrification, waste diversion, embodied carbon, on and off-site renewable energy, and commute mode shift. The model was developed as an interactive Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and was then converted into a Tableau Dashboard. This dashboard included similar user-inputs and customizability as the Excel model, allowing users to visualize how different combinations and implementation details of strategies would impact Business-As-Usual emissions. The goal of this dashboard is to serve as an educational tool for students, staff, and faculty so all stakeholders can understand what measures are needed to achieve net-zero.
“The creation of this our university strategic sustainability plan was presented with many challenges including a wide variety of stakeholders, difficult timelines, and working within state institutional regulations. The team at Lotus stepped up to each challenge and worked with our needs to create a beautiful and engaging document. We are truly proud to be able to demonstrate our commitment to sustainability efforts by sharing our plan with the campus community and with the world.”