Dennis W. Quaintance, CEO and chief design officer of Quaintance-Weaver Restaurants and Hotels, offered a paradoxical observation in his address to open Elon’s eighth-annual Fall Environmental Forum. “There’s a line out there that all of us say, that green building costs more,” he said. “I can’t deny that it costs more. But no one ever says this: It also costs less.”
The forum, which addressed the theme “Sustainability in Business: The Green Economy is Coming,” was sponsored by Elon’s Center for Environmental Studies, the Sustainability Office and the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business, as well as the Cape Fear River Assembly. The forum also featured remarks by Terry Stone, sustainability value chain manager for Syngenta Agriculture in Research Triangle Park, N.C., a panel discussion moderated by Lyons Gray, former CFO of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, workshops and field trips to sustainable businesses in the Burlington-Greensboro, N.C., area.
Quaintance-Weaver’s Proximity Hotel, a AAA Four-Diamond hotel in Greensboro, is the only hotel in the nation to achieve platinum certification, the highest grade attainable under the United States Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design guidelines. Quaintance-Weaver also operates the Print Works Bistro, located in the Proximity Hotel, and Lucky 32 Bistro, Green Valley Grill and the AAA Four-Diamond O’Henry Hotel, also in Greensboro.
A longtime entrepreneur and a capitalist at heart, Quaintance told the audience his interest in sustainable business practices was prompted by conversations with his wife about how future generations would look back on ours, and whether they would look favorably on our use of resources. After the birth of the couple’s twins 11 years ago, he said, he began to think about those questions in more concrete terms.
“If you have kids, you have a legacy, if you want one or not,” he said. “It’s just a question of what it’s going to be.”
Quaintance and his associates worked to achieve the right blend of practicality and idealism required to build a successful, sustainable business venture. The product of those discussions, the Proximity, features more than 70 sustainable practices in its construction and operations. Quaintance placed particular emphasis on the 100 solar panels on the hotel’s roof that provide enough energy to heat 60 percent of the water the building uses, resulting in 41 percent less energy use than a conventional hotel or restaurant.
“We have the largest array of solar panels in North and South Carolina,” Quantaince said. “Why aren’t there more? Every hospital should heat their water with the sun, it’s there every day.”
Two years after the Proximity opened in mid-2007, Quaintance estimated, the hotel has saved $280,000 through reduced energy use while maintaining the luxury hotel experience.
“In the first year alone, we didn’t burn about 500 tons of coal,” he said, “and our guests couldn’t tell the difference.”
Quaintance said he expects the Proximity to recoup the extra investment made to include the sustainable practices within four years, and he plans to retrofit other Quaintance-Weaver properties to meet LEED requirements for existing buildings. He said believes the United States is on the cusp of adopting new expectations about the construction and use of buildings, but a push toward genuine sustainable development would require a significant increase in the price of oil, natural gas and other conventional energy sources.
“That’s the signal we need to send if we’re really going to satisfy folks 20 generations out and get off this resource-use binge,” he said.