Rebecca Droke, Post-Gazette Karen Winwood, left, Shema Krinsky, center, and Tina Beck install bluebird houses along a hillside overlooking The Mall at Robinson. The women work for Forest City Enterprises, which owns the mall.

By Teresa F. Lindeman
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Retailers sure use a lot of cardboard. Every month, the compactors at the Mall at Robinson collect 6.5 tons of recyclable cardboard that came into the shopping center carrying jeans, candles, food, shoes or other merchandise. It all used to go out with the trash and into a landfill somewhere.

"We were just throwing it all away," said Beth Edwards, general manager of the shopping center.

Not any more. The cardboard compactors are new in the last two years. As are the green cleaning products the mall's contractor has begun using and the energy management system that turns the lights off when nobody's using them.

Management even considered installing a green roof with plants to absorb sun and carbon dioxide but decided that wouldn't be a feasible option until the existing 20-year roof warranty expires.

"They've gone in with both feet," said Court Gould, executive director of Sustainable Pittsburgh, a nonprofit organization with the goal of promoting environmental quality in a way that makes economic sense and gets communities involved.

The mall and the nonprofit organization have gotten pretty close in the past two years, both of them experimenting with ways to change their particular patches of the Earth. It's not the most obvious partnership.

Historically, the retail development industry has been better known for its tendency to lay down acres of asphalt where farm fields once were than for efforts to produce sustainable projects. Meanwhile, some people questioned Sustainable Pittsburgh's decision to focus on a place where teens buy jeans rather than, say, a manufacturer churning out heavy equipment or some other product.

Yet there are tens of thousands of malls in the United States and billions of dollars spent in them. And a mall tends to be an imposing presence on the landscape -- a really, really big box as viewed through the satellite images of Google Earth. Robinson's 872,000-square-foot mall alone brings in more than 7 million shoppers annually.

And those consumers have started to pay attention to the environmental impact of the places they shop, which has a way of focusing developers' interest.

Developers are planning more energy-efficient projects, said Kent Jeffreys with the International Council of Shopping Centers. Simon Property Group, which owns Ross Park Mall, South Hills Village and Century III Mall in the Pittsburgh area, began monitoring its malls' energy use in 2005, a move that helped reduce electricity usage by 8.2 percent.

There's been more so-called brownfield projects turning sites that once held steel mills or other industrial uses into retail centers. There's even a plan to open a mall in Chicago next year with a green roof, environmentally friendly tenants and the name GreenExchange.

Some efforts may have been driven as much by green, as in dollars, as green building practices, but that fits the increasingly practical approach winning over more converts.

Forest City Enterprises Inc., the owner of the Mall at Robinson, made a splash in sustainable development with a project on the site of the former Denver International Airport.

The community there had produced a detailed plan for what it wanted, including many elements considered to be part of sustainability, such as energy efficiency and paths to connect to the rest of the community.

It went well, said Jon Ratner, who worked on the Stapleton project and is now Forest City's director of sustainability initiatives. So well, in fact, the company decided the same principles might work in its other properties.

The Robinson team learned about the new directive at a 2005 management meeting in which Forest City executives announced the company had added "sustainability" to the list of core values. "In the very beginning, we weren't quite sure what it meant or what it meant to us," conceded Ms. Edwards.

Her team put a call into Sustainable Pittsburgh just as the nonprofit was looking for a place to pilot a new service. The group wanted to pull together experts to assess everything from energy use to construction materials to community accessibility, even the impact on wildlife habitat.

That last one explains why mall volunteers recently put up bluebird houses in open land around the shopping center, something suggested by the Wildlife Habitat Council. Other participants included Solar Power Industries, the Green Building Alliance and the Airport Corridor Transportation Association.

Mall officials received a long list of recommendations organized into three categories depending on how easy they would be to accomplish and the potential payoff.

Recycling came early because it was just a matter of arranging with the trash hauler and explaining the change to tenants. In the past year, 788 tons of paper and cardboard were diverted from the landfill.

The new energy management system was an investment, but lights get turned off at night and people no longer fiddle with heating and air-conditioning controls. Ms. Edwards said savings had been significant. The mall's 3,653 lights are in the process of being changed to more green-friendly versions.

The Sustainable Pittsburgh team found running vending machines constantly to keep drinks cool cost more than sales from the machines brought in. The mall installed devices that kick on only when someone walks by. The staff promises drinks still come out cold.

"We haven't spent much money," said Ms. Edwards, who said her staff had become sensitized to the possibilities and looked at even simple decisions differently. Shema Krinsky, the marketing director, said she had traded her notebooks for a recycled paper version and that mall marketing materials now use soy-based inks.

They even are taking bids now to determine if waterless urinals would be worth the investment.

It has helped that Sustainable Pittsburgh had lists of contacts ready. Mr. Ratner cited the "hassle factor" as something that discourages businesses from trying to buy green or institute sustainable practices. In addition, increased demand has helped bring costs down for such services and products.

Shoppers may not be aware of the mall's efforts beyond observing plastic recycling containers in the food court and signs strewn throughout the building touting green as the new black. One less obvious touch is the new gravel paths, meant to make it easier for shoppers riding buses to get to the mall.

The face a mall turns toward its visitors is heavily influenced by the tenants inside who all have their own policies. For the most part, the stores at Robinson look like typical operators in a regional mall. Those looking hard for evidence of Earth-friendly practice might notice that Starbucks gives away used coffee grounds to consumers who use them in their gardens, and the cartridge outlet helps people recycle used cartridges.

The trend toward reusable bags hitting the grocery industry hasn't made a real dent in mall shopping habit, although the Robinson management is considering ways to get more tenants thinking along those lines.

More of what Mr. Ratner referred to as "green bling," or easily identifiable changes, might help get the message out -- that green roof, for example, or perhaps allocating prime parking spaces to drivers of hybrid cars.

But any public claims must be handled with care because no one wants to be accused of "green washing," a term for trying to jump on the bandwagon without making a real commitment.

Despite the industry's growing push to be more aware of such issues, it may be awhile before malls begin to truly differentiate themselves based on their Earth-friendly practices. "I don't think there's any market where you have those options," said Mr. Ratner, who noted it could take several years to build new projects or adapt existing ones.

He said ideas implemented at the Robinson mall had been taken to other Forest City projects around the country.

Mr. Gould seems to have little doubt the mall management has caught the sustainable fever even if he recognizes the budget constraints and contract agreements that make progress evolutionary.

As a pilot project, the assessment went well. Now his organization hopes to do the same thing for others, offering the service under the name "Sustainable Business Solutions."