LaVelle Winery and Pony Boy Gilbert - Here's How Real Environmentalism Works

This is what the old steel winery structure looks like after being reclad by Pony Boy Gilbert

The wine industry has a great trade publication called Vineyard And Winery Management.  Below is a story I wrote for the magazine a year or so ago.  The story is a great example of how environmentalism, stripped of all the politics and emotion, is really supposed to work.  If you're ever in Eugene, Oregon, visit LaVelle Vineyards.  They put the fine in fine wine and if you ever need something really special designed and built in a cost efficient and environmentally sensitive manner call Pony Boy.  He's amazing.

To the right, the new wood, sawn from logs that would usually be ground up into chips covers the old steel clad buildingvisible to the left.  Serious environmental benefits were achieved even as costs were reduced

When Doug LaVelle decided his winery and tasting room in Oregon’s Southern Willamette Valley needed an upgrade he worked with his builder and the owner of a local custom sawmill business to design a most unique approach to the project. The result, Doug comments, was entirely satisfactory in nearly every respect.   An old, steel clad “warehouse” looking structure housing the winery was transformed in appearance over the course of a few months into an elegant “Oregon Lodge” style attraction without significant disruption to winery operations and for a fraction the cost of more traditional approaches.  Equally important, Doug comments, he was able to act directly on the environmental ethic he espouses, achieving documentable environmental enhancements at almost every stage of the project. 

LaVelle Vineyards became the oldest bonded winery in the Southern Willamette Valley surrounding Eugene, Oregon when founder Doug Lavelle acquired, in 1994, the existing bonded winery license, 16 acres of vineyard, and a winery from the previous owners.   

Using knowledge gained over 30 years in the corporate world, Doug began to build the kind of wine business he'd always envisioned as a post-corporate career pursuit.  By 2008 LaVelle Vineyards’ physical property included not only the vineyard, the winery and the tasting room tucked into the quiet and secluded hills north of Eugene but also a terraced garden attraction with seasonal landscape displays and a wine bar and bistro known as the  “Club Room” at the historic 5^th Street Public Market in downtown Eugene.

Doug says he was especially pleased in 2008 when his son Matthew, who’d been acting as operations manager for the firm while learning wine making from a master craftsman stepped up and formally became the LaVelle Vineyards winemaker.

What LaVelle did not have in 2008 was a destination winery and tasting room appropriate to the image Doug had created for the business. The winery structure, in its fourth decade of service, hadn’t aged beautifully.  By 2008, the industrial pole building’s siding had become sun bleached and parts of it were beginning to corrode.  The LaVelle’s decided it was time to upgrade their facilities to match the quality and image of their product. 

An early step was to contact one of Doug's contractor friends, Robert Stolle of Eugene's Ordell Construction for a brainstorming sessions. After some research, the men decided to investigate options other than tearing down the existing structure and constructing an entirely new building. 

Tearing the building down and starting over presented problems.  The winery would face extended downtime and would need to operate out of an alternate location for the duration.   "From an environmental standpoint," Doug recounts, "removing the existing structure and putting up a new one would have created a good deal of waste.  Recycling the old building was clearly a more attractive option.” 

“Possible alternatives investigated,” Doug continues, “including removing the old steel from the building and replacing it with new metal siding that emulated a stucco look, or actually resurfacing the building with stucco.

 A fourth option presented itself with the introduction of Pony Boy Gilbert into the discussion. 

Pony Boy is proudly Native American and, Doug says with a smile, possesses a boundless enthusiasm, a dedication to practical environmentalism and a portable, thin-kerf sawmill. 

The solution Pony Boy put forward was to utilize his sawmill to mill some grand old incense cedar logs that would otherwise be chipped into pulp for a paper mill into boards usable in recladding the existing LaVelle winery.

Making lumber from logs otherwise destined to be underutilized as pulp chips

“The idea was immediately appealing,” Doug commented.  “I had been focused on creating a Tuscan look for the winery, an architectural theme that is commonly used in our business because it evokes an Old World ambiance.  But we don't live in Italy, we live in the Pacific Northwest, and I really preferred a solution that used local materials and fit comfortably into the Northwest landscape.  Pony's proposal got us thinking about an "Oregon Lodge" look constructed from cedar and stone."

Robert Stolle was familiar with Pony Boy’s expertise and thought the idea might have merit so, at Doug’s behest he took the concept and began to play with the possibilities, figuring out how accomplish the task of affixing lumber to the old building, and costing out the alternatives.

“We were surprised by the costs for the various options,” Doug said.  “Although I didn't keep all those numbers, using lumber milled by Long Tom Custom Sawmill (Pony Boy Gilbert’s company) was approximately 40% less than resurfacing with steel would have cost, and steel was roughly 30% less than the stucco option."

According to Robert Stolle, a 40% estimate for the lesser cost of lumber milled by Long Tom Sawmill vs. lumber purchased at a lumber yard is probably quite conservative, if difficult to quantify, because Pony Boy could mill lumber to exact specifications.  “Traditional supply channels typically provide only standard dimensions,” he comments.  “With Pony milling the wood on site we were able to get exactly the sizes we wanted including the thicker, rough cut boards the owner preferred.  We were able to obtain precisely milled specialty sizes without the extra cost of specialty milling, so both cost and waste were minimized.”

The decision was made to move ahead with the innovative solutions Robert Stolle, Doug LaVelle and Pony Boy had worked out between them and work began on upgrading the existing structure.  Ordell poured a new footing around the structure to support the weight of the wood.  The original metal building was left intact albeit attached to and surrounded by a new façade separated from the old building by an 8” space.  Logs were delivered and sawmilling began. 

The sawmill used by Long Tom Custom Sawmilling to mill logs to lumber is a portable, thin kerf sawmill (kerf is the thickness of the cut taken when a saw blade passes through a log).  First broadly marketed some twenty-five years ago by Wood-Mizer Products of Indianapolis, Indiana, the mills allow one and two person entrepreneurial firms to recover very high end lumber from trees that might otherwise be land-filled, under-utilized or simply left in the woods to rot and release the greenhouse gasses stored in them to the atmosphere.  

Today, estimates are some 20,000 plus businesses like Long Tom Custom Sawmilling provide service to builders, architects and individuals with access to those services in virtually every area of North America.

The LaVelle effort, according to Pony Boy Gilbert, is a case study in demonstrating that carefully considered environmental approaches to construction can also be profitable. 

“Doug LaVelle deserves huge credit for his commitment to environmental sensitivity,” Gilbert put forward.  “He put his money where his passion is by taking a chance on an unfamiliar approach based on my assurances this could not only result in the construction of a beautiful facility but also provide important environmental enhancements.”

According to Gilbert, “Those enhancements are real and documentable.”

“First,” Pony Boy said, “Wherever an old building can be effectively reused it should be.  It’s a terrible waste of resources, both natural and financial, to rip something apart just to replace it with something new when viable options are available.”

“Next,” Pony continued, the wood used was harvested within fifteen miles of where it was used so the emissions and other environmental impacts of transport were minimized.”

“We wanted to use Incense Cedar to demonstrate how environmental sensitivity can be practiced on a project like this,” Gilbert explained.  “ It’s a beautiful wood often piled up and sold for making chips as a byproduct of harvest.  The LaVelle building is, I believe, an outstanding example of how local and typically underutilized species can be put to their highest and best use.  Now, landowners throughout Central Oregon can visit the winery and see how resources on their own lands can be responsibly and sustainably utilized to optimize value and reduce waste.” 

Pony Boy points to the sawmill he used to mill lumber for the LaVelle Winery as providing  additional environmental enhancements.  The very thin cut taken by his Wood-Mizer means about 30% more lumber is recovered from a log than is typical in a conventional sawmill.  “That means the carbon contained in that additional thirty percent continued to be trapped in the wood for decades and it means thirty percent more trees are left standing and still scrubbing climate change gases from the atmosphere as a result of this mill,” he contended.  “A thinner blade also requires less energy to produce the lumber.  This is waste reduction, recycling and reuse at its best.”

“This has been a wonderful project for us,” Doug Lavelle said.  “We know that cedar will require more maintenance than steel but the opportunity to live our environmental ethic, achieve our goals regarding the aesthetics of the winery, and still be financial conservative is rewarding beyond what we thought possible when we conceived this project. How many times in business does a single solution represent the lowest cost, the highest quality, and the most environmentally responsible alternative?  Not many."

Garbage In - Garbage Generated Greenhouse Gasses Out

Garbage in, garbage out?

Not if you live anywhere near my neck of the woods where, it seems, we are dedicated to shipping our environmental problems elsewhere; at the cost of many tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year.

Garbage disposal has been an issue for mankind for as long as mankind has existed.  Few things make an archeologist lick his or her lips more than the discovery of a new midden with its treasure trove of broken kitchen utensils, shells, bones, and other stuff even the poorest of our ancestors tossed.

When I was young, most “garbage” was disposed of in either private dumps or in the town dump.  My dad, and many others, cheated the archeologists of the future by picking through the local dump for items someone else might have seen fit to throw away but we could use.  “Waste not, want not,” was the rule of the day in our house.

In the modern era nearly everything has become disposable.  I don’t know if that is bad or good but, it is a fact of life.  We, especially in America but, elsewhere as well, create mountains of garbage as we live out our lives.

How we dispose of that garbage says a lot about how we view the environment around us.  Is garbage a resource as it was to my father's generation or, is garbage waste; to be filed away somewhere for the archeologists of the future to ponder over?

In my home town, the pop-environmentalists have had their way so we do all we can to assure our garbage disposal issues are resolved by the “out of sight, out of mind” approach to problem solving;  “Got a problem? Ship it somewhere else and put it in a hole so I don’t have to look at it.”

The problem is, of course, a “Ship it somewhere else and put it in a hole so I don’t have to look at it,” approach results, in our case as least, in tens of tons of unnecessary diesel emissions to the atmosphere, an increase in fossil fuel use as electricity that could have been created through the incineration of non reusable garbage is not produced and, perhaps worst of all, the creation of an attitude that as long as we can ship a problem elsewhere there is no problem. 

In my community, garbage is collected then taken to a central location, compacted, containerized and loaded aboard freight trains for shipment. 

Containers loaded with garbage await shipment; out of sight, out of mind

It is an interesting aside that with few exceptions, manufactured goods cannot be shipped in or out of the community by train but, in order to avoid handling our own garbage we’ve managed to find a way to get the containers onto trains.

The garbage is then shipped across the mountains bordering coastal Washington to one of two destinations a couple of hundred miles out of sight where it is off loaded and dumped into a hole in the ground.

We are so proud of getting our garbage out of sight and out of mind in Whatcom County that we, as part of a report on greenhouse gas emissions in the county done under the auspices of our local Northwest Clean Air Agency and a pop environmental group of governments called ICLEI, proclaim:

“The greenhouse gas emissions generated from waste are dependent on the type of waste being disposed of and the configuration of the landfill where waste is disposed. Two processes usually occur in a landfill. First, the waste does not completely decompose, which causes some of the carbon that would have been released as CO2 to actually be sequestered in the landfill. Second, because of the lack of oxygen in the landfill, the decomposing matter is released as methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than CO2. If methane is not captured or burned, the landfill is a net source of greenhouse gas emissions. And in these cases, waste disposal can be a significant part of a community’s climate pollution profile. Some solutions include capturing the methane to produce energy or burning it to convert it back to the less potent CO2.”

Whatcom County’s waste is sent to Columbia Ridge and Roosevelt Landfill, sanitary landfills with methane recovery factors between 56% and 80%. This means that the majority of what decomposes in the landfill and is released as methane gas is captured (or “recovered”) at the landfill. In the County’s case, the net result is that a little bit more carbon equivalent is buried and trapped in the landfill than is added to the atmosphere. This effect explains why eCO2 emissions from our waste sector are reported as negative.”

Whatcom County is to be emulated world wide.  Who else can gather garbage, transport it by train for hundreds of miles, throw it into a hole in the ground and END UP WITH NEGATIVE EMISSIONS?

But wait.  We are proud of burning thousands, maybe tens of thousands of gallons of diesel to get our garbage to a place where we can produce methane from it but, happy days, we only emit 20 – 44% of that methane to the atmosphere?

We used to incinerate our garbage in our community, making electricity in the process.  The result?  Sure, carbon is emitted, but not concentrated in the form of methane!  And, fossil fuel emissions resulting from producing electricy using coal or gas fired plants are avoided.

And think about what the pop enviros don’t consider here.  Any strategy for disposal that can be utilized 200 miles away can be utilized in the community.  So where is the consideration of the emissions caused by a 200 mile trip to get the resource out of sight and out of mind?  Or is that kind of like the local city’s being lauded for purchasing 108% of its power from green energy sources?