CAFAC’s Commitment to Environmental Stewardship

“We take responsibility for the finite resources used in fire art forms by promoting creative reuse, repair, and environmental stewardship.” This is one of the foundational values that we at CAFAC work to embody on daily basis. Recently we have been working on some larger-scale projects on our own site to offset our organization’s environmental impact, including the installation of a new solar array on our roof and the design of a stormwater management system, to be installed next year.

We have collaborated with Metro Blooms on a number of community projects over the years including garden trellises and sculptural water conveyances, and we love to design beautiful, eye-catching, and educational elements that draw attention to these normally subtle or even invisible conservation practices. Now we are lucky to be able to work with Metro Blooms on a project in our own backyard (well, side yard, really). Our new cistern and stormwater conveyance will be installed next year, funded in part by a Hennepin County ‘Good Steward’ grant. CAFAC’s Artistic Director Heather Doyle is designing the system and Metro Blooms is helping to evaluate our infrastructural needs so we can hold as much water as possible on site and prevent runoff. When we break through part of our existing pavement this spring, Metro Blooms will bring their infiltrometer (which sounds so cool, right?!) to measure how efficiently water can penetrate the soil on our site.

This past summer, we also worked with local solar installer Greenway Solar for our new 66-panel solar array, covering about two-thirds of our roof area. Our facilities require a fair amount of electricity, and we are excited to be able to draw from a non-finite resource to power tools like our welders, furnaces, and kilns, as well as the space heater inside the greenhouse at George Floyd Square. In the future, we plan to install a battery system to store some of the energy we can generate from our array. We learned a lot from this process about the challenges and opportunities for local businesses using solar power, so if you have questions, we would love to talk more about it.

And we’re not done with our efforts! We continue to work toward turning our parking lot into a Parking Yard, which will include parking spaces for cars as well as rain gardens and areas of permeable pavement. We look forward to welcoming you and others into the space as we make it more beautiful and more sustainable.