2010 Results

Full articles are available:
1. Glooscap Heritage Centre
2. Fair Trade Cafe
3. Clay Cafe

The Glooscap Heritage Centre earned the recognition of The Cool Truro Business initiative by reducing its power consumption by 15.4% in a year. This has been achieved by many simple steps such as turning off lights and switching to energy efficient bulbs.

The Fair Trade Cafe eliminated tonnes of waste by giving coffee grinds to customers, using proper utensils and dishes instead of disposables, and by eliminating the use of paper hot drink sleeves. Some creative customers also collect the Cafe's foil coffee bags to make crafts.

In addition to their energy saving actions the Clay Cafe has proven to be a real leader in waste management. Everything possible is recycled by staff and customers as they have two recycling centres and three compost bins located in the store. After implementing this program their waste dropped from five to one garbage bags per week. That's a total of 624 pounds diverted from the landfill annually.

2009 Results

1. The McHattie/Leenders Family of Truro with a whopping 
    reduction of 47.1%
2. Richard and Margie Cotterill of Truro with a reduction of 45.1%
3. Sharron and James Dempsy of Onslow Mountain with a 
    reduction of 39.8%

229 households or individuals from the greater Truro area signed on to be part of the Cool Truro campaign. 107 households completed the contest. 56 of the 107 households achieved power consumption reductions totaling 49,757KWh, which equates to 13.05 metric tonnes of CO2 emissions.

The average decrease among the 56 households was 11%, representing a financial savings of an average of $106.32 per household. 29 households achieved reductions of 10% or more.

Mean temperature during the contest period as compared to the same period in the previous year was 13.9 degrees colder. The longer and colder winter was a challenge, and in particular those using electricity for space heat were at a disadvantage in reducing their power consumption. Because of this, it is likely that some contestants showing an increase in power use during the contest, in fact achieved a relative decrease.