Flippin’ a buck by greening up brownfields
My pal Andrew Willis at the Globe and Mail had a great article last week that, if you haven’t seen it already, you might want to check out. The story is about the launch of the Kilmer Brownfield Equity Fund, which is a $100 million private equity venture — led by Kenneth Tanenbaum — dedicated to cleaning up dirty and contaminated industrial sites. “Mr. Tanenbaum plans to bring the most downtrodden of downtown properties back to life, and turn a tidy profit in the process,” writes Willis.
The fund’s focus, at least initially, will be Toronto, where there are many examples of large industrial lands that have sat vacant because of the contamination stigma attached to them. By cleaning them up and re-selling these properties to developers, Tanenbaum’s venture will help cities like Toronto move forward with their urban revitalization plans and make it easier for these municipalities to lure taxpaying tenants to properties that have otherwise been an eyesore and drain to the urban landscape.
It also, perhaps, offers an opportunity for soil remediation companies to get some business and test out new technologies.
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca