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Robert Fung is like the rock star of Vancouver real estate development – he's naturally laid-back yet passionate about heritage, and gung-ho to do it green.

In Fung's world of doing business, it's not about turning people out of their downtown eastside homes or filling up the landfill.

It's that philosophy that made him an ideal candidate for Team Power Smart.

"It's really nice to be involved with the Power Smart thing because it's something I believe in, but it's also something where I'm hoping to learn more, and find more practical solutions for the projects we're doing and for myself and my family," says Fung, president of the Salient Group, a community-oriented real estate development company. "So it's actually really fun."

"And fortunately, I am anything but perfect. I think the real quest is to find practical, applicable solutions that aren't too much a stretch for people. And my goal corporately is we want to lead, so we'll find all the practical things and hit them really, really hard, and then there are always the decisions to make on things that might not be practical but might be a really good idea."

Gastown's green developer

From his command central office space in the heart of Gastown, he is revitalizing the area's unloved, derelict buildings, which he converts back to their former glory, and then some. Outwardly, they look freshly built turn-of-the-century; inwardly, they are masterfully crafted, contemporary studies in urban chic.

The Terminus building, for example, is currently being refaced with recycled old brick and will be heated by geothermal power, generated underground. And Fung's efforts at sustainability include extensive recycling of any building that is dismantled or whose interior is gutted.

Old house, special challenges

When Power Smart does an energy audit on his house later this month, Fung will redirect his focus to his 1920 renovated Kerrisdale home.

"Hopefully, they'll say, 'you did this, you did that, that's good.' That's the hope," says Fung. "We do have an old house – I have a sickness about doing these things. And not all of the windows are brand new; some of them are arched, old-type windows and they are really expensive to have remade, and they're so beautiful we didn't want to change them. They're like having big holes in my wall."

"I can't say I'm super proud of my energy performance anywhere other than where we put timers and dimmers on things. We try not to keep lights on all the time. We try not to keep the heat cranked all the time."

"I suspect that we'll probably be a little bit better than average – not a high performer, but we as a family with young kids, we're starting to really think about it a lot and change our behaviour a bit."

Salient Group is born

Fung became interested in issues like social sustainability when he obtained a cultural anthropology degree in hometown Toronto. After a seven-month trip around the world, he settled in Vancouver in 1990 and went to work for Concord Pacific. That's where he cut his developer teeth before moving on three years later to Narland, a company that works on multi-family and commercial projects.

He then sold his house in 2000 so he could start up his own Salient Group, which is today largely responsible for changing the face of the once forgotten Gastown. Fung and a group of pioneering restaurateurs and retailers have given the heritage district a much-needed facelift these last couple of years.

They've done it while taking the area's problems into consideration, not attempting to push them aside.

Going green's not easy

On the home front, Fung is the type of dad who tells his kids not to run the water while they're brushing their teeth – and his kids remind him right back. There has been a cultural shift in thinking, he says.

"For a long time it was the tree hugger type thing and energy conservationists tended to be the person that had granola in the morning and who wore a hemp shirt," he says, laughing. "Now it's very mainstream. For me, the tipping point was the Al Gore stuff. It became extremely mainstream, extremely high profile, and he presented it in a way that there's a dialogue about it. But at the end of the day, unless you can get the message out clearly and in a way that people understand, then it doesn't resonate."

That's not to say that Fung hasn't encountered a few snags in his own green movement at home. He spent around $50 replacing all the pot lights in his basement with compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs – and then discovered that he had the wrong lights, as only specialty CFL bulbs work with dimmers.

"I have already had long discussions with [Power Smart's] Brent Billey and other people at BC Hydro about the fact I would use CFL in a heartbeat if the light didn't suck so badly," he says, echoing the thoughts of others initially frustrated by trying to find the right CFL. "It's terrible."

Because Fung is not alone in his thirst for more information, Power Smart is doing its part to provide helpful tips and details, including a bchydro.com CFL page that links to a 2007 test by Popular Mechanics Magazine. Popular Mechanics discovered that six of seven CFLs tested against an equivalent incandescent scored higher for reading – and all seven CFLs scored a higher overall grade.

Of course, discovering he didn't have the right CFLs for his pot lights was only the beginning of Fung's adventure.

"There were $50 in CFL lights that I had to throw out – and then I just learned on the TV last week that they all have mercury in them," he says. "You have to recycle them. I didn't know that."

With amounts of less than 4 mg of mercury per bulb – about one-fifth that found in the average watch battery and less than 100th found in your typical amalgam dental filling – and convenient access to CFL recycling facilities, the mercury threat is not considered significant.

Again, not everybody is aware of the issues. That's where Power Smart comes in, and where warts-and-all Team Power Smart leaders like Fung play a role in educating the masses.