About Town: Redmond Resident Helps Her Condo Community Go Green

Darsi Fouillade has been the driving force behind an effort to green up her 770-unit Redmond condo community Sixty01, helping the condo association launch an effort earlier this year called “Go Green At Sixty 01.”

The whole thing started with a discussion with a neighbor at the community’s community garden, where Fouillade and her friend started talking about how they’d like to compost. Soon they were brainstorming other ways that the community could reduce waste and become more sustainable.

Though composting on-site proved to be impractical because it would attract vermin, through her research, Fouillade discovered a City of Redmond program through which multi-family communities can food scrap compost.

She set about taking her proposal to the community, creating a Facebook page for the green efforts, promoting the idea in the community’s newsletter, and doing a lot of talking with neighbors to encourage resident engagement.

Seven food scrap bins were placed around the community in May, and three more will be added soon, Fouillade said. The results so far have been encouraging.

“The bins are definitely getting more full,” Fouillade says, noting that her own kitchen garbage has been reduced so much that she changed from a tall kitchen trash can to a small three-gallon size. Fouillade said she believes the food scrap program is successful in part because it’s easy to use.

“The program accepts everything from meat to paper towels,” she says. Other apartment and condo communities that are interested in the program can find out more at the City of Redmond’s website, and individuals can get a free two-gallon food waste container from the city, which can be added to residential yard waste containers.

The GoGreen group is now continuing to operate under the auspices of Sixty01’s landscaping group, and is looking at other ways to be more environmental. A key to the success of such programs, Fouillade said, is looking not only at the environmental benefits, but the cost efficiency as well.

“Instead of it just being the right thing to do, it’s the right thing to do and we become more efficient,” she said, adding that taking on such efforts together provides greater cohesiveness for the community, too. Fouillade said her neighbors are now looking at other areas to be energy efficient as well, such as by reducing water and electricity usage.

Fouillade said part of her own interest in sustainability comes from her experience as a chemist in Portland, where she lived before settling here in Redmond with her husband, Sebastien, and their two children in 2008.

Spending some time here as a stay-at-home mom has given Fouillade the opportunity to focus more on volunteer work, and along the way she said she also has discovered a new career path.

She’s currently working on creating a “Green Story” for the where she serves of president of the preschool board, to help it not only figure out what it wants to do environmentally but also assess what it already is doing.

Meanwhile, Fouillade has also just launched her own consulting business, Green Biz Consulting, and hopes to help local businesses with these efforts as well.