Look to the future

Where do you want to be in ten or twenty years?  Do you want to be living in a city where everything looks like this?

Probably not, but for many countries like China and India, by 2050 there could be an outlook of 3.6 million premature deaths a year due to pollution.  (Arup, 2012)

By 2050, Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions will increase by 50% if nothing is done.  Results of this would be dreadful.  Loss of biodiversity and water shortages being just two of these (Arup, 2012).

So what can be done about the future now?  Renewable energy sources like hydro electricity, wind power and solar energy produce little to no global warming emissions.  (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2013)  So why do half of Australian businesses ignore energy saving methods?  (Hayman, 2010)  Maybe one of the reasons is the costs of installing or remodelling to fit in solar panels or energy efficient appliances.  Or the more expensive costs of green energy as opposed to normal electricity and gas.  There could be a number of reasons why Australian businesses don’t incorporate these methods but now with the Australian Government’s investment of more than $5 billion in developing new technology as well as starting the Australian Carbon Trust to help subsidise the costs involved in switching to cleaner energy, (Think Change, 2012) there should be no excuses.

So why support businesses that don’t care?  Join us and become a part of the future.

Music sourced from Gillicudy at:

http://freemusicarchive.org/music/gillicuddy/

Arup, T., 2012, ‘Death stalks us in the air, says OECD in its outlook’, The Sydney Morning Herald, viewed on 19^th May 2013, <http://www.smh.com.au/national/death-stalks-us-in-the-air-says-oecd-in-its-outlook-20120316-1vaya.html&gt;

Hayman. P, 2010, ‘Half of Australian businesses ignore energy efficiency’,  Dynamic Business, viewed on 16^th May 2013, <http://www.dynamicbusiness.com.au/finance-cash-flow/australian-businesses-ignore-energy-efficiency-1938.html&gt;

Think Change, 2012, ‘Reducing Australia’s emissions’, Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, viewed on 19^th May 2013, < http://www.climatechange.gov.au/government/reduce.aspx&gt;

Union of Concerned Scientists, 2013, ‘Benefits of Renewable Energy Use’, Citizens and Scientists for Environmental Solutions, viewed on 19^th May 2013, <http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/renewable-energy/public-benefits-of-renewable.html&gt;

 

– Michelle Chew, Eco Fitness administrator

You are not alone

In the first blog I did mention about the meaning of our fitness centre, and absolutely “unlike any other” our fitness centre is not only looking for people would like to give back to the community, but also we are caring people.

How much do you know about the meaning of “eco”? By survey we realised that 78% of people had been interviewed answer “eco” mean for environment. However, is this only means that?

Let me tell you a story about the “eco”. The “eco” doesn’t only mean eco, but also means “everyone cooperates”. The idea of eco-fitness is not only saving the energy and protect environment, but also cooperate people.  But, the question is how to co-operate people if they don’t know each other?

Continued interviewed people, asked them about idea and how to connect people in fitness place, and we found out 95% of people gave us a suggestion that if we create more events or activity club, therefore, people will have chance to talk to each other. In normal gym, we analysis that people just go direct to exercises or bring friends with them to exercise. How boring is that? There are few events have been introduced however people seem doesn’t know much about this, or maybe the events aren’t interesting enough to motivate people to join. We are doing different.

More events will be introduced to members and we hope that from any events, people will make more friends and more laugh. Events will be update on this blog, so keep up-to-date with us.

Event and activity club seem to be the best idea for us in order to motivate people to come to our fitness centre. So, what do you think about this idea? Please don’t be hesitating to give us your thinking.

Binh Duc Mai, Eco fitness Team Member

Other Eco gyms

In the very first blog I mentioned about in Denmark the 366-room Crown Plaza Copenhagen Towers had been encouraged to head down to the gym to spend time on its new fleet of electricity-generating exercise bikes.  It is successful in Hotel, and why not in fitness?

By researching, we are realising that there are other eco-fitness in the world. In Portland, the Green Microgym and Plugout Technology were invented by Adam Boesel, a school teacher turned personal trainer in 2008. When he wrote his business plan, he thought about making electricity when exercising, therefore he started this business idea about eco fitness as his centre focus.  By looking into his site, we found that the Green Microgyms use about 85% less electricity and their carbon footprint is about one tenth that of a traditionally run gym, per square foot. A member of The Green Microgym saves about ¼ ton of carbon compared to if they belonged to a traditional gym. How’s great is that?

Other Eco gym has been found in Naperville. This centre has been powered by its members and solar energy. Their purpose is that the more you work out, the more you give back to the community. This fitness is for people who really want to give something back to the community. Furthermore, in this fitness centre, there are some service is really good that our gym should learn from them such as “fitness class to help the paradigm shift of getting kids active and instilling good health and fitness values as an early age” and also they have classes for kids available from 5 to 12 years old.

There are a lot of things we need to learn from other fitness centre, and also from people in order to make our gym become special and convenient to our members. More ideas would help us to develop our gym in the future. If you have idea, please speak to us. We would love to hear from you.

Binh Duc Mai, Eco Fitness team member

The green microgym, 2013, “About us”, viewed 10 May 2013, <http://www.thegreenmicrogym.com/the-story-of-the-green-microgym/&gt;

Andersons, N, 2012, Nicki Anderson: eco gym powered by its members, NapervilleSun, viewed 10 May 2013, < http://napervillesun.suntimes.com/lifestyles/anderson/13948622-423/nicki-anderson-eco-gym-powered-by-its-members.html&gt;

Who are we?

Hey all, here is a video explaining a bit more on who we are, what we stand for and what we are aiming to do.

Eco Fitness is founded on the core values of passion for the environment, inspiring others, responsibility and hard work. We incorporate energy saving methods into our business and aim to lead the way for other businesses to follow.

Michelle Chew, Eco Fitness Administrator

Like our Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Eco-Fitness/328025777320117
Music is sourced from Gillicudy at:

http://freemusicarchive.org/music/gillicuddy/

Pollution in Eco Fitness

What is Business Pollution?

Every industry makes a major contribution to the non-point source pollution problem in a variety of ways. Toxins come from vehicles, machinery, cleaning products, garbage, septic systems, toxic waste and several other pollutants used by businesses (Business Pollution 2013). Just like any other business in the fitness industry there is pollution to be emitted into the environment daily. Just think about the change of equipments in the fitness centres. Whenever a new technology is here at some point the old equipment is phased out. These are considered as business rubbish generated from the fitness centres. Therefore, where do these wastes go? Are they recycled properly and something made completely new out of them remains a question. The number of Air Conditions emit co2 gas from fitness centres can be unimaginable. That is not the end there are water pollution added to that. Moreover, the more electrical equipment is used at Eco Fitness the more bills the organisation has to pay and use of more power means more pollution. S

Therefore Eco Fitness looks forward to reduce the usage of electricity and looking forward to the idea of using exercise equipment to generate electricity. For example, A gym in Hong Kong has been using this type of feature since 2007. At that gym lots of music festivals have turned to bicycle generators to power their concerts. And some hipster bars are even making customers pedal for a few minutes to get their pitchers of perfectly blended margaritas (Newcomb 2010).

Eco Fitness can also be socially responsible and generate its own safe water precautions for supply to the customers. The solution was introduced by a Japanese company named Nippon. The cycle’s basic is looking to change that with its Cycloclean, a bicycle that purifies water for drinking. Riders bike to a lake or river; once there, they insert an attached hose into the water, place the bike’s rear wheel into a stationary stand, and start pedalling. The energy generated activates a pressure pump that propels water through the bike’s multi-unit filtration system, producing about 1.3 gallons of clean water per minute that depends on how fast they are pedalling (Kiniry 2013).

What can be done from the recycled rubbishes produced from the gym? Eco Fitness looks forward to a contract with recycle Management Company who will purchases old equipments and recycle them and then process it for further use. For example, there can be rebuilt equipments from the recycled junks like, outdoor bars, swinging bars or any other.

By taking these innovative measures water cost may go down to 5 to 10 percent every year saving nearly $1000pa. Moreover, by reducing centre wastes creates new recycled equipments saving more money as we are getting new equipments.

References :

1. Business Pollution, 2013, “Business Pollution”, Viewed at 14 May 2013, http://protectingwater.com/business.html.

1. Newcomb., Tim, 2010, “In the Gym: Clean Eneregy from Muscle Power”, Time Magazine, viewed 14 May 2013, http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2032281,00.html.

1. Kiniry, L., 2013, “7 Ways Pedal Power Will Change the World”, Popular Mechanics, viewed at 15 May 2013, http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/green-energy/7-ways-pedal-power-will-change-the-world.

Read more: 7 Ways Pedal Power Will Change the World – Popular Mechanics
Follow us: @PopMech on Twitter | popularmechanics on Facebook
Visit us at PopularMechanics.com

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2032281,00.html#ixzz2TRKr7ss7

Hamad Alsaif, Eco-Fitness Team Member

Positive Partnerships of our Eco-gym

Positive partnerships:

In the age and day, the gym has positive changes to obtain more customers which have benefits in the gym to achieve customer’s health and fitness goals with our personal training program.  Our Eco-Gym would like to be received investment from corporate fitness in Melbourne and any gyms in University because we truly believe that Eco-Gym is going to spread in the market Australia. It’s very helpful to manager’s gym about dealing with several problems such as saving electricity, water, plastic etc. Eco-gym also gives various conveniences to investors, producers, competitors, customers who would like to join our gym. For instance, customers can exercise on the electrical generating equipment easily, to use TVs or Ipads on machines and they also feel comfortable under clean environment. We strongly consider Eco-Gym is a modern model in near future. If another gym might invest to our Eco-Gym, We would like to recommend the best our quality of our services

The picture shows how the relationship between our Eco-Gym and other partnerships:

We will continue a strong relationship between all partnerships; they wish to be involved in our business. It is our hope that this will also be appealing to any investors, suppliers and other gyms can understand Eco-gym. It is not only profits for our venture, but it also can change people’s life

For more information, any gyms who would like to fund raising our Eco-Gym, Please book appointment with us on our website, please!!!

We offer moral services in Eco-Gym if partnerships want to make sponsorship for us:

• A new reputation because we apply to electrical generating Elliptical, treadmill machines
• Value of money: We have various options for customers to choose one such as Pay fortnight, a month, three months, six months or one year. If customers make payment for more three months, they must receive special offer such as free memberships without starting fees
• Customers can do suspension during vacations is greatly appreciated or transfer to another person when customers have busy schedule
• Customers will have Ipads and IPods on each generating electrical machines
• We provide re-energy to adapt customers needs in the gym, members would like to receive promotions such as juice, protein, smoothies in our bar
• Members would turn off the lights, TVs, Ipads, IPods of the gym after finishing exercise

The most significant factors of partnership’s requirements in Eco-Gym:

• The Placement of Eco-gym, for example, partnerships will care Eco-gym’s place close home or their workplace to exercise easily
• Eco-Gym has plenty of services such as sauna room, boxing room, tennis room, swimming pool to serve them
• The facilities, machines, equipment in Our Eco-Gym are high conditions such as new, clean, sustainability, etc.
• Eco-gym provides Personal training program guide new partners how to exercise with machines

We encourage all partnerships to check out the following our Eco-Gym. There have many valuable information and resources to assist with your gym into our project.

 

• Eco Gym on TouTube Channel
• Eco Gym on Facebook Page
• Eco Gym on product website

Keep your gym innovation to get more customers with Eco-Gym!!!

Tan Nguyen Thanh: Member Team

Who will join eco gym?

 

First, the target audience for a gym should be the same whether it is ecologically aware or not, in fact, the audience for an eco gym would probably be higher because it is green. That target audience would include: those who are health conscious, those who need to be more proactive about their health, those who want to lose weight, body builders and of course, the occasional gym rat who simply comes to socialize. Of them, the majority, probably also takes steps to be more eco-aware in their daily lives anyway.

People would like to look good or feel good in trying to look good. By this, many people sign up for health and fitness programs that will provide them the feeling of security that at least someday we may achieve a beautiful and healthy body.

‘Who are these people who will pay possibly ludicrous amount of money just to look and feel good with themselves?’, or a better question would be, ‘What should be the target market for a green gym business?’ If that is the case, then we will show you the target market for a green gym business.

Normally, we would say that men go more to the gym than women do. However, that seems to contradict the present statistics. Believe it or not, 57% of gym and health club members presently are females. This is possibly the reason why health clubs exclusive to women are becoming a successful trend in the health, fitness and environmental industry. This also indicates that women are more attuned to a healthy lifestyle than men do. So a female target market for a gym today is the way to go.

Now, a statistic for gym and health club members based on age shows that 35% are still in the range of 18 to 34 years old. This is expected since young people are more conscious with their physical attributes compared to other age groups. But shockingly, 33% of gym and health club members are from the age 35 to 54,

While a substantial 20% of members ages 55 and above. This indicates that the target market for a gym, based on age, is from ages 18 to 55. So a gym business owner must cater to the specific needs of these individuals to attain customer loyalty. An accurate way to know what the target market wants is to do a survey.

Another figure representing gym memberships by annual income still shows that 50% of members have annual income of $75,000, while a noted 19% has annual income of $25,000 to $49,999. This shows that the gym memberships are still distributed throughout a wide-margin in the population; where middle-class citizens are still interested in joining a gym if membership costs will go down. This proves that the target market for a green gym business can be widened if costs can be lowered enough.

References:

http://thehorticulturaltherapist.wordpress.com/tag/green-gym/

http://energythoughtspickup.blogspot.com.au/2010/12/essay-on-human-powered-gym.html

Start a Green Gym

http://fitforgreen.com/blog/?tag=green-gym-equipment#

Tanundorn Sorataworn, Team  Member

 

 

Eco gym equipment

Gyms expend a lot of energy, as do gym-users. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to reduce the electricity usage of a gym, while utilizing the energy of the gym-users themselves? With green fitness equipment, there is. Eco gyms are springing up across the globe, with this aim in mind – to reduce the environmental impact of large gyms.

How often do we look through the window of a large gym and see all the lights on, all the TV’s on, and one solitary gym-goer working out on the treadmill? Eco gyms are working to change that, with just a few simple changes to their fixings. For instance, with only one person working out, a gym only needs one light on, and one fan working. Gym-goers can adjust their ceiling fan to suit them, and unused fans remain off. This may not seem like a big deal, but over time this reduction will make a huge impact on energy use.

Eco gyms are also using equipment, such as the green range of cycles from SportsAmerica, which are self-generating and use absolutely no power. Revolutionary! They also run a line of treadmills, which make use of the Eco-Power™ drive system. Eco is an acronym for Extreme Conservation and Output and the system uses 32% less electricity than industry standard AC and DC motors. This means that an average gym running twelve treadmills per day would actually save $3,000 in a calendar year. That’s money which an environmentally conscious gym-owner could use to install low-flow toilets, and create the lowest carbon-footprint gym on the block.

References:

http://www.thedailygreen.com/living-green/definitions/green-renewable-energy

http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/conservation/these-exercise-machines-turn-your-sweat-into-electricity

http://www.thedailygreen.com/living-green/definitions/green-renewable-energy

http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/environmental-gym-equipment-the-ecomill-self-charging-treadmill

Tanundorn Sorataworn: team member

Facilities in Eco Fitness

Along with our innovative equipment in our gym, we are also incorporating other facilities in our gym that will all go towards saving resources.

Kelly Turner from Every Joe states that gyms are renowned at using more than enough energy for their activities, so we at Eco Fitness have developed several initiatives and ways we can combat this and save more energy and money in the long run.  We want to show other businesses that our activities are beneficial to all involved and to lead the way for businesses to incorporate similar practices.

To combat these energy wasting ways that normal gyms have gained a reputation for, our showers will be equipped with water saving heads to ensure that our customers still get the best experience at our gym, just with less water waste.

Our bathroom sinks and toilets will be integrated together so that the water used for washing your hands will then be reused as toilet water.  It may sound a bit unappealing, but normal toilets can use up to six litres, even older toilets can use up to 13!  (Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism)

To light up our gym we will be using fluorescent light bulbs, these provide the same brightness as regular light bulbs, but can save up to 66% of energy.  Fluorescent light bulbs are more expensive than regular light bulbs, however they normally last six times longer than regular incandescent bulb. (How Stuff Works)

To power these electronic utilities, we will need additional energy.  Kinetic energy that’s harnessed by our members will not be able to power the entire gym, so the remaining energy will come from renewable energy.  Solar power, wind power and hydro energy will be the main ones we will be using.

In Eco Fitness we are also incorporating an organic food and juice bar.  Napkins will be made from recycled paper and all of the food and juice will be fresh, healthy and organic.  In the future we are thinking of implementing a ‘plate for plate’ program, where every meal a member buys, translates to a plate of food for Australia’s homeless who are needing help.

These are just some of the ways and strategies that can be implemented into our business.  For the purpose of saving energy and even saving money in the long run, Eco Fitness not only aims to be the leading fitness centre, but also the leading movement for all businesses to incorporate these practices.  We want to educate others that these methods not only save our precious resources, but can also be translated into saving money.

 

References

Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism, 2013, Install Water Efficient Toilets, <http://www.livinggreener.gov.au/water/water-efficient-appliances-fixtures/install-water-efficient-toilets>

How Stuff Works, 2000, Are fluorescent bulbs really more efficient than normal light bulbs?, <http://home.howstuffworks.com/question236.htm>

Turner, K., 2008, Green Gyms: Talk about Powering Through Your Workout, Every Joe, <http://www.everyjoe.com/2008/09/23/health/green-gyms-talk-about-powering-through-your-workout-663/>

 

 

Michelle Chew, Eco Fitness Administrator