Life Time Fitness
At a Glance
Industry
Retail and Apparel
Project Types
Clean and Renewable Energy, Sustainability and Energy Management Strategy
Year
2017
Location
Chanhassen, MN
Summary
Joseph Robbins helped Life Time develop a strategy for communicating about its sustainability commitment to stakeholders and looked into opportunities for renewable energy.
Goals
Life Time, a premier healthy life company with over 120 locations across North America, has made huge strides over the past five years in reducing its environmental impact, but hasn’t publically talked about its progress. EDF Climate Corps fellow Joseph Robbins was enlisted to develop a platform for the company to highlight its accomplishments. He too was tasked with finding ways to support renewable energy, since operational difficulties and prior contract commitments made solar PPAs and onsite installations difficult to implement.
Solutions
Robbins quantified Life Time’s reduction in environmental impact and put it into everyday terms. He conducted extensive competitor research and dug into GRI reporting guidelines to develop ideal first steps for Life Time to talk about its impacts on people, the community and the planet. Robbins partnered with digital designers and copywriters to transform the sustainability webpage to that of corporate social responsibility.
To help Life Time with its desire to support renewable energy, Robbins worked with the energy procurement team to evaluate a host of possible solutions. The best option proved to be partnering with a Community Solar Garden in Minnesota through a special program by Excel Energy, which offers contracts that ensure yearly saving on energy for no costs.
Potential Impact
The new corporate social responsibility website gives Life Time a powerful tool for communicating its commitment to people, communities and the planet to prospective team members, current team members, club members and investors. The community solar garden deal has the potential to generate 2 to 5 million dollars over its life for no cost. In addition, it prepares Life Time to deal with renewable energy PPAs in deregulated markets when its current contracts run out.