Dover's Con-Green-ience Store

It’s easy to drive by the new gas station and convenience store on Central Street in Dover without noticing anything unusual.
Three gas pumps stand in front of a brick building that houses a little store and garage.
In fact, this site was a former gas station, but had closed down a few years ago.
Now it’s getting a new look.(nat sound hammering/drilling 25 6:03)
5:21 (these are the panels over here)
Up on the roof, Jay Laurie and his crew from Seacoast Energy Alternatives are busy building an array of solar panels.
(Jay Laurie :25 20 there’s going to be six panels on here, producing about a 1000 watts of electricity.)
That renewable electricity will help power the new Simply Green Biofuels station and Congreeniece store.
So what is a congreenience store exactly?
(nat sound walking in)
Simply Green Founder and Manager Andrew Kellar says it starts with what they offer customers.
30 2:13 all the products that are in this store, 75-percent of them come from a 100 mile radius, so we’re supporting the local economy, we’re supporting the environment by minimizing our transportation needs coming from those far off facilities.
And Kellar says you’d be surprised how much you can buy locally.
3:30 for example we look in the refrigerator here and we have Maine Root which is a local root beer company coming from the Portland ME area, some of the products are more organic based, our chips all come within a close proximity to where we are…
Local granola, local candy and fruit bars, local organic eggs, local baked goods and sandwiches, and even local coffee…. sort of.
(some of our coffees are roasted local, so you really can’t get any more local than that when it comes to coffee, obviously we can’t grow coffee beans in New England, but at least we can have them roasted here, and brought in from within a few miles from where we are right now)
It’s organic and fair-traded coffee as well.
But let’s face it; some of us just crave a Coke or a Snickers bar.
Kellar says customers can still get that too.
“30 4:45 they can get a coke, they can still get a Snickers Bar, they can still get a pack of Advil if they had a busy night the night before”
Kellar says he’s not trying to make his congreenience store perfectly green – at least not yet.
But he wants to do what he can to reduce the store’s impact on the environment.
As part of that, he chose to reuse an existing building, what’s called infill development, which fights sprawl.
(we are a small area, only about 550 square feet total, so we try to maximize the space the best we can, the easiest way to reuse a building is to not have to add to it, not have to put more energy into it making it bigger)
Instead of row after row of pantry shelves, shelving is pushed against the walls to show off the store’s more sustainable bamboo flooring.
The paints on the exterior and interior walls are less toxic; the lights are L-E-D, which last years and use 40-percent less energy.
And an added congreenience…
2:08 we have wireless internet so people can come sit have a cup of coffee, sit at the little coffee bar down at the end..
And even that coffee cup is compostable… like most of the store’s packaging.
Outside, customers can fill their cars with the less environmentally-friendly but still needed regular gas.
But Simply Green has also given customers the option of biodiesel, in blends made from recycled waste vegetable oil.
The biofuels station and congreenience store will have its grand opening the first week of December.
For NHPR news, I’m Amy Quinton.