The Green Revolution

Environmentally sustainable construction doesn't always have to cost more

Story by Sean Fitzgerald

Green isn’t just for St. Patrick’s Day anymore.

It’s a year-round affair, and if you hadn’t noticed it, you must have been hiding out in the arctic highlands. Even there, you were certain to notice retreating glaciers and melting icebergs.

Whether it’s to keep up with the latest trends, or because of a genuine concern for environmental sustainability, going green is impacting nearly every aspect of commerce. From energy use and industrial emissions and waste, to more seemingly mundane aspects of business such as product packaging and ink cartridge refilling, environmental consciousness is no longer a domain just associated with left-wing extremism.

In recent years, perhaps the industry with the greatest ability to make a green mark on the planet has been in construction, where building materials, construction site management, architectural design and interior environmental systems all play a substantial role in minimizing the environmental footprint made by a newly constructed building.

So much so that the U.S. Green Building Council adopted a benchmarking system in 2000 which provides a framework for evaluating the performance of a building in meeting sustainability standards. This measurement system – called Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED for short – applies a point value to buildings in categories such as water efficiency, materials and resources, and indoor environmental quality, to name a few. Owners of buildings can apply to receive – and pay a fee for – a third-party LEED certification of their building. With or without such a certification, the LEED guidelines provide a well-defined map for environmentally sustainable building practices and techniques.

History of Green
This modern era of environmentally sensitive building isn’t the first time such green nuances entered the construction vernacular.

The energy crisis during the 19070s encouraged various creative, scientific approaches to lighting, heating and power use in new buildings. Most often, the popular approach was to make buildings as airtight as possible, believing that minimizing the chances for cold drafts and hot air to penetrate a building would improve energy efficiency. But such building technologies and techniques didn’t allow for suitable air exchange, leaving the interior of such structures stale, uninviting and generally unhealthy, indicated Tom Boldt, chief executive of The Boldt Company in Appleton, which has been constructing buildings in the Fox Valley for more than a century.

“The industry has learned from its mistakes since that timeframe,” Boldt said, noting that sound architecture combined with scientifically proven technologies paved the way for this modern era of green building.

Better quality building materials – like exterior glass, insulation, and even sealants – help better maintain a building’s interior climate while still allowing healthy air exchange and efficiency of heating, cooling and lighting systems.

“I’m of the opinion that a green building – if done well – doesn’t have to cost any more than a typical project,” said Boldt.
The evolution of project delivery to a more integrated approach where planners, architects, construction managers all work within the same organization has also helped advance this newer era of sustainability, said Paul Hoffman, president of the Appleton-based design/build firm Hoffman LLC.

Hoffman has long held a reputation in the Fox Valley as a green and environmental design/build company, even when it wasn’t the popular trend it’s become today. The firm’s previous corporate headquarters near the Outagamie County Regional Airport – recently leased to Kimberly-Clark Corp. for its design and innovation team – was built as a laboratory for sustainability when constructed in 1999, Hoffman said. But it’s not a matter of chasing the latest trends that’s shaped the company’s green philosophies and values.

“It’s something that needs to be seen as more than just a movement,” Hoffman said. “Sustainability is as much about the business solution as it is about the environmental solution. It’s about making a positive impact on people’s lives and their environment in which they live and work.”

In 2006 the company rolled out its “Total Project Management to the power of Green” process to help customers make decisions about their facilities through a green lens. The process involves an algorithm of finding the proper fit of environmental sustainability, the overall health of the building, and ongoing energy saving all within the framework of efficient, budget-driven costs. It’s a revolutionary approach, Hoffman argues, because building green doesn’t always have to involve a trade-off of higher costs.

Hoffman cited the Northland Pines High School construction project the firm took on in the Northwoods community of Eagle River in 2006, in which 83 percent of the construction waste and demolition of the previous high school was recycled or reused in some other fashion. At the completion of the project, the final price tag was 23 percent lower than the average price for constructing a new high school in the U.S. during 2006.

“Within any given budget – no matter what it is – there are ways to trade value with cost and still be sustainable,” Hoffman said.

LEEDing the way
There’s substantial buzz around LEED as a standard in new building construction.

Although a building may be built to guidelines that would qualify it for some level of LEED certification, there is a cost to do so. While the designation might otherwise be earned, it can cost thousands of dollars or more to conduct the official third-party verification of a project’s LEED-worthiness. To some, it’s a cost that doesn’t always outweigh the benefits.

Hoffman said his firm’s new digs in downtown Appleton’s City Center complex were redesigned to qualify for LEED certification, but the cost to pursue the actual certification process would add the equivalent of $2 per square foot to Hoffman’s leasing costs for the space, dollars that could minimize other employee benefits and amenities at Hoffman.

“LEED is useful as a guideline to make good decisions, but certification isn’t always the right business solution,” Hoffman said.

Of the 32 certified LEED projects in Wisconsin as of late February, only about one-fifth of the projects are located in northeast Wisconsin. Four of those buildings are clinics owned by Menasha-based Affinity Health System, according to data kept by the U.S. Green Building Council.

Overall, Wisconsin sits roughly middle of the pack nationally – as well as in the Midwest – in numbers of LEED-certified projects. Illinois and Michigan each have upwards of 50 LEED-certified projects to date, while neighboring Minnesota only has 12 projects and Iowa boasts less than 10 LEED projects.

LEED certification can provide intangible marketing value for a business owner, and has also helped building owners more clearly define their corporate values among customers and suppliers.

Appleton-based Consolidated Construction Corp. is designing and building a gold-rated LEED facility for a client that produces organic whey protein, said Jim Perras, vice president of Consolidated. The certification process was particularly important to this client, being that they’re visible within the agricultural industry and are already recycling a food-processing by-product. The client plans to use the plant as a showcase for its customers when they visit, Perras said.

As more and more clients inquire about sustainable building solutions, Consolidated Construction is responding by having at least one staff member from each of its departments go through the LEED accreditation process. Perras said discussions about LEED guidelines and possible certification take place on nearly 80 to 90 percent of all projects with which the firm is working.

“Green has really become more the norm than it is the exception,” Perras said. “But we do hear clients say ‘It still has to make sense for my business.’”

Savings on the inside
Most every builder will agree a business case needs to be made to realize value for the bottom-line dollars and cents investments in sustainable, LEED certified building enhancements.

Perhaps the greatest area of cost savings – as well as opportunity for most LEED credit – comes in making more efficient use of energy resources. The U.S. Green Building Council estimates nearly 63 percent of total electricity consumption in the U.S. comes from commercial and industrial buildings.

Though you couldn’t tell from the outside, more than half of the LEED efficiencies in a construction project can be found in the interior systems of the building, particularly the water, wastewater, lighting, heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems.

The expense placed into these systems, though, also contribute a substantial amount toward he overall cost of any new building construction. J. F.  Ahern Co. – a Fond du Lac contractor of mechanical and fire suppression systems – runs a computerized economic model of the energy savings a client can expect from a particular sustainable technology compared with the cost to implement the technology, said Phil Corbin, a LEED accredited engineer and the business development manager for the HVAC department at J. F. Ahern.

That’s helped clients better determine the payback on otherwise expensive, cutting edge technologies, like geothermal climate control or photovoltaic electricity generation.

Geothermal heating and cooling – the practice of drilling down hundreds of feet into the earth’s surface and using the temperature of the ground to heat or cool a building environment – is gaining greater momentum with owners of new buildings as well. Geothermal doesn’t completely replace the need for mechanical heating and cooling systems, but can be a good alternative to supplementing the operations of those systems, said Curtis Schroeder, an architect with the Kaukauna-based design/build firm Keller.

“It’s becoming more and more popular as energy costs continue to grow,” Schroeder said. “The payback on geothermal is becoming more realistic.”

Keller recently installed a geothermal system for a church it constructed, Schroeder said, indicating that the payback on a geothermal system has come down to as little as 15 years, a relatively short time in the life of a building.

Photovoltaic – or solar panels – still doesn’t always make business sense because such equipment is still comparatively expensive, but is expected to come down in price in the future as new technologies make solar panels more efficient to manufacture.

Digital controls and sensors for lighting, heating and cooling have become more omnipresent and help to cut down on the operation of these systems when they’re not needed, particularly during night time hours and in facilities like warehouses. Digital controls are relatively inexpensive to install, said Schroeder, and aren’t just limited to new construction. Digital controls can often be retrofitted into existing facilities to make more efficient use of heating and cooling systems.

Water use might appear to be the least of a concern in a new building construction. Surprisingly, it counts toward about 8 percent of the overall LEED certification assessment for a building. Altogether, commercial buildings use an estimated 12 percent of all potable water in the U.S., according to data from the U.S. Green Building Council.

“Right now, people look at water as more of a commodity. They see it come out of the faucet here, and go down the drain there,” said Craig Bahr, senior project manager for the water/wastewater department at J. F. Ahern Co. in Fond du Lac. “Looking forward, we see water as one of the issues that the country and the globe will have to face.”

Increasingly used methods of minimizing water use and reclaiming storm water and wastewater can allow a new building to cut down on the water it uses from a groundwater well or municipal water utility. J. F. Ahern’s own facility includes a “greenwater” recycling system which captures storm water runoff from its roof and treats and collects it in a 20,000-gallon tank for reuse, primarily for flushing toilets at its nearly 250-employee headquarters office.

Bahr estimates the system saves the company nearly 400 gallons of potable water each day, which would otherwise come from Fond du Lac’s municipal water utility.

Beyond storm water runoff, a number of heavy manufacturers tally up high water bills from processes like cooling or rinsing machined parts, or for water jet-cutting steel panels. Some of the water used in those processes can be recycled and reused on site if treated properly, Bahr said, but often will need to go to a municipal wastewater treatment facility if the water came in direct contact with metal, for example.

Water used in manufacturing processes for cooling or heating and is contained in coils and other piping is increasingly being reused, Bahr said.

Green materials
Even finishing components like flooring, cabinetry and countertops fall into green and LEED-certifiable categories.
Scott Lind, a product specialist with Elite Custom Countertops in Oshkosh, said traditional household and office fixtures are being made out of anything but traditional materials, all to the benefit of landfill space and the environment. Lind said his firm’s Vetrazzo brand of countertops are made from 85 percent recycled materials like glass windshields, plate-glass windows and decommissioned traffic signals.

Its PaperStone brand of surfaces are made from post-consumer recycled paper and a cashew nut oil-based resin, which together create a material Lind said performs like steel and has greater durability than most of its traditional counterparts.

“I see a niche for this in the market,” Lind said. “Even though you might spend more money up front in (some aspects of) green building, you’re getting it back down the road.”

In nearly every component that goes into a construction project, product manufacturers are increasingly make green options available, and that widespread availability has also helped drive down costs of sustainable building, said Consolidated Construction’s Perras.

“As little as five years ago, you’d ask for green products from a supplier, and they’d say, ‘yes, we have green – and we have blue and yellow also,’” Perras said. “Today it’s becoming very easy to specify green products.”

J. F. Ahern’s Corbin estimated in about 90 percent of the projects it works on, the client is requesting some level of sustainable design improvements. More often than ever before, the owner of the company building a new structure make a conscious decision to add those green features.

Ultimately, it’s been the client and the consumer driving the green revolution as they gain a heightened awareness of the long-term value and environmental stewardship that many sustainable solutions provide.