Efforts launched to help builders, others ‘go green’

In Seattle, all city-funded buildings with more than 5,000 square feet of space have to be built “green,” meaning they must meet certain standards for energy efficiency and resource conservation. A bill introduced in the Washington Legislature last year would have extended that criteria statewide.

By Addy Hatch

http://spokanejournal.com/spokane_id=article&sub=1855

There is growing interest among consumers and the real estate industry in green, or sustainable, building practices, says Jim Wavada, sustainability specialist at the Washington state Department of Ecology’s regional office here. In Colorado, for example, a subdivision filled with environmentally sensitive homes proved popular on the market, while manufacturers elsewhere have reported productivity gains from going green in building or remodeling their plants, he says.

While the Inland Northwest lags those areas in the attention given to sustainable design and construction practices, Wavada and others hope to stimulate the green-building movement here through several new initiatives, such as a green-design center and training programs for tradespeople. What’s more, construction is set to begin next year on Spokane’s biggest green-building projects to date—Spokane School District No. 81’s three planned elementary schools and two remodeled high schools.

Is it easy being green?

Generally, green buildings are “designed to save resources and energy and reduce the impact of a building on its environment,” Wavada says.

There’s no single attribute that makes a building green, but rather a checklist of items that can be included, ranging from boosting indoor air quality to lowering electricity costs to incorporating sunlight into a building’s lighting system to using low-water landscaping, he says. A new rating system, called Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design Green Building Rating System, or LEED, has emerged that’s often used to judge how green a building is.

Governments have been natural early adopters of green-building techniques because they tend to own and operate buildings for long periods, and studies have shown that green buildings save money for their owners over the long run, Wavada says. Those savings may come in the form of lower energy and water costs, increased worker productivity, lower absenteeism, or higher sales, he says.

“We now have concrete proof that green buildings are more efficient to operate,” he says.

Green buildings are more expensive to build, however, mostly because of additional design work and the extra steps that are necessary to document green features for eventual certification, Wavada says. Previously, the construction industry had estimated that “green premium” at as much as 15 percent of a project’s total cost, but a recent, comprehensive study on the subject put that amount at about 2 percent, he says, which he calls “almost insignificant.”

Those considerations aside, however, the main reason to build green, says Greg Brown, director of capital projects for Spokane Public Schools, is that it’s “just the right thing to do.”

Eco Depot

A loose coalition that includes Wavada and representatives from the nonprofit Spokane Alliance and Spokane-based WOW Energy Systems hopes to showcase green-building techniques, products, and services in a facility that would be part retail, part educational, Wavada says.

The group is eyeing for that purpose a mostly unused brick building on Division Street owned by Washington State University at Spokane that at one time housed the Spokane Farmer’s Market.

Discussions are in the early stages, however, and the group hasn’t yet approached WSU-Spokane about using the building, which is just north of the railroad viaduct, Wavada says.

“We’re hoping it’s a feasible thing,” he says. “The effort to organize it is going to happen.”

Wavada, who teaches courses on green building at WSU-Spokane’s Interdisciplinary Design Institute, asked his students to come up with ideas for the space, which will be distilled into a proposal that can be presented to the university and potential tenants, he says.

Just the action of remodeling a derelict old building for a new use would highlight one important tenet of sustainable design, a concept called “adaptive reuse,” he says, adding that Spokane’s downtown already is a showplace for that concept because it retains so many historic buildings.

Skilled trades

Although WSU-Spokane is graduating 30 to 40 architecture and engineering students a year who’ve had exposure to sustainable design and construction, it won’t do the region much good if the building industry can’t execute those designs, Wavada says.

That’s the reasoning behind a new training program that will be launched in the spring by the Northwest EcoBuilding Guild, a regional organization that has a chapter here. Using a $10,000 grant from Spokane’s Foundation Northwest, the guild will devise short training sessions in green-building techniques and technologies, such as how to install a radiant-heat floor system, that will be offered to plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and others, Wavada says.

“We’ll work with community colleges and union apprenticeship programs to integrate (the new programs) into their existing training,” he says.

Schools as pilots

Although it’s easy to read about the benefits of green buildings, many designers and builders won’t be convinced until they see the advantages for themselves, Wavada says.

That’s why he’s particularly pleased that District 81 has pledged to build its new elementary schools and remodeled high schools using green features.

“We’re looking at that as being the first, stepping-out, public project” highlighting sustainable building practices here, Wavada says. “We want to say to the building industry in Spokane, ‘Look, we can show you how this is done.’”

District 81’s Brown says some of the green features the new school buildings will employ include “daylighting,” which is using sunlight in place of artificial lighting, energy conservation features, recycled materials, and water-efficient landscaping.

What’s more, materials will be purchased locally wherever possible to reduce the amount of fuel spent transporting them here. The schools even will incorporate some high-tech features, such as carbon dioxide monitoring, which senses when a room isn’t occupied based on the level of carbon dioxide in the air, and lowers lighting and heating systems accordingly.

“Some of these items do save the district money” right off the bat, and “some of them save the district, and ultimately the taxpayers, money over the life cycle of the building,” Brown says.

He says district officials toured green school buildings on the state’s West Side when planning the new schools here, and were impressed.