6
Facility—
Making Your Workplace Green

Both “ecology” and “economy” have their roots in the Greek word oikos, meaning “home.” This chapter deals with the ecology and economy of your enterprise’s home and how to make your enterprise’s facility more sustainable. If you have a virtual business, then your business’s home is your home. Your business’s home and the energy to maintain it can be the biggest environmental burden your enterprise causes or they can have a zero net impact if you make the right choices in terms of construction materials, energy efficiency, water conservation, and indoor environmental quality. Green building protocols can help you address all these issues.

Construction Materials

The ultimate sustainable construction materials were employed in renovating the College Hall at New College, Oxford, built in 1386. After five hundred years, the oak beams supporting the ceiling started to decay and needed replacing. Oak trees take five hundred years to produce such massive beams, so they are not easy to source and would be expensive if you could find them. After many years of searching, replacements were discovered in two separate stands of oak trees in Buckinghamshire. It turned out both forests were owned by Oxford College. Presumably, the College Hall builders in 1386 sustainably planned for the ceiling’s replacement. The giant oaks were cut down and the old beams replaced.

As the Chinese proverb goes, “The best time to plant a tree is twenty [or more] years ago. The second best time is today.”

Wood can be a wonderful, sustainable material to build with. It meets all the green design criteria and then some in that it is produced by nature and, when it has completed its intended use, it can be recycled, composted, or burned as a source of energy with no carbon footprint. Until then it represents a form of carbon sequestration that helps to mitigate global warming.

One of the problems with wood is that in recent years, it has been a victim of unsustainable harvesting methods. Old growth forests have been clear-cut. By clear-cutting, huge tracts of land are denuded of all life—not just the trees but also the animals that depend on them. Without trees to hold the soil down, these clear-cut areas are quickly eroded by wind and rain, and the soil (a complex ecosystem containing a trove of nutrients) is washed away. It can take hundreds, even thousands, of years for the soil to replace itself and support a forest of equal biomass. The nutrients that were washed away in turn overnutrify and silt up the receiving streams, rivers, and lakes, causing eutrophication, a bloom of aquatic plants that use up all the dissolved oxygen, resulting in death to the fish. While some laws regulate clear-cutting and forestry management, they are neither comprehensive nor adequate.

In the 1990s the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)¹ began the process of setting standards for sustainably harvesting wood. Today, you can buy FSC-certified hardwood. This certification applies to sustainable harvesting of forests as well as tree plantations for construction materials, pulp (paper), and other uses.

Contrary to popular belief, trees like the redwoods are not protected species. Stands of redwoods on private land, even if they are over a thousand years old, can still be cut down and cause grievous environmental problems. To address this, an organization called Old Growth Again (now Forever Redwood)² was created. It developed a technology to take clear-cut redwood stands and immediately plant new redwood trees. It prevents erosion by laying the branches and debris left after clear-cutting perpendicular to the downhill slope, and new redwood trees are planted under faster growing fir trees, which are harvested in five years, providing the cash flow to make this sustainable forestry method profitable. Old Growth Again makes outdoor furniture from the old, discarded decay-resistant redwood stumps that have been lying around these clear-cut forests for decades.

A novel sustainable woodlike building material comes from SVN member Robert Hendrikson, who previously successfully pioneered the commercial farming of algae. His new company, Bamboo Sun³, makes prefabricated buildings entirely out of sustainable bamboo, which is a grass.

John Schaeffer, founder and president of Real Goods and the Solar Living Institute, has experimented with renovating and creating structures that are sustainable, are made from sustainable materials (like bales of hay and mud), and are either energy efficient or powered by renewable energy (hydropower, wind power, and photovoltaics [PV]). The Solar Living Institute⁴ is a place to see them, and Real Goods⁵ sells the plans and hardware.

Energy Efficiency

Passive solar construction was first described by Plato. He advised people to build homes with south-facing porticos (roof overhangs) so that when the sun is high in the sky during the hot summer months, the sun hits the portico, keeping the room interior shaded and cooler, and when the sun is low in the sky in the winter, the sunlight enters the home from below the portico, warming the house.

This is pretty much the technology behind passive solar buildings today. Enhancements include superinsulated structures with large south-facing windows and small or no north-facing windows. To further enhance efficiency, well-insulated windows are used. Generally, these consist of at least two panes of glass with a sealed air space in between. The glazing material has a low-emissivity film coating, making it transparent to visible light but opaque to infrared light (heat) so that the heat remains outside. Enhancements of the coating include materials like vanadium pentoxide, which acts as a thermal diode, letting the infrared heat energy escape when the weather is warm and retaining the heat when it is cold.

Another feature of passive solar construction is thermal mass. Heat is stored in massive amounts of material (like water, rocks, or even materials, like Glauber’s salt, which changes from solid to liquid and back) and is released slowly and passively. A large thermal mass also provides for thermal buffering—keeping a place at a constant temperature longer, despite changes in temperature outside.

Water provides a great and inexpensive thermal mass. A ton of water will store the heat of approximately ⅓ gallon of oil per day. In New England, for example, with a 180-day heating cycle, at $2.50 per gallon of heating oil, that can mean about $150 per heating season of heat held onto and not lost per ton of thermal mass.

Energy is an important part of what makes for a sustainable structure or facility, but it is by no means all. Energy is dealt with extensively in chapter 7. Water conservation is another important aspect of a facility’s environmental footprint.

Water Conservation

At the Longfellow Clubs, the men’s bathrooms all have waterless toilets. This has reduced flushing in the men’s rooms by 80 percent and saves 300,000 gallons of water per year. Another major use of water in health clubs is for showering. David worked in the 1990s on setting standards for water-efficient fixtures such as showerheads (2.5 gallons per minute [gpm]) and faucets (0.5 gpm), and most places now have these standards enacted into law, but many water-conserving showerheads just don’t provide the satisfaction that the old 5.5 gpm shower-heads did. Longfellow Clubs’ Laury Hammel noted, “The holy grail of water and energy conservation at health clubs is showerheads—a showerhead that is under 2 gpm that feels like a shower and not a drip. We found two showerheads that do the job. Our showers are running a full day every twenty-four hours times sixty showers. They used to be 4 gpm and now they are 2 gpm. We have saved tons of water and energy by putting in aerators in the faucets as well.”⁶

A building’s landscaped grounds can waste a huge amount of water. Many thoughtful planners are landscaping facilities so that they use only indigenous plants that thrive on the ambient rainfall. Others are using a technique called xeriscaping, which entails planting drought-tolerant plants and using precise watering techniques, such as subsurface drip-irrigation tubes that meter water and apply it at specific times.

In places like the Northeast and Northwest, 2,000 square feet of rooftop or parking lot can collect about 50,000 gallons of water per year. Most facilities send the rainwater that lands on the roof and grounds to the municipal wastewater treatment facility, where it costs about the same to treat as sewage. Excess rainwater falling on the roof and not used for a rooftop garden can be collected, run through a sand filter, and stored. This gray (nonpotable) water can be used for applications like flushing toilets, washing clothes and floors, and watering plants and lawns. The water stored in this tank can also be used for thermal mass to reduce the amount of energy needed for heating and cooling.

Indoor Environmental Quality

Make sure that your facility takes in enough fresh air for the number of people that work there. Stonyfield had a relatively high absenteeism rate in its accounting department. During an audit, David found elevated levels of CO₂ in the accounting offices. He traced the problem to the fact that one cold winter, to address complaints, the building maintenance person closed the fresh air intake on the heating system for that section of the building. The valve was opened and absenteeism immediately dropped. Elevated CO₂ levels due to poor fresh air intake are common in a large portion of the facilities that David has tested.

Tommy Boy Entertainment was another company with indoor air pollution. It was the premier hip-hop music company whose hit labels included Queen Latifah, Coolio, Everlast, RuPaul, and many others. It had a very high rate of employee stress, headaches, and absenteeism. But management was not alarmed by these high rates since the company was located in New York City and record production is a traditionally highstress industry.

Tom Silverman, Tommy Boy’s president, said, “I thought we would do a great thing for our employees to address this, so I brought in a flotation tank, a yoga room, and in-company massage therapists. We also made people take a break each day to stop work and stop looking at their computer monitors, hoping they would meditate. Most ended up just reading the newspaper. We also had an eco-audit that looked at electromagnetic radiation and indoor air quality. At that time the World Trade Center was still standing, and its dish antennas were aimed right at us. Fortunately, the testing showed no elevated levels of electromagnetic radiation. However, when we tested the air for indoor air pollutants, we discovered a high rate of formaldehyde—lower than legal limits but higher than voluntary published standards and at a rate that, based on published reports, predicted the level of stress, headache, and absenteeism. The eco-auditors first looked for a source of the formaldehyde and found over 100 items in the offices that were potential formaldehyde outgassing agents, including Formica, carpeting, office module panels, and many other items.”⁷

It was not practical to remove all the items, so the company needed another way to deal with the elevated formaldehyde levels. Indoor plants such as philodendron and spider plants are known to sequester formaldehyde, so plants were put wherever lighting would support their healthy growth, but there were not enough well-lit locations for plants alone to fix the problem. Another way to deal with formaldehyde or other indoor air pollutants in the work environment is to exchange the air with greater frequency—bring in more fresh air. ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers) Standard 62 for fresh air exchange suggests ventilation of 20 cubic feet per minute of fresh air per person in a facility. During the eco-audit, Tom told David that he had invested in an air-handling system that actually brought in fresh air at a rate of five times the ASHRAE standard and had spent a fortune on the equipment.

After a review of the blueprints, David put a wind sock on the air intake to make sure it was up to the specs. Surprisingly, the fresh air exchange rate was six times worse than the ASHRAE standard, not five times better. When David and Tom contacted the contractor (one of the biggest heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning [HVAC] contractors in the world) and explained the discrepancy, the representative quickly apologized, and the company took out the system and installed the correct system. One can only guess at how many facilities have air-handling systems that have not met the specifications ordered. David notes that about half of the companies he has audited have fresh air exchange rates lower than the ASHRAE standard.

When you contract for a building, it is easy to check if you got the five floors you paid for, the marble tile in the lobby you specified, 10-foot-high ceilings, lighting that illuminates the room you are in, and an HVAC system that keeps the place warm in winter and cool in summer. You also need to validate the specifications that you can’t verify with your five senses. Check the fresh air exchange and indoor air quality. Check the quality of the well or municipal water supply (sometimes pipes leach the strangest things) as well as the water quality coming off a filtration or reverse osmosis unit. Check the electromagnetic frequencies at all the workstations and other parameters that impact human health and comfort—and therefore profitability. If a building is sick, the inhabitants will get sick. A healthy building creates the atmosphere for a healthy work environment.

Very little attention is paid to electromagnetic radiation in the work environment. Ten years ago, David found lots of companies with computer monitors, microwave ovens, and cell phones that had excessively high levels of EMR, but since then the multinational manufacturers have adopted voluntary international standards for EMR exposure and we see less of it from these devices now. In old buildings with antiquated or exotic wiring systems and electric space heaters, high levels of EMR are still found. At Mal Warwick Associates, the audit found elevated levels of electromagnetic radiation in a few of the senior managers’ offices. This was addressed by switching space around and using these former executive offices for storage, so people have less exposure to the elevated levels of radiation.

A man whose two sons worked with him as the senior management team owned another company David worked with. The man and his sons worked together in one large room within a machine shop and office complex in Jamaica, New York. They had lathes, screw machines, and two- and three-axis metal carving machines and computer numerically controlled machines for making precision metal parts. The father had such an unpleasant disposition that he dissolved away the lining of his stomach with ulcers. One son was so unhappy that he hanged himself from the ceiling in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. The other son was equally miserable.

What was causing this misery? To keep cool in their office, they had installed a ceiling fan with blades that rotated below the drop ceiling fluorescent lights. Fluorescent lights pulse at 60 cycles per second. The fan blades created a stroboscopic effect with the ceiling lighting at frequencies known to cause irritability. The three men actually became cheery when the ceiling fan was removed. You can buy electronic (versus magnetic) fluorescent ballasts that bump the frequency up to 20,000 cycles per second, which avoids negative human behavioral effects. Or just don’t put a fan between you and your fluorescent lamps.

Similar to the case above, another company David worked with built a new restaurant that initially enjoyed instant success. Everything had been done to make it a success, including investing a significant amount of money in the sound system. The success encouraged expansion. In the second year, the basement was made into a dining area with the same care as the initial floor. The new sound system was of the same high quality as the first but had to be played as a separate system. During the first few weeks, both the lower level and the ground level of the restaurant were filled to capacity. Then the numbers began to fall. Within a few months it was obvious that something was wrong. The owner tried to think of everything he could. The quality of the food and beverages and any changes in the menu were questioned. There had been very little staff turnover, so the same people were serving as when the house was full. What was wrong? In despair and confusion, the owner called for help.

After many customer interviews, it was finally realized that the two different sound systems, playing different music, clashed with each other and created a discordant ambient background sound, causing unconscious disquiet in those present on both floors. Harmony is defined as the pleasing interaction or appropriate combination of elements in the whole. It is also defined as a pleasing combination, through constructive interference, of musical notes. The sound waves combined in a destructive manner, creating unpleasing disharmony, literally and figuratively. Interactions of sound waves, light waves, and other electromagnetic waves can positively or adversely influence the indoor environment.

Maintenance practices influence indoor environmental quality as well. When Paulette Mae Cole, who founded ABC Home, came back to work when her daughter was ten, she found that the business, which had previously thrived under her direction, was teetering. She said, “The first thing I did was try to make a difference from the inside out. We threw out all the chemical cleaners. We replaced them with natural products, and we were able to do that for less money.”⁸ After implementing several other sustainability initiatives as well, business turned around.

Candle Cafe and Candle 79—strictly vegan, mostly local and organic restaurants in New York—are as green as they can be, even though they rent their buildings. Candle Cafe was the first Certified Green Restaurant named by the Green Restaurant Association in New York City, and both restaurants are perennially ranked among the greenest businesses in the country. Their sustainability practices include investing in equipment, decoration, and infrastructure in line with their values, such as energy-efficient electrical and cooking equipment and eco-friendly paints and fabrics. They educate their staff about green practices and how to implement and maintain them in the workplace. They use only nontoxic, environmentally friendly cleaning supplies and sanitizers; recycle glass, plastic, metal, grease, paper, old computers and electronics, and printer cartridges; and compost their food waste. They also purchase recycled materials whenever possible. All napkins, bath tissue, ink cartridges, menu pages, and office stationery are made from recycled materials. And they invest in wind power to help offset some of the environmental impact of running the restaurants.

Whether you own or rent, build from scratch or occupy an existing facility, there are many opportunities for both manufacturing and service companies to make their facilities greener.

Total Sustainable Building Development

Paolo Soleri is a visionary architect who created the concept of archology, the fusion of architecture and ecology. His archologies are ecologically integrated communities or cities. They function like a single-structure, eco-industrial development that operates as an ecological closed loop. Over the last thirty years he has overseen the construction of Arcosanti⁹ in the desert north of Phoenix. This city uses about 2 percent of the land that a typical sprawled city would use for the same population density as well as a fraction of the energy and material resources.

Sustainable developers are emulating and expanding on many aspects of the archology concept. One of those developers is Tom Horton, former program director at the Rodale Institute.¹⁰ Tom was recruited by David Butterfield, a building developer seeking help in waste management and sustainable composting and gardening. Together they created Savano, a master planned community near Tucson consisting of 2,600 homes integrated into a 110-acre eco-industrial park. They experimented with every technique employed in sustainable construction, including straw bale houses, sod houses, bermed earth houses, and every experimental and proven energy—and water-conservation technology. They even had community gardens and composting.

With the integration of housing and the eco-industrial park, the municipality realized that quantifiable significant savings were possible and invested $10 million in the development. Ultimately, this project was partnered with and then sold to Sallie Mae and became its representative “green” project. Savano became the classroom for other developers who were interested in sustainability. Because of the huge scale involved there, Tom Horton and David Butterfield proved that “size matters” and that there were big payoffs on the money spent on planning.

What they learned at Savano, they integrated into their next mega sustainability project. Forty years ago, Cancun was a forgotten wasteland region on Mexico’s Caribbean Yucatan coast until a computer program selected it for development as a tourist destination.

The Mexican government’s computer program also selected another site for development, Loreto Bay in Baja California. The Bank of Mexico funded the infrastructure development for both projects. Unlike Cancun, however, once the infrastructure was installed, no one did the work to develop Loreto Bay. Tom and David “rediscovered” Loreto Bay and developed it based on what they learned from Savano. Chief among those lessons was full transparency to investors and the public, including communicating their vision.

The Loreto Bay project is committed to placing two-thirds of the land into permanent conservation and to being a net producer of renewable energy, water, and food/biodiversity. For the water, this means that no net amount of water is drawn from wells. Collecting rainwater and desalinating seawater produce all the water used. The development—which will consist of 5,000 homes, several hotels, and golf courses—has been a model of exquisite planning and execution. At this beautiful location, where whales mate and play, the developers got, for the first time, an exclusion from Mexico’s property ownership laws so that non-Mexicans could own their beachfront homes. All the buildings are made largely from indigenous materials sourced and fabricated on-site—using a machine that rams the earth into building bricks. All the thoroughfares are free of automobiles, and there is a network of narrow roads for electric service vehicles and personal transportation. When you go food shopping, the bagger carries your bags to the electric vehicle and then drives your bags and you back home.

Tom said, “One of the coolest things we did was hire a geologist to look at the site and figure out what it looked like before Fonature, the Mexican federal tourism agency, plowed it flat. It had demolished the whole natural ecosystem. From this work we discovered where the estuaries and the channels were and we put them back. With that we reintroduced the natural water collection and filtration system. Another of the many things we did—and this was also only possible because of scale—we reused the waste heat coming off the air conditioning systems to provide all the domestic hot water.”¹¹

Green Building Standards

A sustainable building must consider the local environment. For centuries, buildings reflected the realities of the local climate and culture and the availability of indigenous materials. You could look at a picture of a home and tell where it was. For example, places with snow loading had homes with steep roofs. Now you cannot look at a modern building and tell where you are. You see flat roof structures in areas with high snow loads. Walls are made almost entirely out of glass in areas that are hot and have lots of sunlight. If you are looking to build a sustainable structure, tour your area and replicate the essence of whatever 100 to 200-year-old buildings you find.

For more specific guidelines, turn to sustainable design standards. In the early 1990s David had the honor of working with the fledgling U.S. Green Building Council developing a standard for sustainable buildings called Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). The original volunteer certificants represented a tiny fraction of the entire market, but it was the beginning of a new revolution in the evolving field of green building. The certification process itself improved many buildings and inspired countless enterprises to strive to meet a higher standard. The U.S. Green Building Council¹² has created one of the most successful certification programs for structures. The new LEED v3, inaugurated in April 2009, covers commercial and residential structures for existing, new, and renovated buildings and addresses all aspects of what it entails to create a sustainable facility.

For a site itself, the LEED standard deals with reductions in the amount of construction debris, development density, and contribution to sprawl; use of a previously contaminated “brownfield” site; and access to parking, public transportation, bike storage, and the requisite changing room for those that bike, hike, or jog to work. Site development also includes maximizing open space and protecting or restoring habitats. LEED planning for the site includes quality and quantity control for storm water, light pollution, and the heat island effect—why it’s cool in the woods and hot in the summer in the city.

The LEED standard addresses water use reduction for bathrooms and kitchens, as well as water use reduction for landscaping or use of gray water and on-site water treatment. In terms of energy, the LEED standard addresses the entire building’s energy management system, including heating, lighting, the type of refrigerant used for cooling, energy conservation, and use of renewable energy. For materials, the standard addresses not only the types of materials used in the construction but the distance they were hauled to the site and whether they were reused or recycled materials.

In complying with the LEED standard, you’ll find plenty of room to be clever and creative. Just like in the story of the tailor that killed seven flies with one swat, many criteria can be achieved with a single act. For example, the heat island effect of the roof is also mitigated when one covers the roof with photovoltaic or solar thermal panels or if one plants a rooftop garden. Implementing each of these ideas gains points toward LEED certification.

Other facility standards come from Audubon International.¹³ These standards cover businesses; golf courses; schools; renovation or redevelopment; hotels, motels, inns, and bed-and-breakfasts; neighborhood or homeowner associations; new construction and development; whole villages, towns, cities, and counties; and large-scale private/destination resorts. The standard for golf courses, for example, addresses the following issues: wildlife and habitat management, chemical use reduction and safety, water conservation, water quality management, and outreach and education.

For those who are extremely concerned about the impact of a building on health and human ecology, the Institute for Building Biology¹⁴ offers courses, certification, and very rigorous standards for building materials, indoor environments, living environments, environmental health, ecological design, building physics, and electromagnetic radiation. Accessing these standards, small to medium-sized businesses can pick and choose improvements commensurate with their budgets.

Summary

The elements of a green facility include construction materials, energy and water use and conservation, maintenance practices, and indoor environmental quality, which includes air quality and electromagnetic radiation. Use building standards as a guide to green a facility. Green building standard-setting organizations include the U.S. Green Building Council (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design—LEED), Audubon International, and the Institute for Building Biology.

Here is a brief list of actions you can take:

• Source sustainable wood for every project—new or improved.

• Make sure the HVAC system allows plenty of fresh air.

• Fill the workspace with plants.

• Install waterless urinals.

• Let the sun do some work.

• Get rid of toxic cleaning chemicals.

• Strive for LEED certification.

Perhaps the most important aspect of a facility’s environmental impact is its use of energy. The next chapter discusses renewable energy options, provides instructions for performing an energy audit, and offers recommendations for reducing energy consumption.