Winter 2000 Environmental Audit - Building For a Better Future

Winter 2000 - Environmental Audit

Building For A Better Future
by Katrina Tyrrell

A splash of emerald paint, a floor covered in olive shag carpeting or a few newly planted fir trees may appeal to the color green-loving person, but remodeling alone is not enough to make a building truly green. The "Green" building is a term for resource-efficient buildings, buildings that use materials wisely by including recycled, renewable, and reused resources in construction. Different shades of green do exist, but the selection is a process often decided by money, at least at Western.

It costs millions of dollars to construct a building like Haggard Hall, and incorporating ecological concerns into the design of buildings is a new challenge for Western.

Western is aware of green building standards and is trying to incorporate them, but for the most part doesn’t follow them, Western’s Construction Manager Bob Schmidt said. Environmentally conscious issues are a low-end priority because recycled materials are generally expensive, and the university is obligated by the state to take the lowest bid possible, he added.

"Whatever the lowest price is, we generally award that contractor and hire them to build the building," said Gil Aiken, senior architect in Facilities, Planning and Operations at Western, "and they actually do the ordering of the material."

Funding comes from taxpayers, and by requesting specific material Western would show favoritism and eliminate competitive prices, explained Aiken.

"Sometimes we don’t make the conscious decision about what to use in terms of specific recyclable material," he said. "When this goes out to bid … it’s public money that’s used; it has to be biddable from as many sources as possible."

It’s ironic that Western is a respected higher learning institution, yet follows commercial building trends in order to save money. Shouldn’t Western, and especially Huxley, be setting an ecological example for its students?

Other schools show the trend can be broken. Middlebury College, an independent, liberal arts college in Vermont, recently announced plans to use locally grown, certified wood and slate taken from a nearby quarry in the construction of its new Bicentennial Hall – the largest ecologically planned academic project of its kind in the country. By using this wood, the college is helping to protect forest habitats while contributing to the local economy.

Although Western has incorporated some certified wood, which comes from forests that are managed for sustainability, they don’t require it in their blueprints, Aiken said. It costs more to produce sustainable wood, making the building more expensive.

"We’re trying to build buildings that are going to last at least 50 years," Aiken said. "So we kind of stick with building materials that we know are going to last."

Western uses a few environmentally friendly materials, including recycled building insulation and aluminum window frames, reused linoleum and mineral fiber ceilings. But for buildings in Western’s future, traditional materials will still be used, like concrete, steel and gypsum wallboard, Aiken said.

It makes sense to employ materials that are still useful, rather than destroying or disposing of them. Construction-related waste accounts for about one-fourth of the total landfill waste in the United States, according to the United States Department of Energy’s Center of Excellence for Sustainable Development.

"Plans change and buildings kind of outlive their usefulness," Aiken said. "And then it’s time to tear it down and build another one. Unfortunately, most of them go to construction debris yards, which are basically garbage dumps."

Reusable and recycled building materials are an evolving industry, and large, institutional facilities haven’t found a lot of ways to use them, Schmidt said. The use of these materials is more common with small-scale residential homes, he elaborated.

But other colleges across the country, even in our own state, have found ways to prove reusable materials can be incorporated into their building designs. Imagine running on a surface made out of old sneakers and tires. About 4 million scrap tires are discarded each year in Washington state alone. SATECH, an environmental technology company based in Kirkland, Wash., discovered this scrap rubber could be used in engineered athletic surfaces for sports such as basketball, football and track. The company designed a regulation court using more than 25,000 old sneakers and 1,000 scrap tires at Puget Sound Christian College in Edmonds, Wash. The basketball court is the country’s first of its kind.

Western has engaged some small-scale recycling efforts, most recently the removal of bleachers in Carver gym. The 40-year-old fine grain Douglas Fir from the bleachers, which came from old-growth trees, was reused in parts of Old Main.

"Rather than taking all that wood out of the gyms and just throwing it away," Aiken said, "we kept a good part of it so we could use it for hand rails and wood paneling. That is a good example of a building material that is too valuable now to throw away. So we recycle it and try to use it."

Traditional buildings consume valuable resources and generate vast amounts of waste. A standard wood-framed home consumes more than one acre of forest and the waste created during construction averages from three to seven tons, according to the City of Austin Green Builder Program, the nation’s first environmental rating system for home construction. Using recycled materials reduces the amount of raw material taken from the land and, in the end, the amount of waste that reaches landfills.

Residents of the industrial world comprise only 20 percent of the world’s population, yet consume 86 percent of the world’s aluminum, 81 percent of its paper, 80 percent of its iron and steel and 76 percent of its timber, according to the Center of Excellence for Sustainable Development.

Western’s geology department research technologist George Mustoe agreed that money is the reason for the lack of recycled materials.

"Imagine an architect," Mustoe said, "unless the contract specifies that everyone has to do recycled materials as part of the contract, anything that pushes the price up is a detriment to the odds of that company getting the contract."

"It gets to be a tax-payer money-thing, you know. People like the cheapest way possible," he added.

Many building products are available that are manufactured from recycled materials. According to the Center of Excellence for Sustainable Development, organic asphalt shingles contain recycled paper, and cellulose insulation is manufactured from recycled newspaper. These alternative materials also conserve resources by allowing more efficient use of scrap lumber, which might otherwise be landfilled.

Businesses, like the not-for-profit ReStore in Bellingham, divert usable building materials from going into the landfill. The store has kept more than 5.5 million pounds of used materials from the waste stream by selling them to be used again.

Nicole Champagne, employee at the ReStore for about a year and a half, took a quick break from the hustle of a typical busy Saturday afternoon.

"I think salvage is really just starting to be known and thought about," Champagne said. "I think that in the future it’s possible to create networks in which usable commercial material can be reused. People are tearing down buildings all the time. Brand new buildings, like three-year-old buildings, are being torn down. The turnover rate of buildings is just immense."

Unfortunately, Western is not networking with stores like The Restore and cannot even take leftover building materials to them.

"If we just take all the windows out of an old building and take them down to the Restore, it’s sort of like a gift to them, and it shows that favoritism," Aiken said. "Because it’s public money that built the buildings in the first place we can’t do that."

The store gets a lot of work with contractors, removing items and bringing in a lot of usable materials, but ironically it’s often hard to justify the use of used materials to their clients, Champagne said.

"On the whole it’s cheaper but there are definite instances where it is just easier to go buy it new," Champagne said. "Most people who hire contractors want new stuff. Especially for big projects, it’s just much more of a hassle for them to try and find the material."

Material that was once used for a specific purpose is being used for totally new purposes, Champagne explains. The most popular new idea from the Restore is constructing a desk made from two reusable file cabinets and a door. The hole from the old doorknob gets used for computer cords.

Networking is one solution to utilizing reusable products, as illustrated by SATECH’s discovery of used sneakers and tires.

"I think it’s all about networking," Champagne said. "If you can connect the need with the supply … it’s totally do-able. There’s so much material out there.

Winter 2000 - Environmental Audit

Building For A Better Future by Katrina Tyrrell

Building For A Better Future
by Katrina Tyrrell