Environmental Leader

Businesses across all sectors including health care, manufacturing and information technology (IT) are seeking the coveted LEED certification to ensure that their new buildings meet the highest of environmental standards. Some of the most recent LEED projects include Spectrum Health, Fortune Data Centers and Allied Tube Conduit.

Spectrum Health Hospital Group’s Lemmen-Holton Cancer Pavilion has earned LEED gold certification by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). The six-story, 284,000-square-foot facility pavilion is the first health-care facility in Michigan to receive gold certification, according to the health care facility.

Spectrum Health worked with URS Corporation and The Christman Company to build the Lemmen-Holton Cancer Pavilion to achieve LEED certification for energy use, lighting, water and material use. The companies implemented a number of sustainable strategies to meet these goals.

These included reducing water use through low-flow plumbing fixtures, rainwater collection and high-efficiency irrigation, and saving energy through the use of a high-performance building envelope, heat recovery, HVAC, and lighting design and controls.

The facility also reduced urban heat island effect through the use of underground parking, reflective roofing and vegetated roof areas, as well as reduced its impact on the environment through use of regional products and products containing recycled content. The project also used materials that minimize emissions of indoor air contaminants.

Also going for the Gold, Fortune Data Centers earned LEED Gold certification for its Silicon Valley facility. The data center is among the largest in Silicon Valley with a power capacity to serve 8 megawatts of critical load for IT infrastructure and the first LEED Gold certified data center in San Jose, according to the company.

Fortune believes its facility is the first multi-tenant data center to receive the LEED Gold Certification for 100 percent of the usable tenant space.

Some features of the facility include an overhead-down rather than the traditional raised floor-up approach to cooling servers, which enables Fortune to save energy while significantly contributing to its power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.37 at full load, compared to the industry average data center PUE of 2.0, according to Fortune.

During construction, the builders re-used materials and recycled waste during the conversion of the facility to data center space. According to DPR Construction, approximately 96 percent of construction waste was diverted from landfill, which translates into 1,137 tons of material recycled or re-used on site. The company also used regionally sourced and recycled content for construction materials.

The company also invested in a highly efficient infrastructure, selecting critical components such as uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) based on their energy-efficiency ratings. They also implemented an education campaign with customers to demonstrate how they can benefit from making their IT operations within the Fortune data center facility more energy efficient.

In the Midwest, Allied Tube Conduit Corp., a business within Tyco Electrical Metal Products (TEMP), plans to spend $30 million for a 514,000 square-foot expansion of its manufacturing center in Harvey, Illinois. This marks the company’s first LEED-certified project. The project is expected to be completed by early 2010.

The expansion project is expected to meet enough LEED requirements for new construction to achieve a Silver certification. The expansion includes the design and installation of a high energy efficiency building envelope, heating and ventilation systems, and water heating, power, and equipment systems that will maximize performance with minimum energy usage. It also provides measurement and verification systems for continuous monitoring of cooling load, an air/water economizer, and air distribution systems. The building also meets ASHRAE Indoor Air Quality standards for ventilation with the HVAC system design.

The facility reduced potable water consumption through water efficient landscape and low-flow lavatories by 20 percent, encouraged use of renewable energy sources by purchasing Renewable Energy Certificates, and diverted construction waste from the landfill. The project recycled or salvaged up to 75 percent of the construction and demolition waste.