LEED Roundup – Johnson Controls, Westinghouse, Medline, Frito-Lay, ASH

by | Sep 17, 2010

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Here’s the latest roundup of some of the most recent businesses and organizations that have earned the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. These include Johnson Controls, Westinghouse, Medline, Frito-Lay, and the American Society of Hematology (ASH).

Here are highlights for each LEED certification project.

Johnson Controls’ Glendale corporate campus features hundreds of wireless controllers and sensors communicating throughout buildings on the 33-acre site, which feed information to the company’s Metasys building management system. Providing continuous monitoring of energy consumed per square foot, variances can be detected and the systems adjusted automatically or with handheld devices from any location via the Internet, according to the company.

The corporate campus has been awarded LEED Platinum certification and is touted as the largest concentration of LEED Platinum buildings — four — on one site.

The company’s energy use has been reduced by 21 percent, despite the recent doubling of space by adding 160,000 square feet. Greenhouse gas emissions also have been reduced annually by more than 827,000 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent thanks to on-site solar electricity generation. Water use has been reduced by 595,000 gallons annually by collecting and recycling rain water and the addition of low-flow fixtures.

Each employee has desktop control of workspace temperature, lighting, airflow volume, and can introduce white noise to mask sound. The environmental systems turn off in a workspace when an employee is gone for more than 10 minutes, reducing air conditioning and electrical loads, says the company.

Other features include a geothermal heat pump, a 31,115 sq.-ft. ground-mounted solar photovoltaic array, 14,335 sq.-ft. of solar film on the roof, skylights, automatic window shades and rooftop rainwater collection.

Johnson Controls expects to recoup its investment on making the campus energy-efficient within eight years.

In Tennessee, Westinghouse Electric Company’s Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) Service Center office building at its Chattanooga campus has achieved LEED Silver certification. Key environmental features include a storm water management control system (built using local building materials), a building design that allows 90 percent daylight views to all occupants, and the addition of bike racks and changing rooms to accommodate alternate transportation to the work place.

Westinghouse’s new headquarters facility located in Cranberry Township, Pa., is also expected to achieve LEED certified status.

Medline Industries, a manufacturer and distributor of healthcare supplies in the U.S., received LEED silver certification for its 66,000 sq.-ft. service facility in Dubuque, Iowa.

The building features daylight harvesting, energy-efficient lighting, solar-tracking skylights, advanced building insulation materials, tankless hot water heaters and a geothermal heating system.

Medline says the installation of these and other green technologies resulted in an electrical use reduction of 320,565 kWh, which avoids more than 230 metric tons of carbon dioxide.

PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay Beloit, Wis., facility is touted as the state’s first food manufacturing site to be awarded LEED Gold for Existing Buildings. PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay business unit now has five LEED for Existing Buildings Gold-certified manufacturing facilities.

The facility implemented a number of green design and construction features, water reduction technologies and practices, as well as improved waste management. Thanks to these upgrades, Frito-Lay Beloit has reduced its dependence on natural gas by 35 percent, electricity by 20 percent and water by 50 percent per pound of finished product since 2000, according to the company.

The company’s waste heat recovery technologies also have reduced the Beloit facility’s greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent over the last five years. Recovered waste heat from its tortilla and potato chips processes is used for various cleaning and process applications, and heats more than 80 percent of the facility during winter months.

In addition, the Beloit facility recycles or reuses nearly 99 percent of the facility’s waste, sending only approximately 1 percent of its wastes to landfill.

The American Society of Hematology’s new headquarters in Washington, D.C., has achieved LEED Platinum for new construction, making ASH the first nonprofit association in the country to achieve LEED Platinum certification on a commercial office building larger than 80,000 square feet.

Many of the materials used for the ASH facility were regionally sourced and manufactured using recycled products, including the wood materials, which are certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), says ASH. Other features include natural light, low-flow plumbing and water-efficient showerheads, a motion-sensitive lighting system, and low-energy light fixtures.

Here’s a link to EL’s previous roundup of LEED buildings.

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