Archive for December, 2009

Congressman Carnahan kicks off High Performance Building Series

Early Monday morning nearly 150 people gathered in downtown St. Louis for the first of three High Performance Building sessions hosted by USGBC-STL and St. Louis Regional Chamber and Growth Association.

Congressman Russ Carnahan kicks off the High Performance Building Series

Congressman Russ Carnahan kicks off the High Performance Building Series

Congressman Russ Carnahan was our first speaker. As co-chair of the Congressional High Performance Building Caucus, Congressman Carnahan is committed to improving building performance locally and nationally. On Monday, he spoke about the Federal Building Personnel Training Program, which found that with ever dollar spent on facility & building manager training, we can expect at four dollar return on investment. This topic of discussion was an excellent introduction to the second speaker, Robert Lane, the Executive Director of Green the Capitol.

In 2007, Speaker Nancy Pelosi established the Green the Capitol program in an effort to make the U.S. House of Representatives a national leader in resource stewardship and sustainable practices. Robert Lane discussed the Green the Capitol efforts thus far, which are quite impressive! Since launching their office greening effort in April 2009, the program has reached nearly 3,000 House staff on Capitol Hill and many, many more in District offices around the country. Some of their savings include*:

  • 177,034 kilowatts/hour – annual electricity consumption of 16 homes
  • 73,644 pounds of of waste – equivalent to five garbage truck loads
  • 392,898 pounds of CO2 – equivalent to removing 36 cars from the road for one year
  • 1 million sheets of paper per month – equivalent of 1,000 trees in one year
From l-r, High Performance Building Session One Speakers - Tracy Hart, Congressman Russ Carnahan, Christine Ramsdell, Robert Lane

From l-r, High Performance Building Session One Speakers - Tracy Hart, Congressman Russ Carnahan, Christine Ramsdell, Robert Lane

Christine Ramsdell, from Enterprise Holdings, was our final speaker and wrapped up with a local perspective on the benefits of green buildings to businesses. As a rental car company, many may not think of Enterprise as a candidate for greening their buildings. But the LEED Silver Certification of their fleet operations center in 2005 made them an early adopter of LEED in St. Louis. That project served as a catalyst for furthering sustaiability at Enterprise. Since then, they have achieved LEED Certification on their new call center and are now rolling out sustainable initiatives to all their operations.

Mark your calendar for Thursday, January 7, the  second session of our High Performance Building Session with St. Louis RCGA.

You can find Monday’s presentations and audio from the program on St. Louis RCGA’s Climate Prosperity Project website.

* Statistics from Enabling a Green Workforce: Building a Culture of Sustainability in the House, A Progress Report - November 13, 2009. Learn more about Green the Captiol.



Your Building, Your Carbon & What You Can Do About It

Most people are familiar with the term Carbon Footprint but have you heard of Green Footstep?

Green Footstep is a free calculator developed by the Rocky Mountain Institute that gives design targets for carbon neutrality; net zero site energy and other goals. It reports your greenhouse gas emissions based on site development, construction and operation. Architects, engineers, developers and others can use this tool for new construction or renovation, for commercial or residential. The information provided by the calculator can be used for goal setting, decision making or as a tracking tool.

There are four major sources of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions related to building development:

  • development of site
  • embodied emissions from construction
  • operation of the building,
  • and transportation to and from the building.

Green Footstep only accounts for the first three. However, the Rocky Mountain Institute anticipates that subsequent versions will include the transportation aspect. Transportation can be the main contributor to GHG emissions for some developments, such as community colleges.

The Green Footstep calculator prompts you to answer basic questions regarding the location of your building, the local ecosystem and related building characteristics. You are then given a report on your building performance with regard to carbon emissions, from site development through operations. This is compared to a base case building. You can make revisions to items such as energy use intensity, on-site renewable energy and off-site carbon investments to determine how these will effect your emissions, allowing you to make the appropriate sustainable decisions. Rocky Mountain Institute’s concept behind Green Footstep is to make building stakeholders more aware of ecosystems and their limits, driving building stakeholders toward more aggressive project goals that address our current ecological challenges. This tool provides information relevant to assessments tools such as USGBC’s LEED, the Architecture 2030 Challenge and EPA’s Energy Star program. In order to answer Green Footstep’s question ‘Your building, your carbon and what you can do about it?’ go to http://www.greenfootstep.org and get started!

- Submitted by Barbara Anderson, a member of the USGBC-STL Advocacy Committee and an architect at AAIC.