How to Build a Greener Office Building

Seattle's new Bullitt Center?which will house eco-conscious tenants such as the International Living Future Institutue and the University of Washington Integrated Design Lab?is the brainchild of Bullitt Foundation president Denis Hayes. He's the guy who coordinated the first Earth Day, which, not surprisingly, will serve as the grand opening date for the center. Hayes spent more than two years sourcing materials for the office building as part of his attempt to build the largest structure to qualify for the Living Design Challenge.

The solar panels dangling over the downtown Seattle sidewalks and the composting toilets on the sixth floor have gotten most of the publicity as the Bullitt Center has grown skyward. But there's more to sustainability for a 50,000-square-foot structure than net-zero energy usage (check), onsite wastewater treatment (check, check), and harvesting rainwater (check, check, check): The builders have tried to filter out all toxic chemicals from the construction process. Here's how.

Lead-Free Living

Use lead-free paint?that's the way most people would think about removing lead from a building. But most lead actually lies behind your walls, in brass and bronze plumbing systems. Getting an entirely lead-free system, even for the wastewater pipes, was quite challenging until recently.

While most bronze or brass fixtures contain 4 to 6 percent lead, Bullitt officials say, new laws in California and Vermont require manufacturers to offer plumbing products with only .25 percent lead. As a result, over the last two years more and more lead-free products have hit the market. While it's expensive, removing lead?whether from paint, roofing materials, textiles or plumbing?is doable.

Making Their Own Mixes

The Bullitt Center needed an airtight building envelope, which requires a liquid-applied air barrier instead of traditional Tyvek-type wrapping. Prosoco offers the leading product, but, according to the company's materials list, that product contained phthalates. This group of chemicals added to the barrier keeps it stretchy and plastic-like, but some studies have linked those chemicals to reports of hormone imbalances in humans. (Apple has been involved in a similar controversy for putting phthalates in those ubiquitous white earbuds.)

Phthalates fall on the LBC red list, so the Bullitt Center had to look elsewhere. That is, until Prosoco spent the next four months in research and development in its Portland, Ore., facility, reworking the formula to remove phthalates. The new version is going into the Bullitt Center, and it works well enough that Prosoco says it plans to reformulate its entire FastFlash line to go phthalate-free.

No More Neoprene

Chlorinated rubber?most of us know it as Neoprene, its trade name?is considered a dioxin believed to cause cancer, according to the CDC. But chlorinated rubber has long had a place in buildings, where it's used for sound insulation and gasket coupling. After working with Bullitt's plumbing subcontractor and its list of suppliers, the design team discovered that EPDM (ethylene propylene diene monomer) synthetic rubber gets the same result as Neoprene but without the same health concerns.

Flushing Formaldehyde

Formaldehyde is prevalent in the building industry; it's possibly the most intrusive chemical on the red list. As a volatile organic compound, it slowly emits into the air over the lifetime of a product and is known to cause asthma and cancer, according to the CDC and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The reason it's so widely used is because of its amazing binding ability; formaldehyde helps to make composite materials such as plywood rigid.

Formaldehyde is so common that the Bullitt Center couldn't get rid of it completely?there's just no formaldehyde-free replacement for structural plywood. To try to make a small difference, builders opted for phenol formaldehyde instead of the more traditional, and more dangerous, urea form. The center used Forest Stewardship Council?approved wood for all nonstructural components, such as cabinetry and casework. In the interior fiberglass insulation, the Bullitt Center steered away from formaldehyde altogether and used a product with a plant-based binder instead.

Picking Out PVC

While the Bullitt designers fully expected to eradicate PVC (polyvinyl chloride) from its plumbing system, using HDPE (high-density polyethylene) in its stead because of its lack of chlorination leaving it without dioxin issues, they weren't expecting to find PVC so ubiquitous throughout the wiring system. PVC, which contains carcinogenic chlorination dioxins, had a way of showing up in all wiring types, used as both insulation and in wiring jackets. Along with the HDPE for piping, the center features ABS plastic (acrylonitrile butadience styrene) and other similar products to strip the center of PVC.

Cleaning Out Concrete

Concrete isn't just water, cement, and rock. A multitude of chemicals get added to differing concrete mixes depending on the need and environment. The Bullitt Center waded through more than a dozen batch designs to cut red-list chemicals and avoid using materials not from Washington State (some suppliers were pushing China-made products). The end result gave the Bullitt Center a locally sourced, toxin-free concrete. It also increased the fly ash quotient, which cut down on CO₂ emissions during the creation process. Fly ash is a by-product of coal-generated electricity, and it can replace up to 50 percent of the mix's portland cement. Using fly ash reduces the carbon emissions of the entire concrete creation process.

Follow Tim Newcomb on Twitter at @tdnewcomb.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/architecture/how-to-build-a-greener-office-building-15332845?src=rss

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