The central element of the expansion, an exterior courtyard situated between the original structure and the addition, provides daylight and views. Features such as rain gardens, native plantings, and an 8,000-gallon rainwater-harvesting tank earned the project all of the LEED water-efficiency points. And simply staying in an urban environment and renovating the facility earned the team 21 of the 26 sustainable-sites credits.
Because the sustainable elements of the $6.5 million project were integrated so deeply into the project, Mitchell says that it’s difficult to identify their cost premium. The architects estimate that the payback on the investments will take about 12 years.
Posty Cards’ story is resonating in Kansas City both because of its timing—it entered design in 2009, after the economic crash, and was completed in November 2010—and because of the business’s small, family-owned operation, Mitchell says. When others see that a small company was able to achieve a LEED Platinum renovation, “They think, ‘Well, maybe our business can do that as well.’ ”
Rural Reuse
While ConAgra Foods Lamb Weston’s 200,000-square-foot, LEED Platinum–certified processing facility in Delhi, La., was not an urban project, but it may have been just as valuable to its part of Louisiana, which has seen few new jobs in the past century. And its rural location presented its own challenges.
“Manufacturing sites of this scale are typically in fairly rural areas,” says Patrick Leonard, manager of the portfolio existing buildings practice at Paladino and Co., the Seattle-based sustainability consultant on the project. “It’s easy to come up with a shiny new [green] office in Seattle, when you’ve got all the recycling amenities, all the supply chains, and everyone knows what green building is. You try and do that in rural Louisiana and you’ve got a big supply-chain-engagement exercise on your hands.”
The facility’s design and construction teams turned that challenge into an opportunity. Because there is no local sewage plant that is equipped to handle the facility’s waste output, an on-site biogas plant processes wastewater used to clean sweet potatoes (the facility’s primary output). Microbes digest bio solids in the wastewater, creating methane gas that feeds the facility’s boilers. This biogas meets about 20 percent of the plant’s gas needs, offsetting the cost of on-site sewage treatment. Similarly, with little recycling infrastructure in the area, the team bought a chipper to turn construction wood waste into landscape mulch, and crushed the concrete waste for use in the roads and parking lots. Those solutions helped the team stay within a tight budget that allocated only about 0.5 percent of the funds for sustainable features.
The team also made reducing energy demand a primary focus, using high-efficiency lighting and equipment, energy-recovery features, a white roof, and rigorous commissioning to make the plant 40 percent more efficient than industry standard.
Because manufacturers are used to optimizing the efficiency of their operations, they’re quick to catch on to both the LEED framework and sustainability in general, Leonard says. “People get the terminology, they just need to set a path and start working towards it.”
