“It’s up to business and industry. We’re the only institution on Earth that’s large enough, powerful enough and wealthy enough to lead humankind out of this ecological mess.”
Those are the words of Ray Anderson, founder and chief executive officer of Interface Inc., one of the world’s largest carpet manufacturers. Anderson turned to Sasaki Assoc., a Watertown-based architectural firm, in May to be part of Sasaki’s GreenDAY, an annual event set aside for presentations on the latest in green thinking. A clear consensus that emerged was that it is the responsibility of American business to lead the way in sustainable design and building practices. But where to start? Who can blame the corporate executive who’s baffled and confused by all of the conflicting claims about sustainable design practices and products?
Corporate facilities/real estate always takes up a substantial percentage of any company’s annual operating expenses. While picking eco-friendly materials is important, architects, planners and interior designers are always quick to point out that companies often can have the most profound impact on the environment with “big picture” decisions – that is, where are the company’s offices located? Are they in a new or refurbished building? What is the proximity to mass transit? What kind of building do you lease space in? Is it a historic adaptive reuse, possibly on a brownfield site? If so, this is a major step – such buildings can be an exceptional reuse of existing resources. What is the term of lease signed? A 10-year lease has substantially reduced environmental impact compared to moving every three or four years. How can the space be designed to maximize natural daylight and to warm in winter and cool in summer? Does the company subsidize automobile travel, or does it provide incentives for employees to use mass transit?
When a company does decide to undertake a renovation or moves into a new space, architectural firms like Sasaki counsel them to think of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) process – the U.S. Green Building Council’s certification system for green building – as an actual process, not simply a destination. Often, highly effective green results come from a conscious process of integrating sustainable “best practices” completely independent of any LEED certification.
Smart Business
Many corporate executives understandably are taken aback when designers start to discuss LEED certification – they have concerns about additional cost. And yet, especially in Boston, some kind of tangible commitment to sustainability within corporate facilities is emerging as an important element in employee recruitment. It is quite likely that the highly qualified candidates just a few years out of college were exposed to – or even instrumental in demanding – sustainable design at their colleges and universities. As the job market tightens, a firm’s demonstrable ecological commitment can make a real difference in attracting the best and brightest.
Partnerships between designers and manufacturers hold tremendous potential in bringing us to the next level of green design – real, quantifiable progress in specifying environmentally friendly materials, whether or not one is engaged in LEED certification. Because they make dozens of choices every day that can affect manufacturers’ sales, designers are in an especially powerful position to influence what is put on the market and how. But in order to get the right answers, they need to ask the right questions.
Sasaki and InterfaceFLOR Commercial, a Georgia-based carpet manufacturer, have teamed up to develop a priority matrix that weighs and ranks product choices across various product attributes. The goal is to offer a system for making specifications within the context of real-world constraints of budget and client aesthetic preferences. It delves into life-cycle assessment (LCA) as a means of measuring a material’s immediate and long-term environmental impacts. LCA takes everything into account, from the methods used to extract the product’s raw material to how it can be recycled at the end of its life.
This is not meant to be a proprietary system – the results will be shared with Sasaki and InterfaceFLOR’s colleagues and other design firms as a means of improving environmental credentials and lessening the built environment’s negative impact on the earth’s ecology.
And so for both designers and their corporate clients, a commitment to furthering sustainability is not just the right thing to do; it is smart business as well.
