Green

A Green building for Science?

Green design is not so well understood. It is a set of concepts more than a strict protocol. Really all have been integrated into our Regents Hall, and it is on the way toward achieving the US Green Building Council’s LEED program’s Platinum rating. If it can be pulled off, Regents will be the largest and most technical college or university science building to achieve Platinum in the world. LEED is Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

Are green buildings the most energy efficient they can be? Not really. Green design definitely looks at, and takes seriously, energy consumption and all of the associated issues. However, it is as much about what it is like to live, work, and learn inside the walls that shelter our programs. The most energy efficient version of Regents Hall might not even have windows, let alone as many as there are today!

We need to remember right at the start that buildings really don't use energy, the people and their programs use energy. If the program can require less energy, the building will instantly perform better. Maybe the most important green element of Regents Hall then is the commitment of St. Olaf chemistry to a move to mostly water based reactions - known as, what else? Green chemistry.

Because the building does have laboratories, and also because all of the air that is used to ventilate labs must then be exhausted from the building, it is possible to have a science building that is a huge energy hog. Again, green design is as much about our work processes as anything else, and St. Olaf has pushed hard, designing the systems to be right on for our relatively new discipline – green chemistry. Green chemistry does all of the same work as good old un-green chemistry, but with mostly water based reactions. This means that a cutting edge building for 21^st century science could be planned and constructed with about half of the fume hoods you’d expect, and so half of the exhausted and wasted conditioned air you might expect. Green chemists are, and will be increasingly, important as we try to minimize human’s impact on the Earth.

What are the concepts? Daylight is almost always a good thing. A building and its people should use only the water that is absolutely necessary. The building site and its surroundings should be designed to manage the associated storm water to the advantage of the environment. Production of materials should be sustainable, and have positive socio-economic impacts. Occupants should have the ability to control their environments to the greatest extent practical. Only the energy necessary to produce the program should be necessary. When renewable energy can be incorporated, it should be. It should be easy to access the building by mass transit and alternative fueled vehicles. The landscape should not require irrigation. Materials should be safe, and not negatively impact the environment through off-gassing. Materials should be selected based on their performance and their whole life cost. Materials should contain recycled content when they can, and be recyclable themselves. This can go on and on.

We chose some materials that you might not think of. Good old actual linoleum of baby boomer’s youths turns out to be one our most green floor coverings. It is very benign and recyclable itself. It doesn’t require an entire family of custodial supplies for good maintenance. The colors and patterns that are possible make it a great aesthetic choice as well. Our Rolvaag Library still has the original linoleum on the corridor floors in the English Department, and it is well over 60 years old.

Distance is another material issue. We had a goal of getting as many materials as possible from within a 500 mile radius to minimize the amount of hydrocarbon fuels necessary to get them to Northfield. This also helps to support more local production. All of the concrete in the project contains a minimum of 15% boiler fly ash which was always land-filled in the past. Even our fly ash is from a coal gasification plant in North Dakota, and so within our radius. About 9,000,000 pounds of this ash in our project would have been land-filled in the past. St. Olaf limestone is actually Fond du Lac dolomite. Before 1954 it all came from a now played out quarry outside Faribault – really local! Now it comes from close by Fond du Lac Wisconsin, farther away, but still “local”. The buff colored smooth finished stone is Kasota Limestone, from St. Peter.

Many very common materials contain some level of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and our plans and specifications were put together to minimize these to the greatest extent possible. VOCs are the largest contributors to total off-gassing as materials live their life. Many forest products especially have contained formaldehyde in the past. We specified that woods and related forest products be VOC and formaldehyde free as specified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). All this comes together to have cleaner indoor air than is otherwise possible.

The HVAC systems have been designed to reclaim the heat energy form the air that is to be exhausted, and that energy is then sent to warm the incoming air to the greatest extent possible. In this way we even reclaim some of the energy used for lighting, refrigeration, equipment operations, as well as the steam that’s sued to further warm the new air.

Electrical consumption will be minimized by thoughtful use of lighting in conjunction with day light, variable speed motors (so that they only run as fast as necessary to achieve the desired effect), more highly efficient appliance and equipment, and so on. The St. Olaf wind turbine supplies the kilowatt hours the building requires. All together, the design achieves great than 50% better performance than if it was modeled just on the energy code.

All that said, even a LEED Platinum facility such as this still has some negative impacts because it still has a steam and chilled water requirement, even with the great systems we have. While it isn’t the most energy efficient that it could have been, it is very much better than a conventional building, but still has great daylight and views, really nice interiors and furnishings, and mostly, the teaching, research, learning, study, and work spaces that the program needs.