Cross-posted to PoHo blog:
By Ben Fry
Our buildings pretty much suck. Too many of them are monuments of energy inefficiency. They suck too much electricity off the power grid and water out of the ground. Construction materials often travel far to the work site, sucking fuel out of the tanks of big rigs. Many were built using harmful chemicals, which sucks.
The Pasco County school system has joined the small but growing ranks of those trying to do something about it.
Gulf Trace Elementary in Holiday became the first K-12 public school in Florida to be certified as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Silver by the U.S. Green Building Council.
“We were requested (by Pasco County schools) to build green,” said Joshua Bomstein, vice president of business development for Creative Contractors, Inc., who built the school.
Creative Contractors made some minor changes to the original design to make the school greener. The overall cost of the school was only one percent higher than the budget for the original design.
“We delivered a school that was far greener than if we didn’t make those changes,” said Bomstein.
During construction, about 80 percent of the site's construction waste was recycled and around one-quarter of the school was made from recycled materials. Workers used different bins to collect waste materials, like concrete, scrap metal and drywall, Bomstein said. The drywall was finely ground and mixed into the soil after testing revealed it was environmentally safe.
For long-term benefits, the school uses 40 percent less water than an average building by using dual flush toilets, low-flow sinks and showers, and landscaping with water-wise plants, Bomstein said. Even the school’s carpeting is (environmentally) green: it was made from recycled windshields.
“To build the first K-12 school in the state to reach LEEDs silver really means something,” Bomstein said.
Gulf Trace is one more building in Tampa Bay that is sucking up less. Now on to the rest of them.
This article appears in May 21-27, 2008.