Designer Forum - August/September 2009

Interview By Brian Hamilton

Flooring made a significant contribution to the U.S. Green Building Council’s ability to achieve platinum certification for its new headquarters building in Washington, D.C. USGBC, the major force behind the sustainability movement in construction, recently moved into the first space to be certified at the platinum level in the LEED for Commercial Interiors program under the recently updated and stricter program guidelines.

USGBC, the creator of the LEED program, renovated and redesigned two floors totaling 75,000 square feet in a ten-floor 1970s era office building in downtown Washington. The flooring, which included carpet, ceramic tile, linoleum, finished concrete, rubber and terrazzo, played a major role in the project, amassing 94 points, well above the 80 necessary to qualify for the top certification.

It was a challenging project for 10 year old design firm Envision Design, founded by Ken Wilson, whose first sustainable project was the Greenpeace headquarters ten years ago. USGBC wanted a space that was modern, open, very corporate with lots of glass, and that made maximum use of natural light. It would be a showcase for its sustainability mission and demonstrate to the corporate world that green can be both appealing and practical, and that USGBC is “not a Birkenstock organization,” Wilson says. USGBC also wanted to go beyond basic LEED requirements.

USGBC, as a non-profit association, also had a fairly limited budget compared to many commercial projects. But that didn’t get in the way of creating a sophisticated, creative space.

“We integrate sustainable design thinking from the very beginning,” Wilson says. “Green design can’t be looked at as an add-on. All of our projects are green.” He says the first considerations in flooring are durability and appropriateness for the space. After that it’s sifting through all the available choices. And, he says, these days there are green choices in floorcovering for any project budget.

“I would say that there’s absolutely no excuse for any designer to specify non-green products.” Wilson relies heavily on third party certification, such as FloorScore and Greenguard, for proof that the products are what manufacturers claim. However, with some kinds of floorcovering, it may take a little more digging to get the full picture. “We recently were considering a reclaimed wood flooring product for a very high profile client and found out that although the wood was sourced in the northeast U.S., the wood was being processed in China and was shipped back to this country. We rejected the product due to all the embodied energy from transporting the wood halfway across the planet.”

It’s the cumulative effect of many little decisions that ultimately makes the difference in reaching platinum level. “You don’t get a green project by doing one green move, like selecting carpet with some recycled content. It takes hundreds of green choices to get a green project. You have to consider it in every decision you make and it all adds up in the end. It’s important to be relentless and after a while this way of thinking becomes automatic.”

In other words, the flooring has to be as green as possible in as many different categories as possible. But it can also go beyond what is listed on the product description sheet.

For example, one of the significant challenges of the USGBC project was to cut the use of artificial light in half, a far more ambitious goal than Wilson’s firm had ever achieved before. Roughly 75% of the office space is open area and one way to improve the natural lighting was to make the floorcovering as light colored as possible, at least in certain areas. One solution Wilson’s team came up with was running a 6’ to 8’ wide corridor of oatmeal colored Lees carpet around the perimeter of the main cubicle office area, and pulling the cubicles back from the perimeter carpet, so that everyone had a view outside but no one was right up against the windows. Tests showed that the light colored carpet tile reflected the light well and made a significant difference in the overall interior lighting. And that helps cut energy costs.

“We don’t normally pick a light colored carpet but what we liked about it was the Duracolor stain resistance. You can’t avoid spills but you don’t want stains. An added benefit is that the factory is 207 miles away (in Virginia) from the site, while the Georgia mills are outside that 500 miles,” which helped qualify for points for use of regional materials. All the carpet in the project is tile from Lees, with most of it a medium grey, while the conference rooms used a blue tile, just for something different. The grey carpet was also selected because it would work with any furniture and other furnishings the space might accumulate and not stand out on its own, which is generally how Wilson approaches a commercial space. “We tend to be more neutral in our flooring selections because there is a lot of floor in every project and we usually don’t want the floor to be the focus of the design. It’s fine to have moments of attention grabbing flooring but we don’t want people to be walking around all day staring down at the floor. We’d much rather have people looking out a window!”

The carpet also contains 16% post consumer content and 45.5% post industrial content. Lees made the carpet with higher than usual recycled content for this project.

Most of the flooring helped qualify for the regional materials credit, including Stonepeak ceramic tile for the lobby, manufactured in Crossville, Tennessee, EcoSurfaces rubber for the copy rooms and mail rooms, manufactured in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Terra Green tile for the shower areas from Richmond, Indiana, and locally poured terrazzo and concrete.

Many of these products, as well as Forbo’s Marmoleum, which was used in the pantry and game room to create a monolithic look, also feature a high percentage of recycled content. Vinyl flooring wasn’t considered for this project, or any other that Envision designs, because the firm doesn’t consider it green enough, largely objecting to its use of chlorine and that it can be particularly toxic in a fire.

All the selected products were also chosen for their maintenance characteristics. “You can have the greenest product in the world but if the maintenance process is harmful to the environment, then it definitely isn’t green,” Wilson says. “An environmentally harmful maintenance program over the life of a product can cause much more damage than manufacturing the product in the first place. Selecting products that can be maintained in a green manner is critical to a sustainable strategy.”

Despite the platinum certification, Wilson calls the LEED program in general “the triumph of good over perfect.” While the program doesn’t address every sustainability issue, because that would be impossible, he says it has transformed the marketplace, which was one of its primary goals. “I believe that, in general, LEED does reward the right behavior,” Wilson says. “Every project is different and every designer needs to view their LEED project through the lens of common sense.”

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