Colleges build for the environment
Facilities save energy, resources
By Nancy Bazilchuk
Free Press Staff Writer
MIDDLEBURY - By now, recycling's old hat. And most Vermont utilities have paid to install energy-efficient lightbulbs in big energy users such as colleges and universities.
So what remains for an environmentally conscious college to do?
Build green.
Green construction-using environmentally sound products to build facilities that will last a century or more - is the latest way colleges are demonstrating their commitment to the environment.
It's a movement that was ushered into Vermont last summer, when the Vermont Law School opened Oakes Hall, a 24,000-square-foot, $3.25 million building complete with composting toilets and sustainably harvested wood.
Vermont's biggest manifestation of this effort is Bicentennial Hall, a 220,000-square-foot, $47 million structure that will house six Middlebury College departments and provide a home for summer study programs.
Nan Jenks-Jay, head of Middlebury's Environmental Studies Program, says the decisions the college made in terms of ecologically sound building materials are an example of how businesses can embrace environmentally sound design.
Middlebury has a responsibility to put its money where its commitments are, she says, in part because the college is the state's ninth largest employer.
Middlebury's purchases for Bicentennial Hall mean the college is paying for the kinds of practices it encourages its students to think about, she says.
"We're not just thinking about the regional ecology here," she said. "We're thinking about the regional economy."
The holy grail in higher education's efforts to build green lies in the little town of Yellow Springs, Ohio.
That's where Oberlin College is building a 12,000-square-foot, $6.6 million environmental studies building that's designed to produce en-ergy, not use it. The Adam Joseph Lewis Environmental Studies Center will use an engineered wetland called a Living Machine to treat its wastewater so that it discharges water that is as clean if not cleaner than the water it takes in. Living Machines are de-signed by a Burlington company called Living Technologies.
That building's rounded roof will be covered by flexible solar panels, engineered in part with the help of NASA.
David Orr, head of Oberlin's Environmental Studies Program, led the drive for the building be- cause he believes colleges must set an example.
"Our goal as educators is to present a sense of hopefulness to students, and the competence to act on that hope" he said last year in a discussion of the building. "That's different from wish-ful thinking-ignoring problems or assuming that somehow technology or some mythical they' is going to figure it out."
Orr's building is known around the country because of its innovative designs-but its price tag, at about $550 per square foot, gives many pause.
"Not a lot of schools can afford that," says Rolf Kielrnan, an architect with the Burlington firm Truex Cullins and Partners. Kielman designed the Vermont Law School's green building.
Jenks-Jay agrees. Middlebury's efforts to build green include techniques that anyone could use -without having to forge a partnership with NASA, as Orr did.
Oberlin's building "will be a great model," she said. "But David (Orr's) project is an eco-temple."
Saving water
Seen from the road, Vermont Law School's Oakes Hall doesn't look much different from the white clapboard buildings that surround it.
Scratch the surface of the building's paint and you'll find- cement.
"We wanted to at least experiment with material that would hold paint better and longer," Kielman said.
The fiber-cement, molded to look like clapboard, will need painting only half as often as conventional wood siding, says Peter Lee Miller, spokesman for the law school.
Similar thinking led the school to choose natural linoleum flooring rather than vinyl flooring- it's far more durable and less toxic to produce. Wood that's used inside the building has come from forests where harvesting and planting practices have been certified as sustainable, although the source of the wood is Maine.
In all, dozens of choices help make Oakes Hall energy efficient and environmentally friendly. Many of the choices weren't radical, Kielman said, but just common sense.
Take heating and cooling, for example.
The building's eight classrooms will be heated or cooled only when they're occupied. The system is high tech, with a sensor on the ceiling that tells the heating system when the room is unoccupied, but the concept itself is simple, Kielman says.
Still, what will strike most as unusual about the building is its plumbing.
Vermornt Law School "is like a 1ittle elephant sleeping in the middle of that village" of South Royalton, Kielmah says. Water, particularly wastewater from the school, could overwhelm the town's facilities.
So the school elected to build composting toilets into Oakes Hall, although the ground floor of the three-floor building has conventional water-saving toilets.
Patrick Parenteau, head of the school's Environmental Law Center, says he hopes others will look at Oakes Hall and see how easy- and affordable- it can be to build green.
"This is affordable green," he says. "Everyone talks about how there is a premium to building in an environmentally sound way. But at $110 a square foot, we have built an inexpensive environmentally sound building. If little Vermont Law School can do it with our $12 million a year budget, anyone can."
Sustainable forests
At $47 million, or about $200 a square foot, Middlebury's Bicentennial Hall is almost double what Vermont Law School paid to build its new classrooms.
Yet much of that cost is the result of the nature of the building which contains extensive laboratory space for the chemistry, physics and biology departments which will be housed there along with the geology, geography and psychology departments.
The average academic building costs between $100 and $150 a square foot, Kielman estimated.
Many of the features that make the Middlebury building green didn't necessarily add significant costs to the project, said Randy Landgren, director of academic facilities planning for the college.
Like other green buildings, Bicentennial Hall is being built to last, with a self-supporting stone exterior, highly efficient walls and triple-glazed windows. Like Oakes Hall, Bicentennial Hall will be floored with linoleum.
Some of the building's energy saving features are high tech such as the house-sized heat exchangers on the top floor of building. Others are low-tech but very visible, such as the prominent stair being built in center of the building, called the Great Hall.
"The large stair is designed to encourage people to walk instead of ride the elevator," Jenks-Jay said. The stair has large landings that allow students to look west through a wall of glass, where the view is of farm fields unrolling like a carpet in front of a frieze of peaks that is the Adirondack Mountains.
What's most unusual about Bicentennial Hall is the 125,000 board feet of wood that has been harvested from Vermont forests.
All the wood is independently certified to have been grown and harvested in environmentally sound ways, a process callled "green certification."
There wasn't enough of one type of wood available so that each floor could be constructed with the same wood wainscoting, Landgren said. Each floor has its own wood type-a maple floor, a cherry floor, a birch floor.
Jenks-Jay says building with local wood sends a powerful message to students and the community alike.
"We're acting on green certification; we're buying it; and we're educating people about it," she says.