Photo: Bill Timmerman. www.billtimmerman.com

By Jason T. Berner

The University of Arizona at Tucson campus takes the RainWorks Challenge.

Tucson receives 12 inches of rain a year, and much of that rainfall evaporates or “evapotranspires” through its plantlife. Future climate change scenarios going out to 2099 expect increased temperatures will likely reduce snowpack, which will impact streams in the spring by reduced surface water runoff entering streams, according to the EPA. And with future amounts of precipitation projected to decrease during the spring, available water resources to meet high summer demands of a growing population will be reduced. Also, with limited existing surface water and future projections of decreased precipitation for Arizona, it makes sense that universities, such as the University of Arizona at Tucson, focus on water conservation efforts using rainwater, gray water, and condensate collection systems.

The university has a recent history of designing and building sustainable landscapes that conserve limited water sources, including the Sonoran Landscape Laboratory, which uses 83 percent less potable water than similar Tucson landscapes. Sonoran Landscape Laboratory landscape architecture professor Ron Stoltz has provided 3,000 tours annually, teaching community members about capturing rainwater from rooftops, collecting water from air conditioning units, and reusing gray water from drinking fountains for arid landscapes. Tucson and the University of Arizona have a mindset for water conservation and always look for ways to limit the use of turfed landscapes.

In 2012, the EPA announced the first annual Campus RainWorks Challenge, a design competition open to all universities in the United States to submit green infrastructure designs for their campuses. Design teams were composed of students of various academic backgrounds, including engineering, landscape architecture, urban planning, and environmental sciences, mentored by a faculty advisor. The competition was intended to encourage students and faculty to think creatively about how to manage stormwater runoff using green infrastructure, including green roofs, permeable pavement, cisterns, and bioretention practices for their campuses.

The University of Arizona has a recent history of designing landscapes that conserve water resources, such as the Sonoran Landscape Laboratory that uses 83 percent less potable water than similar Tucson landscapes.
Photo: Bill Timmerman, www.billtimmerman.com.

Stoltz and students from the master of landscape architecture program, Micaela Machado and Rayka Robrecht, redesigned an existing 70,000-square-foot parking lot (equivalent to the size of one-and-a-half football fields) into a community gathering place—which includes underground cisterns that collect condensate water from nearby buildings and retention basins. The green space design will be the second largest on campus. Parking spaces lost will be replaced with parking garages located throughout the campus. The design’s intention was to educate the public about the use of rainwater and water conservation—for example, water collected by the cisterns for irrigation would reduce normal annual irrigation needs by 87 percent (610,000 gallons saved).

The students approached the design problem in multiple layers, including engineering, ecological, social, education, and horticulture, creating an integrated design. The design mimics the forms of a storm and an agave plant, highlighting the movement of water. In 2013, the University of Arizona’s design was awarded second place for large academic institutions, being the only winning design for an arid landscape. The design also won an Arizona State American Society of Landscape Architects award for integrated water conservation practices. For these types of landscape projects, Stoltz has found it important to engage campus facilities staff early on in the process. Implementing a sustainable landscape project requires help from staff who are aware of existing sources of water from buildings. Facilities staff found alternative sources of existing water for the design project. And by involving them with water conservation projects, this helps to ensure annual maintenance happens, notes Stolz.

“We often work with a large number of design constraints such as budget, fire lane access, and existing utilities, which makes it difficult to envision anything past what is in front of you. A student competition affords students an opportunity to design without someone saying, ‘You can’t do that.’” Stolz will continue to use the Campus RainWorks Challenge as a design project for the master of landscape architecture students, making students solve real-world and local water conservation problems. For instance, sustainable landscape projects at the university have influenced the city, which now has a municipal rainwater-harvesting ordinance, requiring 50 percent of water used for irrigating landscapes to originate from onsite sources.

Students participating in this challenge increase the intellectual capital of the green infrastructure inside and outside of academia. The design challenge not only highlights how to conserve water in the arid west, but also shows University of Arizona students and staff how universities throughout the country adapt similar technologies under different climates. For the second annual competition, universities had the option to design master plans or site plans. This year, the EPA plans on funding implementation of selected site plan projects from the competition.

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By Karen Aho

With sustainability and community in mind, Gundersen Health System strives for zero energy this year.

When designers talk about healthy buildings, they often focus on interior considerations: air circulation, light, temperature, and maybe energy efficiency as it translates to lower customer costs. Gundersen Health System takes a broader view. The physician-led nonprofit, which includes a leading teaching hospital, trauma center, and dozens of community clinics in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, didn’t think it was right to go green without considering the more far-reaching effects beyond its buildings’ walls.

Whether powering boilers or running chillers, Gundersen wanted to develop efficient operations with the health of everyone in mind, and that meant tapping into alternative energy sources. Ideally, those sources would also create local jobs and improve air quality, even for those living hundreds of miles downwind. “We really take to heart our organization’s mission and purpose, to say that we are about the health and well-being of our patients and communities,” says Dr. Jeffrey Thompson, Gundersen’s CEO. For Thompson, setting a goal of eliminating his health system’s dependence on fossil fuels represents a vital step toward improving public health: The byproducts of fossil fuels are known to cause cancer, liver, and kidney diseases; reproductive and respiratory issues; cardiovascular death; and stroke. Although no small task for any building, reducing energy use is particularly daunting for a medical facility. Hospitals, which continually heat and chill air, burn an average of 2.5 times more energy than other commercial buildings, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Medical buildings alone are responsible for 8 percent of this country’s greenhouse gas emissions. “That’s one of the lessons I’ve learned: how consumptive we are,” says Jeff Rich, executive director of Gundersen’s energy-efficiency program, Envision. Rich headed the Gundersen energy audit in 2008 after energy bills were projected to increase by as much as $500,000 every year. In response, the organization decided to reduce consumption and slashed its energy use by 10 percent within six months and by 25 percent within two years. “One day a few of us got to talking and we asked ourselves, What would it take to get the entire hospital to net zero? Would that even be possible? Or economical?” he says At the time, Gundersen Health System used an average of some 250,000 BTUs per square foot a year—a typical output for a hospital. By 2013, just five years later, Gundersen was averaging 150,000 BTUs per square foot and its new hospital, the LEED-certified Legacy Building began performing this past January at a remarkable 115,000 BTUs per square foot, a level many didn’t think possible. “I remember the conversation with the Legacy project manager and design team, and they kept asking whether 115,000 BTUs per square foot was a goal or more of a target,” recalls Kari Houser, Gundersen’s director of construction and engineering. ”But we set the goal and we achieved it.”

Renewable Sources

In an effort to break free from fossil fuels, Gundersen Health System has partnered with counties and farms in Wisconsin to create local, renewable energy. Gundersen says it is on track to achieve energy independence this winter. Projects include:

The health network slashed $2 million from what began as a $5 million annual energy bill and partnered with farms and counties to produce renewable energy projects, create jobs, and lower patient costs. By 2013 Gundersen had reduced its carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and mercury emissions by more than half—even while adding facilities.

“We see reducing emissions as part of our mission: to treat and prevent disease,” Rich says. “We’ve really had to have a consistency of purpose to get here.” Gundersen is hardly alone in its desire to incorporate healthy energy use—across the country, hundreds of hospitals have joined the Healthier Hospitals Initiative. But Gundersen has set a high bar, prompting other healthcare facilities to consider and address the public health implications of its operations. Envision received so many requests for information from health systems around the world that it set up a for-profit consulting service.

Jeff Rich, executive director, GL Envision, LLC.; Jeffrey Thompson, MD, CEO, Gundersen Health System; Kari Houser, director of Construction and Project Management, Gundersen Health System; Alan Eber, manager, Gundersen Facilities Operation, Gundersen Health System.
Photo: Gundersen Health System

Setting new standards for energy efficiency was not easy, however. Gundersen boldly set out to achieve net-zero energy use in Wisconsin, a state where winters are long and coal is cheap, making it tough to justify scrapping the fossil fuel for a potentially risky unknown. “We’re not rich in ocean currents or geothermal springs; other areas of the country are blessed with better sunlight,” says Rich. At times, engineers, already understandably conservative when navigating the highly regulated and complex requirements of hospital design, were skeptical. Some projects fell through due to changes in regulatory incentives or when initial savings projections turned out to be wildly optimistic.

“We see reducing emissions as part of our mission: to treat and prevent disease.”– Jeff Rich

A heavily promoted and highly anticipated brewery biogas project, expected to generate 3 million kWh of electricity a year, ended up with unanticipated impurities in the gas stream and had to be scrapped. “When you’re working with a technology that’s new to you, you have to prepare for the unknown and the unexpected,” says Rich. “Not everything goes as planned, but some things go better than planned,” he adds. By harnessing the biogas from a single landfill project, Gundersen powers its entire Onalaska campus, making it the only energy-independent multi-building healthcare complex in the country. A geothermal heat pump at the Legacy Building is alone expected to save 70 to 80 kBTUs per square foot annually. Thompson, a pediatric intensivist and neonatologist, hopes that Gundersen’s lead will encourage organizations to take more responsibility for the long-range health implications of their energy policies, too often pushed downstream as somebody else’s problem. “A lot of things in human health aren’t directly measurable,” he says. “It’s hard to draw a direct line between the coal burned in Ohio and the child affected by the particulates raining down later in Pennsylvania. But we believe it’s our responsibility as a healthcare organization to take that issue on and to think as broadly as possible.”

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The new building is a world apart from the old one—and even from the historic main addition. “Our main building has a giant boiler,” Becker says. “On a cold day, you go into the building and it’s boiling, and by the afternoon it’s freezing, because you can’t run the heater all the time or you turn the kids into beef jerky. Kids walk in [to the new building] and recognize with their bodies that it’s the right temperature.”

That climate control is achieved by radiant heating thanks to a geothermal system that runs horizontally under the school’s football field and through a nearby stream, a 35-kw photovoltaic system, and a “solar preheater” that warms fresh air as it enters the building.

The new school has an abundance of natural daylighting such as clerestory windows.
Photo: Michael Mather

The building also boasts excellent insulation, natural lighting, and a 14,000-gallon tank that collects rainwater to flush toilets and water the gardens. And 90 percent of the bus barn, including old-growth hardwood, was recycled into the new building.

That helped with the new building’s aesthetics. The original building is on the National Register of Historic Places. The new doesn’t look like a green building. “All the details, the brick walls, the roof shapes, all of these things come from references to the [main] building. People … don’t think of it as a green building, which was one of our goals,” Holser says. In addition to the LEED certification, the music and science building has been decorated with major awards for its green-ness: an American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment award and a 2030 Challenge award.

And if that’s not enough, the music and science wing is not just a place where students learn, it itself is a teaching tool. “It’s not like everything happens down in the basement, and nobody knows what’s going on,” says Becker. In fact, the mechanical rooms were designed with wide stairs so a class of students could all see what was going on; wall cross-sections are visible so students can learn about insulation, and seventh and eighth graders maintain and redesign the systems.

Through the Outdoor Classroom Project, Michael Becker connects students to the environment and community, creating a multidisciplinary, multisensory learning experience.
Photo: ©Adam Smith.

“We worked closely with [Becker] and the students to come up with systems they could actually control and understand,” Holser says. “I think there’s a lot of buildings that say they do that, but all they do is have a display in the lobby that says ‘Here’s the amount of energy you’re using.’ We have one of those, too, for the general public, but the students kind of ignore the display—but they can tell you everything about the building and how it works, and they can go online and show you how much energy it’s using.”

“We have a lot of college professors come to do tours,” Becker says. “They think they’re going to do the tour with me, but they get the tour from eighth graders and it blows their mind.”

Building a LEED Platinum addition—and then going to net zero—wasn’t cheap. “There was a concern about the cost,” Holser says. But ultimately the school board saw the value.

“We had the chance to do something unique and different … We are housing a program that has a lot of momentum behind it … And then yeah, we’re looking at a 12-year payback on the extra money we spent.” With no electric bills for the life of the project, the county should be sitting pretty for the building’s probable 100-year lifespan.

Ultimately, though, the building is growing a new generation of conservationists—and not just kids who grow up to shop organic. The curriculum, which integrates conservation and food production into science, is growing budding engineers. “We’re working now on developing an environmental engineering certification,” Becker says. He adds, “By the time the kids are eighth graders, it’s amazing the level of ownership they have. They show up wanting to work on the building—knowing that the first thing I’m going to say is you have to make scale drawings and do your background research—I have a lot of kids show up with that work done over the summer. It’s like, ‘How do I get to work?’”

EDUCATION NOTE: USGBC educational offerings support the LEED professional credentials. Earn 1 CE and for more on Hood River Middle School click here

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