FEATURE

A New "Green" Building on Campus

Montana State University's planned $40 million science

building will be a test bed for emerging clean technologies.

KELLYN S. B E T T S

Montana State University is planning to break ground on the world's first "green" academic science building at its Boze-man campus in 2000. The building will serve as a national showcase for some of

the least polluting building technologies yet de­vised, including what MSU officials hope will be­come a zero-polluting-emissions chemistry labora­tory. The university has secured federal, state, and student funding for the project, and a wide variety of scientists and designers are collaborating to de­vise a structure that could "change the way science buildings are constructed " in the words of one of the project's architects.

The university's goal for its Educational Perfor­mance and Innovation Center (EPICenter) is to cre­ate "a living demonstration of what an environmen­tal building is, and what it can do," according to MSU vice president of research Robert Swenson. In addi­tion to being maximally resource efficient, the build­ing will have no sewer system: wastewater from hu­mans and chemistry labs will be treated using constructed wetlands systems known as "living ma­chines." The building will also be largely con­structed from local materials, with 3. primary focus on Montana's waste stream. For example, the struc­ture will incorporate locally generated mine tail­ings and coal fly ash from nearby power plants (1).

As the future home for the National Resource Cen­ter for Green Building Technologies SDonsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) National Resource Center the building will serve as a proving ground to helrj industrv as well as federal agencies like NIST EPA and the Depart-ment of Energv test the performance characteris­tics of the next generation of building materials such as solar photovoltaic cells embedded in roofing shin gles "This is the most extensive demonstration

project we're involved with," says James Hill, chief of NIST's Building Environment Division, the organi­zation that provided the project's initial funding in 1994.

MSU's EPICenter project started as a 50,000 sq. ft. off-campus office building. It mushroomed into a 240,000 sq. ft. on-campus facility in 1996 in the af­termath of a referendum in which students voted to raise their own tuitions to construct much-needed new science laboratories and space for student study and relaxation. By June 1997, MSU had official au­thorization to build a $19 million structure; it plans to request authorization for additional funding the next time the Montana state legislature meets, be­tween January and April 2000.

Minimizing the environmental impact Green building is "an entirely new way of thinking about the goals and the process of creating and mod­ifying the built environment," writes Amory B. Lov-ins, director of research at the nonprofit Rocky Moun­tain Institute in Snowmass, Colo., in the foreword of a book published this year, which describes 80 green buildings and design projects (2).

Green architecture, or sustainable design, is an ap­proach that seeks to minimize buildings' impact on the environment. The hallmark of a green building is resource efficiency. Green buildings are designed so they maximize the use of renewable materials and energy and minimize the use of energy from fossil fuels. Green designers also carefully analyze how wa­ter, air, and waste circulate and cycle through build­ings. Ideally, green buildings recycle water and in­clude on-site advanced waste treatment and handling systems.

Many green building designers stretch the con­cept of resource efficiency beyond its conventional definition into what they call "environmental

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Montana State University's planned EPICenter will be an extremely resource-efficient structure, so efficient that it will use a constructed wet­lands system of "living machines" instead of a sewer. Daylight, natural ventilation, and local materials will be used to the maximal extent pos­sible. (Illustration courtesy of Place Architecture.)

responsiveness." Because transporting goods and ser­vices to the building site entails using some form of nonrenewable energy, green designers stress using local materials whenever possible. The architects for MSU's EPICenter—Place Architecture of Bozeman, Mont., and Berkebile, Nelson, Immenschuh & McDowell Architects (BNIM) of Kansas City, Mo.— hired consultants to create a "resource map" show­ing all the building materials available within a 350-mile radius of the Bozeman campus.

"There are a tremendous number of people who are interested in green buildings," affirms Kristin Ralff Douglas, managing director of the San Francisco-based U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit co­alition of product manufacturers, architects, con­tractors, builders, utilities, and environmental groups.

Although there are no industry statistics on trends in green-building projects, Jenifer Uncapher, re­search associate with the Rocky Mountain Institute and coauthor of the book Green Development: :nte­grating Ecology and Real Estate (2), points to the 80 buildings described in her book as examples of projects that go beyond resource efficiency to be­come environmentally responsive. The MSU project is "at the cutting edge" compared with the other buildings in the book, Uncapher says, because of its use of local waste materials and its cycling of waste materials. Other major green-building projects, ac­cording to Ralff Douglas, include The Gap's head­quarters in San Bruno, Calif.; Monsanto's headquar­ters in St. Louis Mo.; and the new EPA laboratories being built in Research Triangle Park N C

Uncapher and Ralff Douglas agree that the lack of a universally accepted system for rating a build­

ing's "greenness" prohibits them from being able to comment more definitively on these trends. But the U.S. Green Building Council is in the process of de­veloping what it calls the "Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design" (LEED) green-building rat­ing system to provide a source of unbiased data. Sim­ilar to rating systems currently used in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan, the LEED system dif­fers by drawing from existing U.S. standards, includ­ing EPA's Green Lights and the DOE's International Performance and Measurement Verification Proto­col. A draft version is available on the organiza­tion's Web site (www.usgbc.org). The LEED rating sys­tem's prerequisites include standards for energy efficiency, indoor air quality, water conservation, and water quality. Buildings cannot include ozone-depleting CFCs, and they must be nonsmoking and include centralized collection of recyclables (3).

Complex, collaborative design process The process of developing a green building in­volves a great deal more up-front, collaborative plan­ning than conventional projects. MSU and its archi­tects have assembled an unusually large team of more than 100 partners to collaborate in the design of the building. They are actively considering the inter­connections between the building's systems to seek solutions that simultaneously address multiple problems.

For example, the architects and researchers are considering using solar panels and fuel cells to pro­vide electricity. BNIM's Jason McLennan, a sustain-ability specialist, realized that the two components could integrate very tightly with the living machine

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being used to clean wastewater. In the daytime, the electricity generated by the solar panels can power both the living machine—which requires electricity to pump wastewater through the treatment aquaria— and an electrolyzer that uses an electric current to separate water, "cracking" it into hydrogen and ox­ygen. The hydrogen gas serves as fuel for the fuel cells, which provide the electricity to run the liv­ing machine at night. The oxygen is released into the building.

The building design team is trying to estimate the costs of operating the building over its entire life­time. Project architects have mapped airflow pat­terns in the structure to help determine the build­ing's heating and cooling requirements. Using computational fluid dynamics computer programs together with climatic data and information about

the insulative proper­ties of die building ma­terials, they can decide how best to use pas­sive solar and ventila­tion techniques to re­duce the building's use of traditional heating and air-conditioning.

In their efforts to achieve the greatest benefits at the least cost in financial and envi­ronmental terms, the building's designers are striving to optimize wa­ter use. The only water supplied by the city of Bozeman will be used strictly for drinking. All other nonpotable wa­ter will cycle continu­ally through the build­ing. After being used, water is piped to a cis­tern that slowly feeds effluent to the aquaria in the living machine

where it passes through a series of increasingly com­plex natural ecosvstems In 3 to 4 davs nonrjotable wa­ter that meets "swimming water" standards is re­leased from the last tank and is recycled through sinks and toilets

A "zero-polluting-emissions" chemistry lab Specialists are collaborating to help MSU design zero-polluting-emissions chemistry laboratories. To sim­plify the requirements, MSU's faculty and scientists have committed to using microchemistry tech­niques. Once a chemical is used, it will either travel up through a fume hood or down a designated chem­ical sink. From the fume hood, gaseous-phase chem­icals are sent through an electrostatic precipitator that removes particulate matter. The chemical-laden air is then channeled through a photocatalytic oxida­tion process that uses ultraviolet radiation to break down chemicals and bioaerosols.

The university's goal is to create a living demonstration of what an environmental building is and what it can do.

—Robert Swenson, Montana

State University

Although some of these techniques may be used in industry labs, they are rarely found in universi­ties, according to Janet Baum, an architect special­izing in laboratory design for the Health Education Research Association. Together with Melvin First of Harvard University's School of Public Healtii, Baum is trying to determine whetiier the gaseous chemi­cal wastes will require "scrubbing" treatment with ad­sorbers and absorbers in an activated carbon bed.

Liquid chemical wastes will be dumped into a des­ignated drain and flushed into an experimental living machine, which is being designed by John Todd, in­ventor of the "living machine" and cofounder and di­rector of Living Technologies, a Vermont-based eco­logical engineering firm, togemer with Baum, First, and a team of university researchers. If the living machine is unable to handle some of the hazardous liquid chem­ical wastes like phenols, benzene, toluene, and xy­lene, mey will be transported off site for treatment.

Aldiough Todd has completed pilot studies us­ing living machines to treat a mixture of Superfund wastes, including polyaromatic hydrocarbons, DDT, and aldrin, the mix of chemicals the machines will contend with at MSU will be far broader. Baum re­ports that the research indicates that the majority of the liquid chemistry wastes from universities are phosphates, often from cleaning agents.

The university plans to set up a pilot living ma­chine for treating chemical wastes prior to install­ing one in the new building, says Baum. Among the details to be worked out, according to John Todd, are what sort of "food" will need to be coupled with the chemicals to spur digestion by the machine's mi­crobes, plants, and vertebrate organisms. "Hazard­ous materials like chemicals lower the efficiency of living machines," he explains. Accordingly, he be­lieves the treatment cycle will be much slower than for standard human effluent, on the order of 60 days. The machine will probably include filamentous algae to sequester metals.

MSU's grand vision of a green building is slowly coming together, and many of the project's key de­tails are still being worked out. MSU project leader Kath Williams admits that the university does not yet have all of its funding lined up, although she feels confident that much of it will result from negotia­tions with the 96 industries that the university is dis­cussing "partnering" with to test new green-building technologies.

Williams is confident mat the building will be con­structed and that MSU is the right place for the project. "It's important that this be built by an aver­age, ordinary public institution like MSU. If we can do it, anyone can," she says.

References (1) Montana State University, http://www.montana.edu/

epicenter (accessed lune 1998). (2) Rocky Mountain Institute. Green Development: Integrat­

ing Ecology and Real Estate, John Wiley & Sons: New York, 1998.

(3) U.S. Green Building Council, http://www.usgbc.org/ programs/index.htm (accessed June 1998).

Kellyn S. Betts is an Associate Editor ofES&T.

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