Woburn
Advocate - February 17, 2010
LEEDing
the way
Woburn
Advocate
Thousands of people
drive past it every day, but few know that the sleek, glassy building
that towers over Route 128 off Main Street in Woburn is one of the greenest
in the state.
Its a place
that boasts a roof lined with 1,022 solar panels which employees themselves
installed, an underground storage area that traps stormwater to use for
landscaping and a newly opened restaurant where even the cooking oil gets
recycled.
TradeCenter 128
a sprawling 700,00 square feet in connected buildings, as well as a 250,000-square-foot
garage is what energy officials call a LEED pre-certified Gold
Level structure. Thats a fancy phrase that means it meets certain
standards of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)
Green Building Rating System in five key areas: sustainable site development,
water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection and indoor environmental
quality.
The green
planning started even before Cummings Properties turned the first shovel
on the project.
Part of what qualifies
TradeCenter 128 for its LEED designation is its placement in an
area with established services, on a previously developed site and with
on-site public transportation, thanks to the MBTA.
Construction materials
came from local, New England sources and much of it had a history. Seventy-five
to 90 percent of the steel in TradeCenter 128, for example, is recycled
material. Likewise, debris generated from construction was itself later
recycled.
The roof adventure
But the building of
TradeCenter 128 also provided some unexpected adventure.
Take the solar panel
array that sits on the white, reflective roof on top of the five-story
parking structure, next to the building housing the Middlesex County Superior
Court.
James Trudeau, design
manager for Cummings Properties, says the first 520 panels arrived the
last week of November in 2008, with a big snowstorm predicted. With no
time to waste, some 30 employees assembled and formed what Trudeau calls
quite a little production line of workers handing solar panels
through windows onto the roof.
We have so many
skilled tradesmen in the organization, and they trained subgroups of the
installation team, Trudeau explains. We had a bucket brigade
to maximize installation
Ten inches of snow fell the next day.
The second half of
the panels were installed the following year, without incident, and together
they provide for 63 percent of the common-area lighting in the TradeCenter
and are expected to produce more than 400,000 kilowatts of power per year.
Inverters take the energy from the solar panels, boost the voltage and
change it from DC to AC, with excess power going back into the grid.
Indoor energy savings
Inside, the buildings
offer several features many a budget-conscious homeowner might envy:
Reflective glass windows
that cut down on glare and prevent heat loss, as well as small, operable
windows to let in fresh air. A central computer that tells
500 heat pumps throughout the buildings to make the air cooler or warmer,
depending on the season, at night, when most workers have left. Energy-efficient
light bulbs and toilets. Motion-activated lighting. High-efficiency gas
burners. Energy recovery ventilators that admit fresh air.
Outside, stormwater
is collected in underground storage areas, and either seeps back into
the soil or gets pumped onto landscaping trucks for use in watering trees
and plantings. A separate area is dedicated for bicycle storage and those
driving low-emission vehicles get preferred parking spots.
Green
restaurant
The new Beacon Grille
restaurant on the first floor uses demand control ventilation
to adjust the exhaust fan, depending on the amount of smoke thats
generated in the kitchen. Appliances are EnergyStar-rated and a high-efficiency
boiler provides hot water for dishwashing. Glass bottles and cardboard
food containers get recycled and so does the cooking oil, which
will eventually be used for biofuel. All of the proceeds from the restaurant
go to the Cummings Foundation, a private foundation that grants scholarships
to high school seniors in six communities and operates two not-for-profit
assisted living facilities, among other charitable activities.
TradeCenter 128 is
not the only green building among Cumming Properties roughly 80
structures the government has given four others its EnergyStar
designation for being among the most energy-efficient in the nation
but it is the largest.
So why go green?
William S. Cummings,
founder of Cummings Properties, concedes a bit of Yankee frugality figures
in the equation he hates waste but the reasons run far deeper
than that.
It adds more
meaning to what we do, Cummings says. Were trying to
set some leadership pattern.
Trudeau adds that
the emphasis on green is also good for employee morale.
People feel
good about the company because the company is doing that, he says,
as well as it being the right thing to do.
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