The light stainless steel balusters on the stairway were made from recycled waste metal from another project.
Green products used in the building include:
> Drywall with recycled gypsum from a plant near Pittsburgh. (LEED gives points for materials sourced within 500 miles.)
>Sherwin Williams’ Pro Green 200 low-VOC interior latex paint.
> Bamboo flooring. To provide a bit more depth than the standard bamboo floor, the team used dyed bamboo on the third floor and regular natural on second floor and townhouse.
>Recycled countertops. The countertops were either Cosentino’s Eco brand, with 75% recycled content from post-industrial or post-consumer materials and held together by an environmentally friendly corn-oil resin, or Stone Technologies’ Ice Stone, which is made from 100% recycled glass in a concrete matrix.
>Ikea cabinets made with low-VOC adhesive.
> Energy Star Frigidaire dishwashers and refrigerators.
> Glacier Bay dual flush toilets.
> Kohler Simplice kitchen faucets with low-flow aerators.
> WaterSense-certified Delta shower heads.
>Radiance Exterior Wood. This product consists of yellow pine that’s kiln baked until its internal sugars are caramelized to the point where they are inedible to insects. It effectively treats the wood without the need for chemical preservatives.
Price Versus Value
According to project architect Chris Cain, one of MC3’s partners, all of these choices were carefully analyzed and a number of trade-off s made between price and value. For instance, the Glacier Bay toilets were relatively inexpensive compared to other low-flow brands. However, the countertop choices were on the pricey side. “We could have gotten cheaper countertops, but these products helped with the overall feel of the space,” he says.
One place where they had to forego points, according to Cain, was interior lighting, mostly because they couldn’t find LED or CFL fixtures that were acceptable from a design standpoint. “Lighting design hasn’t quite caught up with technology,” Cain says. “All the fixtures we found that were acceptable were reversible to incandescent, which were ineligible for LEED points.”
On the other hand they actually gained some unexpected points. “We got some points simply because the building was near a bus line,” says Cain. “And Alice Emmons, our consultant, told us that we would get additional points for a place to store bicycles. That swayed us to include ground-floor storage units for each apartment.” Cain worked closely with Emmons to ensure that the final point score was well above what was needed. In fact when we spoke with her in late February she was in the process of submitting the documentation to LEED. Although the review can take a few months, she expected the project to handily earn a Gold rating.
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