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Renewable Richmond

Every day in Richmond, people recycle.

Glass, paper, plastic. It's easy -- they just put it in a separate container near the trashcan and set it out for the recycle truck. And yet some don't. They can't be bothered. Most people do sometimes. Do you take the plastic bottle you bought at a convenience store home to recycle or do you just throw it out in the nearest trashcan?

What if someone offered you money to recycle? What if you'd get cash back based on the weight of the recyclables or the total number of items you produced each week? You'd probably be much more inclined to bring that plastic bottle home. Still, some people wouldn't. Human beings can be lazy. Habit and inertia are powerful forces.

That's as true when it comes to building "green," that is building with sustainability in mind, as it is with recycling or any other human endeavor. Sometimes routine blinds us to a better reality. That's currently the case with green building in Richmond and all across America.

"Right now we do a lot of wasteful things but we do it that way because we just sort of got in the habit of it," said Mary Cox , Virginia Commonwealth University 's director of planning and design.

Cox would get no argument from Andrew McBride , the university architect at the University of Richmond . U of R committed itself to building with the LEED ( Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design ) standard in mind back in 2000. VCU is a little late to the party -- trying since this past January to get LEED certification for all the structures it builds -- but its participation is crucial, considering its footprint in Richmond.

U of R has one building, Weinstein Hall , already LEED certified and five more registered. VCU has five in the works, including the Rice Center for Environmental Sciences , for which Cox hopes to achieve the highest LEED level -- platinum.

What Cox, McBride and the institutions they represent are starting to realize is that green building has turned a corner. It's no longer like voluntary recycling: something developers and designers feel they should do, but don't for laziness or lack of financial incentive. Green building on the institutional and commercial scale, like getting paid to recycle, now is something that makes financial sense but is often resisted by force of habit.

"Most institutional builders can get their buildings to be LEED certified without a whole lot of extra cost," McBride said. "If the payback can be made within five to seven years, it's pretty much a no-brainer."

The U.S. Green Building Council 's Web site estimates that building green, i.e. building to the baseline LEED standard of "Certified", can cost an extra 1.5 percent in up front expenses. But that extra outlay is quickly recouped by the operational savings green buildings create through reduced use of water and energy. The data to support this is growing steadily. Greg Kats is a leading expert on green building and clean technology financing. In 2005, he published a study on green schools. He found that "green schools costs 1.5

[percent to] 2.5 [percent] more than conventional schools, but provide financial benefits that are 10 to 20 times as large."

And green doesn't just make sense for schools and colleges. Toyota recently opened a 624,000 square-foot LEED "Gold" building in California. Robert Pitts , Toyota group vice president for administrative services, had this to say about it: "Every decision along the way also had to make good business sense and fall within budget guidelines. We wanted to show that building an environmentally sensitive office complex does not have to be limited to small or unique projects -- or ones with inflated budgets." CarMax followed the same path with its LEED "Silver" headquarters in Goochland County. As then CEO Austin Ligon told Virginia Business Magazine back in 2006, he wouldn't have done it if it didn't make practical, business sense.

"I would describe myself as a fairly typical, skeptical businessman," he said. "So doing an energy efficient building was done because it made sense. For little or no incremental costs, why wouldn't you do it?"

The American Institute of Architects commissioned a study recently, which showed that buildings account for over half the greenhouse gas emissions in this country, more than both the transportation and industrial sectors. The study also predicted that by 2035 three quarters of the built environment in the United States will be either new or renovated. A big opportunity exists to affect real change by building green.

The University of Richmond recognized that opportunity back in 2000 when a group of concerned faculty made a pitch to the president and board of trustees to build in a sustainable fashion. VCU got on board more recently.

"Knowing that [green building] is gaining momentum, seeing that this is something that is clearly headed our way and may eventually become required," Cox said. "We need to get our act together and start being proactive about our buildings."

The efforts of U of R, VCU, CarMax and others are important because they show builders and developers in the area that green can be done right on a large scale and can be a financial boon. They're not waiting for the city or state to force their hand. They're breaking wasteful habits and realizing it's the right thing to do for the bottom line as well as the environment.

Is there any reason not to build this way?

"I don't believe so," McBride said.

"Renewable Richmond" is a new Richmond.com column and will continue to report on all things "green" in the River City and surrounding areas. We would like to know what you think about the green movement in Richmond. Do you know of any major green projects in the works locally? Do you think the green movement is a passing fad or the wave of the future? Please let us know.