Recycling center earns green building designation

PALMER - Given the business its in, it's not hard to imagine why it was important for Valley Community for Recycling Solutions to build its headquarters in an environmentally sustainable way.

"We're living and breathing everything that we do inside of the facility," said VCRS Executive Director Mollie Boyer.

She was speaking at a ceremony recognizing the center as a LEED Gold building. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design and constitutes a standard by which buildings are judged based on things like origin of building materials, how the building is situated relative to its surrounding environment, how much electricity and water it uses and how healthy it is for the people who work there.

The Mat-Su Borough built the recycling center and wrapped up work one year ago. The gold rating puts the center in a pretty exclusive club of borough buildings. There are only two other borough buildings with LEED ratings - Machetanz Elementary School and Su Valley Junior/Senior High School.

Those schools both rank Silver. In addition to being the first borough building to achieve LEED Gold, the borough says the recycling center is the first industrial building in the state to earn that ranking.

One of the criteria a project is evaluated on is how much waste is produced during construction. Boyer said that was obviously an important factor for VCRS.

"One of the wonderful things that we did was almost achieve zero waste on the construction site," she said.

Jason Collins with Wolf Architecture, who worked on the LEED part of the construction project, said that figure is actually 95 percent. The facility kept 95 percent of what it would have thrown away out of the landfill. He said that a lot of contractors are starting to pay attention to waste, especially with metals since scrap metal is valuable.

"They're just putting out bins for the metals because they make money," Collins said. Collins highlighted other things that make the building energy efficient and sustainable:

• It was built into a slope to give entry points to the building on two levels rather than employing an elevator.

• The boilers are 94 percent efficient.

• The building is super insulated to minimize heat loss.

• Those two factors combined with energy efficient lighting systems mean the building is 47.5 percent more efficient than a similar building of standard construction.

• Once solar panels on the exterior are up and running that figure will be 50 percent

Borough Mayor Larry DeVilbiss said he is convinced of the value of building energy efficient structures.

"This facility is going to save $8,000 to $9,000 per year," he said. "Everyone knows I'm big on saving tax dollars."

He said he also supports the organization's mission.

"We look forward to the day when there won't be anything going into the landfill," DeVilbiss said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.