Laura Blaylock, a hydrologist and sustainability champion, gave my REAE 5304 class a tour of Tarrant Regional Water District LEED Gold Annex Building. LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is an internationally-recognized verification of environmentally friendly and sustainable buildings.
Ms. Blaylock started by giving us an overview of the history of the TRWD and an explanation of its mission of providing water to over 2 million residents in an eight-county area stretching from Wise County in the northwest to Freestone County in the southeast.
When the TWRD began to outgrow some of its facilities, it also realized that it needed to better centralize its organization and find a more central location for its SCADA IT command center. Hence, the idea for an annex building was born. Since the Water District's mission deals with maintaining a sustainable water supply, it only seemed fitting to try to construct a more sustainable building.
Initially, the TWRD aimed for LEED Silver status. However, after Ms. Blaylock and others were able to convince management that the building plans made the building optimal for a solar array, the TWRD set out to construct the first LEED Gold building in Tarrant County. While the panels were expensive, they should pay for themselves in 16 to 18 years
Many of the building materials that were chosen also helped this building achieve LEED Gold status. For example, the conference rooms boast cork flooring, which is a renewable material. Building cabinets are made of a material that improves air quality, a key factor in LEED certification. Walls were painted with non-volitile organic compound (VOC) paints to further improve indoor air quality. The floors are polished with beeswax, another renewable substance. Most of the furniture comes from either recycled or recyclable materials, and even the steel used in the building is 40% recycled steel.
The building even received LEED credit for its bike racks, its proximity to bicycle trails, its wellness center, and its eco-friendly meeting spaces that feature an employee-led recycling program.
The building's interior lights are responsive to daylight, and its exterior lights are downward facing LED lights that reduce light pollution.
Being a water authority, one would expect the building to demonstrate water conservation, and it does. It has three 2,500 gallon rainwater tanks and a drip irrigation system for its landscaping.
Ms. Blaylock, like most other sustainability officers, was trained in a different field but became the organization's sustainability champion because she made a suggestion and was able to articulate the message of sustainability in business terms so that leadership could see the economic and social as well as environmental benefits of sustainability, the so-called "sustainability bottom line."
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