News

June 7, 2005 - Taking the 'Leed'
Environmentally friendly design and construction earns distinction


It's a dog's life at Boulder Community Foothills Hospital (BCFH) in Boulder, Colo. A prairie dog's life, to be exact.

During construction of BCFH, the builders took extra care to preserve a prairie dog colony on the site. This involved relocating some animals and constructing a special fence that extends underground, as well as a small dam, to contain those that remained on the site in an area away from the hospital. The contractor moved only a certain amount of dirt per day to ensure the safety of any prairie dogs that had inadvertently been allowed to stay on the portion of the site where construction was taking place.

"No prairie dogs were harmed during the project," jokes Boulder Community Hospital Construction Manager Robert A. Jones, parodying the familiar movie disclaimer. The entire process delayed site work for three months--the only delay experienced on the construction project.

Community commitment
Boulder Community Hospital takes its commitment to the community--even the neighboring prairie dogs--seriously. This commitment is demonstrated, in part, through responsible environmental stewardship.

In the past 10 years, the hospital has won a number of awards for environmental health and wellness programs. With BCFH, a 60-bed facility that opened in 2003, it extended this record by being the first hospital in the country to earn Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

About four years ago, Boulder Community Hospital decided to build a new facility to house its maternity and pediatric services, which had outgrown their space at the organization's main acute care hospital. The new facility was also intended to update security measures for these services, as well as provide care for people living on the east side of Boulder.

At the time, the Boulder city council had recently adopted a policy of adhering to LEED for municipal building projects. "With our hospital's foundation in environmental stewardship and with the recognition that if the city of Boulder thinks this is important, we should be reflecting that same value" the hospital's board of directors decided to pursue LEED certification for the new building, says Boulder Community Hospital Environmental Coordinator Kai Abelkis. To achieve this feat, the hospital worked with several partners. These included two architectural firms based in Boulder: Boulder Associates Inc., which designed the medical facilities, and OZ Architecture, which designed the building's core and shell.

To qualify for LEED certification, buildings must receive a number of points in five categories--sustainable development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection and indoor environmental quality--and the BCFH design and construction team utilized a number of innovative strategies to collect enough points to reach their goal.

Sustainable development
Regarding the sustainable development category, for instance, BCFH has a compact footprint. Even with future expansion, the plan calls for using only 17 acres of the 49-acre site purchased for the BCFH campus. The hospital donated the remaining 32 acres--part of which is in a floodplain--to the city for permanent open space, wetland restoration and wildlife habitat. Jones says this area also provides a green buffer from Foothills Parkway, the primary artery that runs in front of the hospital.

One way the builders were able to reduce the size of the development's footprint was to designate less space for parking. Because the hospital encourages alternative transportation in many ways--including building and maintaining a special bus stop and providing shower facilities near the bike racks--the planners were able to obtain a waiver from the city of Boulder to build 25 percent fewer parking spaces than normally required for a building of this size. They had to allot room for the additional spaces should they become necessary, but Jones says that is unlikely. Even at their reduced size, "those parking lots are not full," he says.

To reduce the amount of pavement further, the fire lane on the site has grass pavers.

General contractor Gerald H. Phipps Inc., Denver, recycled 64 percent of construction waste during the project. "They wish it could have been more, but they couldn't recycle the drywall," says Kristi Ennis, AIA, LEED Accredited Professional (AP), Boulder Associates' project architect and project manager for BCFH. Ennis says the recycling percentage was in the 90s before drywalling began.

Because Colorado's soil is already very alkaline, the alkaline gypsum that's in the drywall could not be recycled as a soil amendment, as it can be on the East Coast where the soil is primarily acidic, Ennis explains.

To make the recycling effort successful, the general contractor had to monitor the subcontractors to ensure they were separating recyclables correctly on-site. "They're not used to doing that," says Ennis. "They usually just throw everything into a bin. It's new to a lot of people, but once they do it they tend to do it forever. It's just a matter of the mind-set. Construction contributes so much to the landfills that if they change their mind-set, they can make a huge difference," she says.

Builders gained permission from the city of Boulder to grind up leftover masonry, such as cut brick, and bury it on-site, reducing the amount of waste the project contributed to area landfills.

Water savings
To conserve water, an especially precious resource in Colorado, Denver-based Civitas Inc. used Xeriscape principles in the hospital's landscaping plan. The Denver Water Board coined the term "Xeriscape" in 1981 to refer to landscaping that requires little water. Joe Howard, Boulder Community Hospital's director of facilities, says "a lot of people have the wrong impression of Xeriscaping; they think it's just rocks. Xeriscaping doesn't mean all dead plants. It means plants that exist normally in this kind of semiarid climate. It's a lot of sages [and] buffalo grass. It's green and actually looks pretty darn nice."

"The area is developing as a very colorful site," adds Jones, "and yet at the same time, it is one that is very much environmentally sound and very much part of the community of Boulder."

Using Xeriscaping and a high-efficiency irrigation system, Ennis says the builders were able to prove the hospital would use 54 percent less water for irrigation than a typical landscape design in Colorado.

For more water savings, the builders installed waterless urinals in the public restrooms. "That's the product that frankly we had the most concern about before the project was finished, and it has proven to be no problem whatsoever," says Howard.

"Basically, it looks much like any other urinal, except there's no flush valve," explains Ennis. "The surface is designed to be very slick, so that the liquid goes quickly down the drain. In the drain there is a blue liquid that the urine will go below, because it's heavier. Odors can't get back up, and users don't flush at all. It's saving a gallon per use."

A cartridge in each unit that contains the blue liquid needs to be replaced periodically, says Howard, but "other than that, maintenance is pretty simple."

The hospital also has low-flow and automatic, electric-eye faucets in the public areas. These faucets were not installed in staff areas. "Staff usually have an issue with [electric-eye] faucets because they aren't using the sinks just as hand sinks," says Ennis. "They're washing babies in them, they're preparing meds in them, sometimes they're using the sink just as a basin and they don't want the water to come on."

Automatic flush valves on the toilets initially had what Howard terms an "interesting conflict" with lighting controllers installed to turn lights on automatically as people approached. "People would be walking down the hall and hear toilets flushing," he says. "We had a problem with 'ghost flushers' for a few weeks. It took a while to sort that out." The problem was resolved by converting the flush valves, which were originally connected to the electrical system, to battery power. "The battery-powered units operated at different frequencies," Howard explains.

Energy efficiency
To save energy, BCFH has a central utility plant. "The investment was about 1.2 million dollars over what it would have been if we were just putting in a distributed rooftop unit," says Caroline Clevenger, P.E., AIA, LEED AP, of Boulder-based Architectural Energy Corporation, the project's energy and LEED consultant. "What they got for that was more efficient equipment. They'll be saving on their utility bills for years and years to come," she says.

With a central utility plant, says Howard, "you can buy better, more efficient equipment, since you're not having to buy so much. With a distributed system, you'd have to buy a lot more pieces. We're running the entire facility on two chillers, two boilers, two generators. The idea here is to put all your eggs in one basket and make sure it's a very good basket.

"LEED certification doesn't require that you go out there and invent a whole new set of products. There's plenty of good products on the market now" for energy savings, he adds, such as variable speed chillers, variable speed pumping and variable air volume systems. "They generally cost a little more, but they have a very good payback," he says.

With increased efficiency, the hospital looks to recoup the additional costs in their first six years of operation, Howard says.

"For a hospital that plans to own the building for 75 years, it's not that bad," says Ennis. She adds that the larger equipment used in a central utility plant also operates well on a part-load setting. With a smaller unit, she says, "if you only need half of what it can do, and it just has an on/off switch, you just waste the other half."

Maintenance of the system is "terrific," says Howard. "There are fewer pieces of equipment to maintain, and as a general rule, the stuff that's more energy efficient is manufactured better," and is therefore more reliable. ("Unpredictability in a hospital is not good," Ennis notes.)

The utility plant was also built with future expansion in mind. Clevenger says the pipe fittings are sized so that it will be very easy to add on later. "That's not typical construction," she says. "As much sense as it makes, it's not actually how people usually do it. Everybody's interested in getting first cost down, especially since they might or might not be on the next project. The hospital did things in a very sensible way that made sense for future planning."

Besides the central utility plant, the hospital is saving energy with a reflective, R-30 roof that reduces the cooling load on the building.

Energy-efficient lighting fixtures were installed throughout the hospital. To make the canopy glow at night without wasting energy or creating light pollution, OZ Architecture used a translucent material that light does not go through. To achieve the desired effect, the architects installed the lighting fixtures in the canopy upside-down.

To avoid lighting up the night sky, BCFH takes down the flags at night, rather than light the flagpoles.

Materials selection
To gather points in the materials selection category, the architects chose several materials that were manufactured locally; in some cases, the materials were harvested locally, as well. For the exterior, OZ Architecture selected brick made from Colorado clay and sandstone from a nearby quarry. Because these materials are common in Boulder, they also help the building fit into the local vernacular.

Due to city building height restrictions, the architects chose to give the facility a concrete frame. "We're within a couple inches of [the height limit]," says Ennis. "In order to give us enough space to run our mechanical systems, we ended up doing a flat plate concrete construction. If you build out of steel, normally you're going to have a 5-inch slab, and then you're going to have an 18-inch steel beam you run stuff under. With this construction, we have places where the entire structure is only 10-1/2-inches thick, so they have some room."

All of the materials to make the concrete were local. Fly ash, a waste product from local power plants, was substituted for some of the cement. "Fly ash is great because cement causes a lot of CO2 to be released into the air during its production, so if you can use the fly ash instead you're using a waste product and saving some CO2 [discharge]," says Ennis.

All of the health facility's casework was manufactured locally as well.

The carpet tile used at the hospital has a high recycled content and the manufacturer will take the product back at the end of its lifecycle. Ennis says this type of program is becoming more common in carpet manufacturing. "Because all of the carpet manufacturers are now using recycled carpet in the backings, they need recycled carpet anyway," she explains. "The carpet industry has made an amazing transformation and has several leaders now in environmentally responsible manufacturing and product design." She notes that the carpet used at BCFH averaged out at 42 percent recycled content. "Today that same carpet is up to 63 percent because they're able to put more and more [recycled content] in the backing," she says.

Over half the hard surface floors at the facility are linoleum, a rapidly renewable material made from linseed oil, flaxseed, cork or wood flour and a jute backing. "The problem is, it's not currently made in the United States," says Ennis. While linoleum was once made in the U.S., manufacturers switched to vinyl when that became the industry standard. The designers purchased the linoleum flooring from Europe, with the hope that by encouraging use of the product they would help create a market for U.S. manufacturing.

Materials were also chosen with an eye toward green cleaning, a practice used extensively at all of Boulder Community Hospital's facilities. Linoleum, for example, does not require waxing and stripping.

Indoor environmental quality
Indoor air quality was a priority during construction, gaining the design and construction team points in the indoor environmental quality category.

During most construction projects, "they're just going along putting ducts in and they leave the ends open and all kinds of stuff gets in there," says Ennis. "Sometimes during construction they're even using those units and the return air ducts are just sucking stuff up." While building BCFH, contractors protected open duct ends by filtering them when in use (a rare occurrence on this project) or capping them off. This prevented the system from filling up with contaminants before the building opened.

Contractors also vacuumed the stud tracks of walls before installing drywall. "There's not additional food for mold or Coke cans and whatever else [that] ends up in the wall on some construction sites," says Ennis.

And, the builders also worked hard to keep water out of the facility during construction, storing materials out of the weather and covering window openings with plastic until the windows were installed.

Activities were timed so that, when possible, VOC-absorbing materials were installed in concert with those that produced VOCs. For example, says Ennis, "If they can get the first two coats of primer and paint on before the carpet and ceiling tile go in, they eliminate the possibility of potentially soaking up the VOCs coming off the paint. Timing's part of the battle."

Low-VOC materials were used as much as possible to prevent excessive off-gassing. In 2001 and 2002, when the building was specified, "those products were rather new and a little bit hard to find sometimes," says Ennis. The designers thought they would have to forego using a LEED-qualified, water-based epoxy paint in the OR because they could not find a suitable paint--until a subcontractor located one the day before that area was scheduled to be painted.

"Today it's much easier," Ennis says. "Low-VOC paints are not difficult to find now. They're becoming much more available and well-formulated." The designers even found a low-VOC stain that worked well.

Ennis says the carpet tile, which received high marks for recycled content, was a "double whammy" for the project because it is also low-VOC.

The LEED "indoor environmental quality" category goes beyond air quality, covering such issues as daylighting. The designers used natural light whenever possible to save energy, aid in wayfinding, make the most of the hospital's natural setting and promote healing.

'Not the truth now'
Regarding sustainable building, Howard says, "I think a lot of people have the opinion that it's going to cost a lot more [and] it's probably going to be more difficult to maintain. I don't know if that was ever the truth, but it's certainly not the truth now."

The BCFH project not only earned a silver rating from LEED, it did so within its original budget.

Ennis says, "I think we were surprised at how much was possible. [LEED certification] hadn't been done for health care before and frankly a lot of people out there had written it off and said it can't be done for health care--we've got too many codes, too many things that would be contrary to energy efficiency."

Clevenger says hospitals' high energy requirements make them excellent candidates for conservation. "Hospitals are energy hogs," she says. "In some ways that gives you more opportunities to save energy. A small percentage of a big number is still a really big number."

Abelkis says the emphasis on sustainability during the BCFH construction project enabled Boulder Community Hospital to build a better facility overall. "What LEED allowed us to do is rethink some of the decisions that you make when you build a hospital and, for that, I believe we built a better quality hospital, one that not only respects the folks inside the hospital ... but also the community at large."

As a maternity and pediatric care center, BCFH should be especially sensitive to environmental issues, says Abelkis. "We know the challenges the environment is posing on mothers--mercury, dioxin, the list goes on and on," he says. "My feeling is that we cannot build a product that has a negative effect on these women who are bearing children, our future.

"And then when children leave our hospital and go out into the world, my feeling is we shouldn't burden them with our negative environmental impact," he adds.

"I think sustainability is a perfect match for health care," says Ennis. "This is a step in the right direction toward alleviating things like asthma and endometriosis and other things that have been linked to environmental causes, which goes hand in hand with the mission of health care facilities."

Best of all, says Howard, "in our opinion, it's not a case that being environmentally conscious requires you to give up anything at all. As a matter of fact, we think that if you do it right you can gain an awful lot in the process."

Amy Eagle is a freelance writer based in Homewood, Ill., and a regular contributor to HFM.


PROJECT NAME / Boulder Community Foothills Hospital

LOCATION / Boulder, Colo.

OWNER / Boulder Community Hospital

TOTAL FLOOR AREA / Hospital--154,000 square feet; medical office building--67,000 square feet; central utility plant--10,000 square feet

NUMBER OF FLOORS / Three, plus basement

NUMBER OF BEDS / 60

PROJECT COST / $80 million

CONSTRUCTION COST / $52 million

GROUNDBREAKING / Fall 2001

OPENING / September 2003


This article 1st appeared in the June 2005 issue of Health Facilities Management Magazine.

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