Green Building
One of our most significant environmental impacts of our business is our buildings. They enable us to provide excellent employee and customer experiences, and serve as one of our biggest opportunities to connect with communities and advance the core purpose of the co-op. However, the operation of our buildings also impacts our efforts to reduce our overall energy use.
Our short-term goal is ensure that by 2009 all new locations would meet or exceed U.S. Green Building Council's LEED®-certified standards. In addition, we want to make REI's buildings achieve the lowest energy intensity in their class. We also intend to apply for LEED certification on at least one typical store per year. While we will not likely pursue certification for each new store, we will use the standards to have reasonable confidence our buildings take their environmental impact into consideration. Our reasons for building green are to:
- Enhance the customer and employee experience
- Reduce operating costs
- Reduce environmental impacts
- Align our buildings with our values and the REI brand
Energy Density (KBtu/sq. ft.)
Highlights
In 2007 we opened two new "green" facilities, our Boulder, Colo. prototype retail store and our Bedford, Penn. distribution center. Both projects were built to achieve LEED-Silver certification. Our Bedford distribution center received its LEED-New Construction Silver certification in January 2008, and our Boulder store's certification is in process as of April 2008.
At 525,000 square feet, our new Bedford facility is one of the very few distribution centers in the country to receive LEED certification. It incorporates energy efficiency concepts such as more than 360 skylights and windows, which bring in the daylight and greatly decrease energy demand.
As our first prototype green store, the Boulder store also served as our participation in the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED for Retail pilot project, which has the goal of creating certification procedures that are less costly and time intensive for the retail construction industry. With features such as high efficiency systems and rapidly renewable building materials, our Boulder store includes our first built-in photovoltaic solar panels. These panels allow the store to self-generate a percentage of its power directly from the sun.
Our Boulder store also received Chain Store Age's 2007 Retail Store of the Year award for Environmental Sustainability.
As we continue to grow, we will pursue innovative ways to decrease the environmental footprint associated with our facilities. In 2007 we measured the energy density throughout all of our operations. Energy density refers to electricity and natural gas usage combined in each of our buildings divided by that building's square footage. This allows us to compare energy efficiency in all of our buildings and understand where our operations are less energy efficient.
Challenges
While there has been significant progress in the green building industry since REI's first efforts in the mid-1990s, we continue to face challenges. Many issues come from trying to do things differently in a very mature construction industry. For example, there are issues in the cost and availability of environmentally-preferred construction materials. In addition, it can be challenging to separate supplier's environmental claims from real technical innovation. In our retail construction, we have much less risk tolerance than building owners in other categories, and therefore it can present challenges to store opening timelines or performance on new technologies or unproven features. Finally, the environmental performance of our stores can be controlled by developers, construction contractors, and local building codes. All of these factors bring different levels of experience and support for our green building objectives.
Looking Forward
In keeping with our goal to use as much renewable, sustainable energy as possible and solar energy in particular, we will begin a significant program to install solar electric and solar hot water systems on a select number of our store roofs.
We will open our second prototype store that incorporates an innovative two-level design in Round Rock, Texas in 2008.
In order to test our standard building process, we plan to apply for LEED certification at our Lincoln Park, Ill. (Chicago) store which will open in the fall of 2008. This LEED certification will help us estimate how green our standard store design actually is.
Methodology
Energy density calculates the total energy use for a facility by converting natural gas usage (therms) and electricity usage (kilowatt-hours) into a single unit (kilo-btus). After this energy input is calculated, we divide by the square footage of the facility to get the annualized energy density (kilo-btus per square foot). We exclude new stores and new facilities, such as our Bedford distribution center, in their first year to avoid extrapolation errors based on partial-year data.
