Grind Home | Buyers Guides | Sneak Peek | Shop Tactics | Email Signup

Sections

• Home
• Photo Galleries
• Snowboarding Guides
• Skate Guides
• Surf Guides
• Environmental Responsibility
• What We Do
• 1% For The Planet
• Conservation Alliance
• Green Building Design
• Business Footprint
• 1FTP Team
• 1% For The Planet Grants

Green Building Design

Late in 2004, Tactics was running out of room. We learned of an old 1940s, 30,000 square foot, 3-story warehouse nearby for sale and pulled the trigger. When the staff saw their new home to be, most of them threaten to quit, or worse. The place had been leaking for years and it was dark and dirty. The renovation project took almost 8 months, but by mid-2005, the building had been transformed, combining historic preservation and modern green building principles. Our guideposts were the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Rating System and the National Park Service’s Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation. Following the primary LEED categories, we examined the impacts of the renovation from a holistic perspective, considering such factors as energy efficiency, stormwater management, water efficient landscaping, water use reduction, resource reuse, alternative transportation, and indoor environmental quality. Below are the green building elements incorporated into the renovation:

• Ultra high efficient interior and exterior lighting and HVAC systems. It is now a no brainer to use CFL (compact fluorescent) instead of incandescent lights. However, CFL lighting systems vary widely in their degree of energy efficiency. Our system incorporates rapid start electronic ballasts and high performance T8 lamps to reach near the current limits on energy efficiency. Additionally, skylights were liberally added to the upper floor to increase daylight and lower energy usage. Lights in all of the common areas and smaller rooms such as bathrooms along with the warehouse spaces are operated by occupancy sensors, turning on only when someone moves into that part of the room. Exterior lighting is all compact fluorescent as well and comes on only when needed via a combination of photo-cell sensors and timer programming. Finally, we took the extra steps to install super high efficient rooftop air conditioning units specifically designed for our climate.
• To help lower our stormwater runoff, we hacked up the old parking lot that the old freight trucks used and installed an expansive bioswale that drains about 2/3 of the entire footprint of the property. A bioswale is a landscape element designed to remove silt and other particle pollution from surface runoff water. It is basically a fancy landscaped ditch that fills up with water during rain events. The water percolates through the layer of rock at the bottom of the bioswale and filters naturally into the water table. Bioswales simultaneously reduce the percentage of impervious surface and provide onsite treatment for stormwater runoff. Most cities do not have any type of filtration for stormwater and the water from streets and parking lots goes straight into nearby streams and rivers when it rains, taking with it a host of fine sediment and automotive products pollution as well as surging into the river more quickly compared to natural river systems where the riparian zones are intact. Instead of running directly into the nearby Willamette River, our bioswale filters the rainwater runoff and percolates it naturally into the water table. All of our landscaping was designed to need only a modest amount of water to stay happy. Native grasses and forbs lining the bioswale promote on-site filtration and infiltration. Additionally, a number of large canopy trees were planted throughout the exterior, providing shade and reducing the heat island affect.
• Alternative transportation is encouraged. We installed indoor and outdoor bike parking as well as shower facilities for our staff that rides, walks, or skates to work.
• With regards to indoor environmental air quality, we used green carpets and green paints throughout the building where we did not restore the original wood flooring. This means that both the paints and the carpets we used were made to have low or no releases of VOCs (volatile organic compounds).
• In 1999, our local utility became the first public utility in Oregon to build and own a wind farm. Customers were given the opportunity to devote a portion of their electric bills to support the development and generation of Windpower, which uses no fossil fuels and produces no pollution. Although it is at a premium over regular electrical rates, we subscribe to this program and receive 100% wind power.
• We learned that historic preservation is sometimes at odds with green building principles, so it forced us to get creative with our design. Designing and building a green building from the ground up is substantially easier than taking an existing structure and following principles of historic preservation while also incorporating principles of green design. In the end, we believe that keeping the existing structure as intact as possible is the greenest thing we did with the building project. For instance, green building principles would have called for us to replace all of the old windows with modern high-performance ones, but historic guidelines required us to keep the old iron windows intact as they were an important architectural feature of the original design. The answer required us to have double pane, low-E custom window panes specially fabricated and installed in order to create the best of an old window upgraded to modern standards. From a materials perspective, we also reused many of materials found in the building, including most doors. Where materials could not be reused they were first sorted for recycling.

From a practical standpoint, following the “Standards for Rehabilitation” meant changing the building as little as possible and preserving as much of the “historic fabric” as possible. This “historic fabric” included the old garage doors and hardware, the open exposed wood ceilings, the original metal window frames, original wood flooring, and the former historic offices located in the Tactics retail area (which became the Tactics snowboard tuning center). Although we did not ultimately seek LEED certification due to the fact that the costs of certification did not scale well for a project of this size, we followed the LEED guidelines and the project would have qualified for certification. The building was ultimately successfully listed in the National Historic Registry. We hope that this project can serve as a model for maintaining a tie to the past while incorporating environmentally sound building principles.