LEED THE NEW GOLD FOR COLORADO DEVELOPMENTS

EPA Walks the Walk on New Denver Headquarters

By Headwaters News, 3-06-07

It’s cool to be ‘green’ these days. Sustainability is the new standard for communities, lifestyles and building codes. And in Denver, the Environmental Protection Agency is putting its practices where its policies are with its new Region 8 headquarters. 

The Denver Rocky Mountain News reports that the building in downtown Denver sports a garden roof, replete with 40,000 plants—half of which were obtained locally—thus reducing even the emissions required to move the materials to the site.

Opus Northwest, the developer of the building, has applied for a Gold rating under the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards.

The gardenscape roof will capture rain and filter out pollutants, and reduce the warming effects generally caused by sunlight reflecting off concrete. 

Yesterday, we wrote on a Denver Post article that called into question the revived practice of capturing rainfall that runs off roofs in Colorado’s Douglas County.  In that article, a Denver water attorney surmised that the water-stingy practice may put some residents on the wrong side of the law in the state.  If the practice of landscaping rooftops catches on in Colorado, there may need to be another regulation on “consumptive” use of the rainfall captured up on the roof.

Also, in Colorado, Vail Resorts continues its green trek with the announcement that it intends to build a billion-dollar, 1-million-square foot development designed and built to earn LEED certification.

The Denver Post reports that Ever Vail, as the development has been dubbed, will be built using the latest environmentally friendly techniques. It is the third foray into the ‘green’ for Vail Resorts, which last August became one of the first publicly traded U.S. corporations to offset its entire electricity consumption with the purchase of wind-energy credits. The next month, it announced a partnership with the National Forest Foundation to raise money for conservation projects.

An added bonus for the environmentally conscious corporation is the investment capital Ever Vail may attract. Investing in projects that have a pro-environment angle is attracting a lot of investors’ money these days. So despite the warning of one executive that building green can drive up the costs of projects by at least 10 percent, Ever Vail may green up Vail Resort’s bottom line: the company’s stock closed up 30 cents on Monday

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