Expert Q&As

We caught up with Edmund P. Klimek to discuss the potential for specific LEED standards as they pertain to industrial design and distribution centers.

KSS has been striving to create new standards for industrial facilities that could eventually be adopted as official LEED standards. Can you tell us a little bit about how you're making this happen?

We have been doing a study on how to approach sustainable distribution center design and industrial design. There's been a huge interest in sustainability out there, both in terms of the development community and the end-user groups who use these types of buildings. There have been questions about how one should go about implementing sustainable design, and whether or not these methods can be codified or at least standardized like the LEED system. There are some unique things about these buildings. If you read the USGBC's new construction guidelines, they don't quite fit. What we are trying to do is utilize the same methodology that LEED uses in order to talk about some of the unique issues surrounding industrial design. That, in particular, is what sort of drove the overall process.

How have you been collaborating with NAIOP on this?
We've met with developers, users, and engineers from all over the country. Everyone, especially NAIOP, has been really good about sharing their ideas. I just came back from their first green conference in Arizona and I'll also attend their industrial conference. We're getting the word out about things that can be done, and national developers are beginning to implement these ideas. What we are hoping to do is to work with the USGBC to possibly incorporate some of our ideas within a LEED document. We've had some initial meetings with the USGBC and they've been very receptive to the idea. There's a whole process by which that actually gets done. It could take some time, but that's not preventing us from getting the ideas out there.

You mentioned that there are unique issues regarding distribution centers and industrial design. What are they?
One wonderful thing about LEED is that it's all-encompassing. It's not just about how much energy you save in your building. It's about understanding how a project fits within its environment, how it fits within an urban infrastructure, and how it deals with things like comfort within the building. Taking that overall approach, the first thing we looked at is the impact of this type of development on the urban landscape and on community connectivity. There's a lot of encouragement within LEED to bring buildings closer to urban landscapes. If you're an office building in the center of town, it's easier to walk to work or walk to shops. As you can imagine, while that works really well for things like office buildings, it may not work that well for say, a one million square foot facility. Nobody's going to put that smack in the middle of their town. So, it's not always a matter of putting it in the middle of the town. Rather, it's about making sure that you put industrial buildings in an area where there is an infrastructure that can handle it, particularly an infrastructure of roads or trains so you can access these buildings in an inter-modal fashion. It's about understanding that these buildings are a part of a supply chain.

Ironically, the biggest user of energy for these projects is not the building itself, but the trucks that serve it. Things like shore power make a big difference

How exactly does shore power work?
They plug the cab into a 110 outlet in order to provide heat or air conditioning. It's like a house outlet that powers an inverter in the truck. The inverter then allows you to power the heater. Most modern trucks have that. Not all, but most. It doesn't have a big impact on the building and it's much better for the environment than allowing the trucks to idle.

We also did a lot of research on how energy is used in the building, and lighting contributes enormously. Using motion sensors to shut of the lights in unoccupied areas works really well in terms of its ability to save energy on lighting. It can have a huge impact on energy costs and it can also have a very early payback.

We've learned that natural light makes a huge impact on the operations of a building as well. While warehouses don't tend to be heavily occupied, they do tend to be occupied pretty consistently as to where packing is done, where sorting is done, etc. We've introduced clear-story glazing to allow an enormous amount of natural light into the facility. "Clear story" refers to windows that are high on the building. Putting windows closer to the roof-line really helps to let the light in.

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