Duke challenges green guidelines

It's not easy being green, especially if you want credit for it.

University officials and the U.S. Green Building Council are reassessing guidelines for environmentally-conscious building design that credit individual projects but are difficult to apply to an amalgamation of buildings.

Duke recently declared its commitment to "greening" the entire campus by adding "environmental sustainability and sensitivity" as the ninth guiding principle of its Master Plan, and the issue of recognition will only intensify as the University proceeds with more than a dozen construction projects in the next few years.

Executive Vice President Tallman Trask noted that USGBC's current standards for awarding environmental honors are "not appropriate for a campus" that presents distinct architectural and structural challenges.

USGBC is evaluating its processes to make its Leadership in Energy and Engineering Design ratings more applicable to universities and other diversely constructed institutions. Sabrina Morelli, a spokesperson for the organization, acknowledged that aspects of the LEED certification checklist are currently difficult to apply to universities.

When the Center for Interdisciplinary Engineering, Medicine and Applied Sciences opens this fall, it will likely bear a silver mark, and when the University breaks ground on the new facility for the Nicholas School of the Environment, administrators hope it will glimmer with gold or even platinum.

Administrators plan for every building touched by construction from this point forward to meet certification criteria, but with most of Duke's construction on a tight budget, silver will likely stand as the maximum level achievable.

Buildings win points for successes such as water-efficient landscaping and an abundance of natural light. But restrictions are inherent to every building--some laboratories, for example, have limitations on the number of windows allowed.

For individual buildings, such as the French Sciences Center, this is not a major problem because they can make up points in other categories. Much of Duke's greening progress, however, applies to groups of buildings, Trask said. For example, rainwater runoff is collected at several sites on campus rather than at each individual building, and under the current awards system, this means the University forfeits those points.

USGBC does offer a "multiple building certification" for which the centralized collection systems would get credit, but grouping myriad buildings together makes it more difficult to check some boxes on the LEED form that are generally more attainable because USGBC evaluates categories in the aggregate.

"When we're certifying a multiple building project, we're certifying the whole campus," Morelli said. But most of those complexes are relatively small and comprised of similar buildings. Different purposes for buildings translate to different restrictions.

USGBC has no way to take these factors into account, so the lack of windows in FSC could prevent the Divinity School addition from earning a natural light credit.

Other University initiatives, such as the energy-conscious utility distribution system, are not counted in the point system at all because smaller-scale developments usually receive these services from the city.

Because Duke cannot count all its green efforts, LEED certification becomes more expensive, which is part of what has sent University administrators off to negotiate with USGBC.

"We're very interested in making sure that they know we do things on a University-wide basis rather than on an individual basis," University Architect John Pearce said.

Students who have helped Duke institutionalize its environmental commitment noted that the University is not seeking shortcuts or "greenwashing," but merely receiving credit for its gains.

"It's unfortunate that individual buildings get penalized because of campus-wide improvements," said Anthony Vitarelli, a senior and founder of the Duke University Greening Initiative. "We could actually lose points for some of the things we've done."