Northwestern is officially jumping on the “Going Green” bandwagon as it begins construction on the Community Life Commons (CLC) building.

The college is seeking to get the CLC “Leadership in Energy and Development” (LEED) certified.

LEED is an official measurement on how environmentally friendly the building will be.

It measures different areas that have an environmental impact, including the sustainable sites the building will be built on, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, and indoor environmental quality, along with any other area that Northwestern may feel was not covered in the previous categories.

The process of certification began several years ago as plans for the building were being made.

Northwestern didn’t set out to make an environmental statement with the CLC, but the architects that were hired were LEED certified, and they design all their buildings in accordance with LEED.

In this way, the CLC was already well on its way to becoming certified. So Northwestern decided to take all measures to make the building LEED certified.            

Brian Humphries, the associate vice president of facilities and planning, said: “To get to where we’re at right now, we didn’t have to increase the budget at all, because it was already in the design. [The architects] did a good job designing the building with LEED in mind.”

Right now the CLC building has a score of 31 points out of a possible 69. While there are still 13 points in dispute, the building has reached “certified” status officially. Humphries said Northwestern is not working for the silver certification, because it would raise the budget of the building project significantly.

Humphries said that the most significant area of certification, that will save the school the most money, is in the way the CLC uses energy. The way the building will be heated and cooled will be very efficient.

Had LEED certification not been utilized, the CLC would certainly have cost more money to operate on a regular basis.

In looking at how far they should go in the certification process, the College considered how cost-effective things would turn out to be in the long run.

“There are a lot more steps we could do in costs [to increase our level of certification], and increase the budget to do that,” Humphries said, “but when you calculate what we call the payback of the initial cost to do it versus how long it’s going to take you to pay it back on the energies that you save, it just didn’t make sense that we would increase the budget to do that.”

Humphries feels that the current LEED certification level of “certified” will give the school the greatest savings for money spent.

It is not only the building itself that will benefit from a positive environmental impact, but also the surrounding area.

The city of Arden Hills, under which this building project is operating, has certain requirements when it comes to cutting down trees, which will inevitably happen during the construction process.

The inch caliber of all trees that are cut down in the building process must be calculated.

The school must then plant that many inch caliber of new trees elsewhere on campus.

In the end, all of the potentials for certification will be submitted and reviewed. Once approved by the certification board, Northwestern must build accordingly.

Upon completion of construction, the building will be inspected to make sure that everything that was planned under the LEED certification is operating and functioning properly.