Going ‘Deep Green,’ Office Buildings Give Back to the Planet

As technology costs have declined, more developers are creating buildings that can benefit the Earth by tackling pollution and save money by producing their own power.

By Jane Margolies, New York Times

Photo credit: Rachel Meyer/Weber Thompson

For a couple of decades, many in the real estate industry have been trying to make buildings “green,” replacing conventionally made materials with sustainable ones and installing energy-efficient systems. Buildings have a heavy environmental footprint, so the upshot of all this tinkering has been structures that are less harmful to the planet.

Now some developers are going further with “deep green” buildings that are actually good for it.

The new approach has been pioneered by nonprofit organizations, educational institutions and mission-driven owner occupants seeking to show that buildings can, say, generate all their own power or turn waste from toilets into garden fertilizer. Now commercial real estate is taking up the baton, with projects that uphold ever-higher environmental standards, and sometimes even tackle knotty public problems like local sources of water pollution.

Gerding Edlen, a developer in Portland, Ore., has joined forces with other companies on the five-story PAE Living Building in its hometown that will essentially operate its own on-site power plant (thanks to rooftop solar) as well as its own wastewater treatment plant (liquid waste from urinals will be converted to agriculture-grade fertilizer). Water that lands on the roof will be filtered so that it is drinkable.

PAE came up with the idea for the project and will be the building’s anchor tenant. The firm and the other companies involved — including ZGF Architects and Walsh Construction — have taken an equity stake in the project. Among them, they have worked on hundreds of LEED-certified buildings.

“There got to be a point of, what’s next?” Mr. Schwer of PAE said.