As part of the Brookline Climate Week, I attended an open house at the town’s LEED Gold certified public health building led by the town’s Health Director Dr. Alan Balsam. The building represents a significant commitment on the part of the Town of Brookline to address sustainability in its public buildings and provide an example of sustainable building practices for the community.
The Brookline Public Health Center was built in 1953. When the building came due for renovation in the early 2000s, Dr. Balsam decided to use the opportunity to make the building a showcase of green building practices by incorporating LEED certification into the retrofit. The town selectmen challenged Dr. Balsam to raise the extra money this would cost. As a result, much of the money was raised privately, including $125,000 from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (now part of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center) and $30,000 raised by community group Friends of Brookline.
The renovated building incorporates a number of sustainable building materials, including cork floors, bamboo paneling, low VOC paints, and shelving made of a cellulosic composite material made from leaves. Other important green features include double glazed windows that can be opened to cool the building, use of glass for interior walls to allow light to penetrate the interior of the building, low flow toilets and waterless urinals, and motion-activated low energy lighting. Old building materials such as wood, metal and toilet fixtures were recycled rather than sent to landfill.
The centerpiece of the renovation is the building’s 25 kilowatt solar photovoltaic system, which Dr. Balsam estimates covers approximately 35% of the building’s electricity use and which saved the city $8000 in electricity costs last year. Visitors will soon be able to monitor the system’s energy generation in real time on a monitor in the lobby. The solar panels are raised so as to be very visible from the street, which Dr. Balsam hopes will serve as advertising for the project and encourage others in the community to consider solar energy. The economics of the solar system were more challenging. While the town estimated a 15 year payback for its contribution, Dr. Balsam estimates that the total payback (including external funding) will be on the order of 50 years. However, this system was purchased before the precipitous drop in solar panel prices of the past few years. A project today would likely see a much faster payback.
Dr.Balsam indicated that he sees the LEED project as a way to encourage sustainable behavior both within the municipal government and in the community through leading by example. He also hopes that the project will provide a way to begin talking to people in the community about the links between climate change and public health threats. The project has already created some converts: Dr. Balsam noted that several people in the town’s building department were initially skeptical but were won over to sustainable building practices by the renovation. As a result of this project, the town is now obliged to include sustainability in its feasibility studies for all future renovations of municipal buildings. Through high visibility projects like this, Brookline is clearly putting sustainability and the threat of climate change on the local political agenda. Hopefully this will lead to more such projects in the future, both within Brookline and in other municipalities in the state.
We believe in creating healthy, environmentally-friendly spaces whenever possible too!
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