By late next year, Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood will be home to a new six-story office building that strives to be the greenest commercial building in the world. The new structure will hold the offices of the environmentally-focused Bullitt Foundation. The Bullitt Center was designed to meet the requirements of the Living Building Challenge, and if it passes a self-sufficiency test after its first year, it will receive Living Building Status.
The criteria for a “living building” are determined by the International Living Future Institute, a Seattle-based organization dedicated to changing green building standards. The ILFI’s standards are considered to be the world’s hardest to meet. So far, only three buildings have been fully certified as Living, though about 100 other projects are in the works.
The building’s design aims to have net-zero emissions, meaning the building was designed to produce just as much energy as it uses. The roof of the building will be topped with photovoltaic panels that will produce enough energy in the summer to offset wintertime deficits and break even over the course of the year. The Bullitt center is expected to use less than one fourth of the energy of a normal building of its size.
The building also must supply and treat it’s own water, using a 50,000-gallon underground storm water cistern. One problem reported in the piece was regarding water treatment. Currently, the plans for the center show that it will collect rainwater for showers, sinks and drinking fountains, then filter the used water though a lower level green roof and landscaping. The raw sewage will be composted and sanitized before it’s shipped offsite to be converted into fertilizer. The problem, however, is that Washington State’s Department of Public Health requires public use buildings like this one that get water from anything other than the city, to chlorinate it.
Chlorine is on the prohibited list of the Living Building Challenge. The building’s designers are petitioning for ozone purification, which is a less toxic method. A number of green buildings have used or are considering the use of ozone as a green alternative to treating rain water or grey water in such applications. Ozone is made from oxygen in air and after use, ozone decomposes to back to oxygen leaving no disinfection by products. In addition, since it is made from air, there is no need to buy or store chemicals on site.