Annual Ranking Reveals Top 10 States for LEED Green Building

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. Green Building Council recently announced the Top 10 States for LEED, an annual ranking that highlights states throughout the United States that made significant strides in sustainable building design, construction and transformation over the past year. Topping the list is Massachusetts, which moved from third to first place with a total of 136 LEED certified projects representing 3.73 square feet of certified space per resident. Now in its seventh year, the ranking assesses the total square feet of LEED-certified space per resident based on U.S. Census data and includes commercial and institutional green building projects certified during 2016. Illinois and Colorado are … Read more

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El Monte Gateway Development Team Celebrates Groundbreaking of Mixed-Use Development

SANTA ANA, Calif. – This month, El Monte Gateway celebrates a significant milestone in its ambitious transit-oriented development realization. On Thursday, Feb. 16, SVA Architects, the city of El Monte, California and the El Monte Gateway development team will celebrate the groundbreaking of a mixed-use apartment community, also known as Parcel 4. The project is composed of market-rate apartments with ground-floor commercial and retail uses; this new community is a key component of the El Monte Gateway Master Plan – a walkable and transit friendly district with linkage to bike trails along Rio Hondo River. Transit-oriented development El Monte Gateway … Read more

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Balfour Beatty to Build New Blackbaud Corporate Campus in Charleston

CHARLESTON, S.C. – Holder Properties has selected Balfour Beatty Construction to build a new corporate campus for Blackbaud in Charleston, South Carolina. Headquartered in Charleston since 1989, Blackbaud is a provider of software and services for the global philanthropic community. Blackbaud’s new corporate campus will consolidate its Charleston operations into one location situated on 13 acres in the Daniel Island community. Balfour Beatty has been contracted to build the project’s first phase consisting of a four-story, 172,000-square-foot office building and 650-space surface parking lot. Once complete, Blackbaud’s campus will provide a modern workplace for its employees, featuring a coffee and … Read more

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Skanska’s Expo 2 Project Receives Envision Platinum Certificate for Green Infrastructure

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – Skanska’s project, the Expo Line Phase 2 Extension, located in Los Angeles, California, has received Envision Platinum certification from the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure. It is the first transit project to receive the certification, as well as Skanska’s first Envision-certified project. Additionally, at more than $700 million, it is the largest project by contract value to achieve the certification. Much like LEED for building construction, Envision is a groundbreaking resource for professionals involved in planning, designing, building and maintaining civil infrastructure. The system provides a holistic framework for evaluating and rating the community, environmental and economic … Read more

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Maximizing LEED Points on the Jobsite

By Thomas Taylor Studies from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency state that Americans spend 90 percent or more of their lives indoors1. This is one reason why the USGBC’s LEED 2009 rating system, which is being used by most project teams that have potential LEED-certified projects in the works, rewards teams from keeping harmful materials out of the facilities they build. Almost all manufactured materials used on construction sites contain some amount of chemicals. The truth is, chemicals that emit harmful gasses into the air, a process that is known as off-gassing, can be found in all sorts of other … Read more

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