First Green Globes certification given to new University of North Carolina housing facility

The Green Building Initiative (GBI) announced that the University of North Carolina-Charlotte’s Belk Hall, a student housing facility for the college’s upper division students, is the first building certified under the 2013 Green Globes for New Construction (NC), according to GBI president Jerry Yudelson.

Belk Hall achieved 507 out of 918 available points for a score of 55%, which is equivalent to a 2 Green Globes rating.

“The current Green Globes for New Construction program very effectively captures essential sustainable components of a building project that ultimately result in an optimized life cycle cost and a ‘cradle-to-gate approach’ for evaluating building materials’ environmental impacts,” Yudelson said. “Belk Hall adopted many of these critical design elements and best practices, resulting in a high performance building with a long sustainable future.”

Specifically, the Belk Hall building project incorporated, in a very substantive manner, key criteria in the Green Globes NC Materials and Resources section, including current and cutting-edge materials performance criteria, with optional paths for a prescriptive approach dealing with a material’s environmental characteristics.

The updated Green Globes NC also includes significant prescriptive criteria related to protection of the building envelope from the elements, and also several current “best practices” building management criteria. Besides earning the maximum credit in the life cycle assessment performance path for core and shell materials, Belk Hall’s design team also developed a Building Life Service Plan, which sets the stage to optimize the entire building life cycle, ultimately assisting the building’s future managers in maintaining and improving sustainability over time.

“An in-person review [by the Green Globes Assessor] of the actual building and systems is helpful in determining whether the strategies we described in our submittal have been implemented successfully,” architect and project manager Tracy Randazzo, AIA, of Clark Nexsen Architecture & Engineering, Charlotte, said. “We want the end product to be the best it can be.”

Finally, UNC incorporated the vast majority of “best practice” prescriptive design criteria related to building protection associated with the roof, wall cladding and foundation. “The UNC – Charlotte team clearly demonstrated their commitment to environmental excellence through their efforts in this area, as well as stellar performance in energy and water efficiency,” Yudelson said.

U.S. school districts are widely planning to use funds from last year’s American Rescue Plan (ARP) to upgrade or improve air filtration and heating/cooling systems, according to a report from the Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council. The report, “School Facilities Funding in the Pandemic,” says air filtration and HVAC upgrades are the top facility improvement choice for the 5,004 school districts included in the analysis.

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