The greenest office building ever

There are a lot of things that people and business owners can do to make the buildings they live and work in more environmentally friendly. When I was young, teachers taught us to recycle the paper we used in class, and that's now a ubiquitous baseline standard.

Last weekend I went to a retreat where every building was made out of reclaimed materials and the compost was used to fertilize the garden in the back and we washed our meal down with harvested rainwater. That's a much more intricate system that brings together a lot of the refined techniques around at present. When I got back to my apartment, I tossed my food scraps into our compost bin that the city picks up. In an urban setting, that's doing pretty well.

But what if an office building were to go all the way? What if a new building in a progressive city were to take everything we know about environmentally friendly urban living and create a brand new building out of it that was not a conceptual model but a real, functioning office building.

Seattle is doing it.

As Adele Peters reports in GOOD, the new Bullitt Center in Seattle is a six-story office building that goes well beyond the baseline LEED certification. It's solar powered, harvests enough rainwater to supply the building throughout a 100-day drought, uses the most sustainable building materials available while avoiding all chemicals and does everything it can to meet the LIVING BUILDING CHALLENGE.

As you would expect, the creators of this building are hoping to serve as an example for other construction.

As they say:

"The goal of the Bullitt Center is to change the way buildings are designed, built, and operated to improve long-term environmental performance and promote broader implementation of energy efficiency, renewable energy and other green building technologies in the Northwest." Way to plant the seed.

Image courtesy of Cargo Cult via flickr