I am interested to hear people's impressions, insights and experiences with "green" building. Although this is a construction forum, I'm also curious to know if you are taking other steps to protect the environment within your business...

We provide E-waste collections.

We wanted to put up a wind generator, but the city wont let us! This is the dumbest thing in the world -- we most always have wind and the mayor is against wind generators!!!

We also wanted to put up solar, but the cost was prohibitive! Would take 40 years of savings to pay it off!!!!

Solar powered light packs on the buildings. IF you are not going to leave your facility open all night use these. they recharge during the day then give you enough light untill your close for the night. I have not looked into the costs but the best thing is that you sometimes do not need to even run electric to them. You save time and Money up front.

Aloha Drew,

Great topic. Although my facility has been around for a number of years, we are always keeping the eye open for ways to lessen the 'footprint' that we leave. I'd love to hear from some of the folks here who are currently developing facilities or who recently developed facilities, and in what areas they took a green approach (and why).

Davelile, do you use the solar packs you mentioned at your facility? If so, I would love to learn your manufacturer so I could contact them for information, if you recommend them.

__________________
Aloha ke akua,
Stoho

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."

please give me the vendor for the solar powered lights
how many hours will they burn?

Thanks

bilvan@gmail.com

When we purchased our third location from bankruptcy. The buildings were made to allow for the addition of climate controlled units.

So we went through and installed all the insulation in the building. And since we were lucky enough to have a none used well on site already. We installed a closed loop geothermal heating and air units for the climate controlled area and our office.

We make sure all of our perspective tenants know that as well.

Drew,

You might consider contacting Greg McVay at Freedom Storage Center in Boise, Idaho about going green. They are making an effort at becoming green beyond the construction end of storage.

__________________
Michael T. Bishop
StorageLand - Management and Consulting Services
www.storageland.com
sales@storageland.com
208-919-0771 (Local)
877-630-0075 (Toll Free)

I've been looking into this myself and some websites that I had found are siliconsolar.com and solarilluminations.com they both are very informative.

Thanks for the insights. I hope more folks chime in--or at least are thinking about it!

We are currently opening our first 'green' storage facility in Philadelphia next month. We are offsetting our carbon footprint by buying carbon credits, so we will be completely carbon neutral. The carbon credits we buy go directly to researching natural energy sources. We have used 'green' certified products to build out our office, such as Vinyl Composite Flooring. We are using all 'green' office supplies and cleaning products, recyclable boxes that are made from sustainable forest regions (certified), large natural lighting, compact flourescent bulbs...and lots of other stuff. This is a great discussion topic, and I'm so excited to see more and more people go green. Our office will be double certified as a 'green office.'