Aggregates Manager Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/85652
Luck Stone built the new scale house at its Charlottesville Plant in Shadwell, Va., operation, to meet EarthCraft Light Commercial standards. BUILDING Green Luck Stone incorporates sustainability into its new scale office. W by Therese Dunphy, Editor-in-Chief hen an increase in traffic created a serious safety issue at its main quarry entrance, Luck Stone decided to relocate the entrance of its Charlot- tesville Plant in Shadwell, Va., to the opposite end of the operation. The company leveraged this op- portunity to incorporate green building practices into the construction of its new scale office. The project supports the company's commitment to evaluate all future projects to see if they should be built according to green building standards such as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmen- tal Design) or similar green building certification programs. The new 2,000-square-foot scale office is Luck Stone's first construction project built to meet certification for green building, in this case, through EarthCraft Light Commercial specifications. "Luck Stone has always been an environmen- tally conscious company," says Mike White, senior project manager for Luck Stone's Environmental Design & Development department. "Our thinking has always been to go beyond the compliance to the minimum requirements of governing agencies." When planning the scale office project, the team quickly realized that LEED certification — which is more suited for larger projects — was fairly restrictive in terms of the amount of fees and docu- mentation required for such a comparatively small project. At the time, EarthCraft, a regional green building certification program that had originally focused on residential green building, had identi- fied the small commercial segment as being a largely under-served niche and was in the process of developing standards for this segment. "They were developing a program called Earth- Craft Light Commercial," White explains. "We were one of the pilot projects for that program, so we worked with them back and forth, helping them to evaluate their program criteria and designing our building to meet those criteria." GREEN BUILDING50 SOLAR50