PNC finds it easy to go green

ShareThis

PITTSBURGH -- Ten years ago, Gary Saulson's life was transformed by a telephone conversation and a leap of faith.Saulson, PNC's director of corporate real estate, had already started to watch the banking company's new downtown operations hub, Firstside Center, rise from the ground when he got a call from Rebecca Flora of the Green Building Alliance.The alliance's mission is to promote energy-efficient, environmentally friendly buildings, and Flora wanted Firstside to become such a structure.Saulson was skeptical. "My vision of a green building at that point was dirt floors and straw walls and people walking around in Birkenstocks, and I don't know if they were singing Kumbaya but they might have been."Still, he agreed to set up a meeting with Flora, and before that session was done, "I had committed to making Firstside a green building, even though it was well under construction."I had absolutely no idea what I'd committed to. I knew I had committed to doing the right thing, but that's as far as it went."Today, PNC says it has more LEED-certified "green buildings" than any other company in the world. LEED, run by the United States Green Building Council, stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and comprises a rating system for making sure a building is environmentally sound."It's kind of like the UL label on an extension cord, showing that some independent entity is saying a building works like it is supposed to," Saulson said.By the end of this year, PNC will have 61 buildings in 11 states that either have the certification or are in the process of getting it, he said, including the firm's new office-housing-hotel complex downtown.Most of the green buildings are bank branches, and one day recently, Saulson led a road trip to one of the newest branch buildings, in Richland.The most notable feature of the branch at first glance is the bank of windows near the roof that let natural light spill into the building."This building is built around the windows," he said, because "people really excel" when they get to work in natural light. At Wal-Mart, which also has a green building push under way, studies have even shown that products displayed at the end of an aisle under a natural skylight will post higher sales than the same items sold under artificial light, Saulson said.The glass in the Richland branch's windows has a thin, tinted film sandwiched inside, making them three times more efficient than typical commercial windows, he said. In the late afternoon, when the sun can slice into the building, the tellers have control over motorized blinds that can cut the glare.The branch is bordered by low-water plants that need only concentrated watering for the first couple weeks, and after that can subsist on natural rainfall.When customers walk into the branch, they cross a hog-hair carpet that is especially designed to glom onto dirt and keep it from being tracked inside, "so you increase the air quality in the building."The flooring in the building is a recyclable terrazzo made of ground-up cement and bits of glass; the brick walls are prefabricated to cut down on construction time; and interior panels are also built ahead of time, using recycled steel.The branch is heated and cooled by a high-efficiency unit on the roof and lit by long-lasting fluorescent bulbs.The philosophy the team adopted, he said, was "let's forget about any bank branch we've built in the past. If we were designing a branch from scratch, what attributes would it have and more importantly, if our objective is to build the most affordable and most efficient green bank branch, what would we do?"No item is too small to fall under that spotlight, he said. For instance, when it came time to consider water heaters for the branches, team members first suggested standard home-sized 60- to 80-gallon water heaters."But I said, 'Why?' " Saulson recalled, and after figuring out that the main water needs in a branch would be employee hand washing and occasional cleaning, they decided to install five-gallon water heaters, "and guess what, it works just fine. You really need to go back and challenge everything, and realize that there is nothing that's sacred."By focusing on cost as much as green materials and practices, Mr. Saulson said, (E-mail Mark Roth at mroth(at)post-gazette.com)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)