Page 23 - ACTL_Sum23

were being used. I worked in aircraft carrier engineering. You stand an aircraft carrier up on end, it’s a high-rise building. Construction really became my passion when I found that a third of all of the waste in the country comes from the con- struction and demolition industry. And that bothered me. Knowing you could engineer materials to do anything, why aren’t we using more recycled content materials in construc- tion? And that really led me down this path of sustainability. The reality is we don’t always have a good plan. High density is great for sustainability, but dense without open space and a connection to nature doesn’t work for us. We have land development codes that require so many park- ing spaces for so much commercial square footage. But times have changed, right? Amazon. I’m not driving to a mall any- more. The mall is coming to my front door, pretty much ev- ery day. But when you put where people live in one location and where they need to work in a different location, you create traffic. Here in South Florida there are rules that say either you will build green or you will pay a four percent construction bond, and four percent on a hundred million dollar building is a pretty big chunk of change. Sources of funding – federal government, local government, private funding are all requiring green building. Prudential, JP Morgan, Barings, Evergreen, all of these companies are saying, “we have to have environmental sustainability goals. We’re not going to invest in your projects unless you build green and are sustainable. We have sharehold- ers that we have to respond to, and this is what they want.” When you are driving out of town, if you look over to the right, you will be able to pick out the 1000 Museum building out of the downtown skyline because it has a very interesting exo- skeleton. This is a great project, silver certified, fun to work on because they had a significant budget and it wasn’t all about trying to value engineer everything – value engineering being cost cutting, not necessarily adding value. So I come in and I try to get them to add value. Let’s talk about Greenland because it probably is the most interesting of the places that I’ve been. If you look at aerial photos you can actually see that the edges of Greenland are melt- ing. So our job was to go out onto the ice in July to lay down reflective blankets to see if we couldpreserveice.Two-thirdsoftheworldgetsitsfreshdrinkingwaterfromglaciermeltand snow. So this wasn’t anything to do with sea level rise, it was having to do with fresh water. SUMMER 2023 JOURNAL 22