Benign Design: Environmental Considerations for Printing Plants and Expansions (Part One)

By: Jim Rosenberg This story is the first half of a two-part E&P series.

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In terms of saving untouched land and avoiding negative consequences of unneeded additional manufacturing and transportation, reusing a building or just its developed, possibly polluted property may be the most environmentally conscious approach to selecting a building site.

A similar sensitivity, however, can guide projects across the spectrum of site selection, from crowded downtowns and contaminated old industrial districts, to larger areas near the limits of cities and towns, to suburban industrial parks and even entirely undeveloped land.

A greenfield project requires new land, new utilities and services, new materials and transport. But like many other cleared -- though neither new nor necessarily clean -- sites, by starting from scratch, such projects have the advantage of being, if only in operation, energy efficient and environmentally friendly by original design.

Besides suitability for a proposed building and the equipment and processes it will house, Scot Sherick, newspaper/print media director for The Facility Group, Smyrna, Ga., says a site's selection and development should take into account certain natural and human elements. Among them, landscaping means selection of vegetation that either thrives with no more than the area's precipitation or can be irrigated from collected stormwater, which also can be metered from a retention basin for use in a man-made wetland to filter the water.

The amount of paving and the materials used also will affect groundwater and runoff. Maximizing permeable surface area without sacrificing paved area can in some places be accomplished simply by resorting to gravel rather than asphalt, as Sherick says he recommended in Bluffton, S.C., for the McClatchy Co.

More-sophisticated permeable paving also is available for high-traffic sites. An example, says Mike Pusich, vice president and media planning director at Austin Aecom (which completed the Bluffton project), is Unilock's paving system, which "in many cases can replace the need for retention basins and provide more-attractive surfaces for large parking areas ... and pedestrian traffic." Though not always applicable and requiring some engineering, he says, the system "has the appearance of an old cobblestone street."

Before employees even enter a building, the personal and natural environments intersect at paving and parking. Planners and designers must conduct a shift analysis, says Sherick, pointing out that the "natural ebb and flow of employees" can minimize parking needs -- for example, where press crews use the same spaces at night occupied by the cars of mailroom workers doing pre-runs during the day. Parking may be more important -- especially at remote greenfield sites -- for night-side production shifts, which don't always correspond well with public transportation schedules.


Staying in town

When comparing costs of greenfield and expansion projects (assuming there is sufficient adjacent or nearby land for the latter), Forum Architects founder Charles A. Rosati insists that "it just doesn't make sense anymore to abandon an existing location and a good site."

Rosati cites as recent expansion examples his firm's work for the Elyria, Ohio, Chronicle-Telegram (E&P, July 2005) and Cheyenne's Wyoming Tribune-Eagle. Forum and Kansas City-based engineering, construction, and environmental services firm Burn & McDonnell (which partner on newspaper energy audits) are working to accommodate production of a smaller sister paper in Laramie (E&P, Sept. 2006), expand commercial printing opportunities, and create a more efficient production process.

Those locally owned 25,008- and 15,667-circulation dailies fit a pattern of design and environmental sensitivity observed by others. "The opportunity for change exists more in independent ... than in corporate newspapers," with their centralized purchasing and decision-making, says Sherick. Smaller groups and family-owned papers "will likely be the first to consider this," he adds, whereas most large, publicly traded newspaper companies will follow if they find it makes financial sense, "because they're answering to shareholders who don't live in those communities."

While Austin Aecom's experience has been mixed, says Pusich, "the brownfield option has probably received more play recently than greenfield." Recent brownfield projects have been undertaken by three very large clients, though two are employee-owned companies.

For its new plant, the Omaha (Neb.) World-Herald insisted on building downtown after seeing so many other businesses leave, whereas the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's "prime consideration" was being located on a bus route for its workers, according to Pusich. An exception whose biggest shareholders proved the rule, the third project, The Kansas City Star production plant, resulted from the paper's and former Knight Ridder Chairman Tony Ridder's commitment to the city's downtown redevelopment initiative (E&P, Nov. 10, 2003).

Availability of public transportation is a big draw for downtown site selections, but parking is still required. Availability and cost of land can make that a problem. But with 35 acres, the Journal Sentinel was the largest of the three sites; the Star was able to use area parking lots; and the World-Herald built on its lot a three-story garage that the city asked to be enlarged to six stories. The newspaper company owns the garage, which the city participated in building and now manages.

All three were able to acquire "appropriate production area" at sites that were chosen, in part, for good access by large trucks, says Pusich. On its big site and connected to its production plant, the Journal Sentinel converted a former steel-fabricating plant into a truck-maintenance facility and warehouse for newsprint and preprints, with each function managed by a third party.

All three sites had foundation issues because some of what had been there before often remained. Because not every structure on every site makes it into a city's records, surprises turn up during excavation. As for pollution, Pusich called it a "very, very minor" matter in these cases. The Omaha and Kansas City sites already had been largely remediated. Some ground contamination was identified in Milwaukee, but the project managed to keep excavation away from hot spots and followed guidelines for paving.


One major metro's move

After investing well over $100 million, the Journal Sentinel production moved into a new, 435,000-square-foot plant in West Milwaukee. Among other reasons, the site was chosen for its highway and rail access and its size, which allowed in-line installation of its 18 KBA printing towers and consolidation of all printing and packaging at one location.

The company received no tax breaks or energy cost subsidies and sought no retraining funds, although it likely would have qualified, according to then-Publisher Keith Spore (E&P, Dec. 18 1999). Saying his community had "the highest tax rate in the state," West Milwaukee Village Administrator Tim Freitag welcomed the plant, telling the Journal Sentinel at the time that it would help restore a tax base hurt by "the decline of our old smokestack industries."

Acting as owner's representative, Milwaukee-based Sigma Development conducted feasibility studies leading to the site selection.

The Sigma Group comprises three businesses, which often act together. Sigma Development applies civil/site engineering and project management expertise throughout planning, design, construction and operations, with emphasis on integrating environmental repair with redevelopment. Sigma Environmental Services devises solutions to air, water, land, and facility process issues, focusing on controlling costs and liabilities, regulatory compliance and improved performance. Sigma Leasing integrates services such as fluid-filtration chemical recovery, waste reduction, and quality improvement with manufacturing.

Although he recalled no concerns by nearby brewer's hops processors being discussed during any of the meeting he attended ('The Right Site,' November E&P), Sigma Development Principal Dave Scherzer remembers the project as Wisconsin's largest brownfield development in terms of the size of the property, the structures and the investment.

Journal Sentinel was the first in years to invest in the area, and today it is "probably the hottest real estate area in Milwaukee," says Scherzer.

Where the presses now roll, on the site's western portion, stood a building that housed a fabricator and painter of corrugated steel for construction. The balance of the site was most recently occupied by a Babcock & Wilcox stainless steel tube extrusion mill. Earlier, other industrial companies did similar manufacturing at the site.

The first acquired property, on 10 acres, was split, with two buildings still up. One, a vacant "box," was retrofitted by the paper as a warehouse "integrated into the press hall," says Scherzer. A key attraction was that it "had high bays and rail tracks going into it." The other building, a vandalized former headquarters, served as on-site project offices, then was demolished.

"The site was heavily contaminated with PCB," Scherzer recalls, and some areas, including the groundwater, still were when the Journal Sentinel acquired the land. After Babcock & Wilcox and others had paid to clean and contain the contamination, the state's natural resources department issued a "No Further Action" letter. But the site is deed restricted, with soil in seven defined areas requiring special handling. So, when Journal Sentinel built, it had to deal with restrictions placed on use of some areas, for example, in the placement of sewer lines, according to Scherzer.


LEED-heeding expansions

Soon after Milwaukee's production project was under way, The Kansas City Star began building a new plant in a blighted downtown district designated for redevelopment (E&P, Nov. 10, 2003) - but at a site adjacent to its offices.

The paper not only selected a more-costly brownfield site, but eventually chose to incorporate elements from Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a voluntary 6-year-old program that aims to achieve sustainable site development with appropriate materials (preferably recycled/recyclable/locally supplied), efficient use of water and energy, and attention to indoor environmental quality through observance of "green building" standards and promotion of "whole-building design practices."

Organized by the U.S. Green Building Council, LEED uses a voluntary rating system as a standard for developing what the council calls "high-performance, sustainable buildings." Tony Bandy-Zalatoris, Forum senior associate architect, LEED, says the program takes into account the energy that goes into manufacturing various building products and that it is an incentive for manufacturers to improve their processes and products. The permeable paving mentioned by Pusich, for example, is certified as a sustainable site treatment. "So it gets LEED credits when used properly," he says.

"The Star building was just a perfect candidate" for sustainable design, said Juan G. Moreno, at that time chief design architect with The Austin Co. and today a design director at Austin Aecom.

Working toward energy conservation, recycling, use of recycled materials and other elements of LEED "is a company mantra today" and is viewed as an architectural responsibility, Pusich says, adding that Austin Aecom pays for employees to become LEED certified.

"Probably one in five clients today ask us about LEED certification or sustainability," he continues. It represents a big change, according to Pusich, who says a year ago there were virtually no such inquiries.

More recently, two other newspapers -- one relatively small and locally owned, the other large and owned by a publicly traded firm based 1,400 miles away (a second exception to Sherick's conjecture, it nevertheless retains a local identity strongly tied to its former family ownership) -- also have chosen LEED-compatible on-site expansions.


Green in northern Ohio ...

Expanding its in-town site to an adjacent lot occupied by a small building, the 25,008-circulation Chronicle-Telegram, Elyria, just west of Cleveland, Ohio (E&P, July 2005), will consolidate operations by printing a smaller nearby sister paper, The Medina County Gazette. Besides adding almost 30,000 square feet, the project calls for renovation of existing offices and conversion of some former production space to office use.

Drawing on characteristics of the existing building and plans for the addition, the project, scheduled for completion next year, is the only newspaper among the hundreds LEED-registered projects currently posted by the council, which counts 624 LEED-certified projects worldwide, 92% of them in the United States. (The only newspaper company on that list, Hearst recently earned gold-level certification for its new corporate headquarters in New York.)

Some clients, says Forum Newspaper Services Principal Steve Barber, ask for nothing more than the simplest structure to enclose production. "That's fine, we can make a handsome box," he says. Others, especially those in a city or town, look for a better fit, knowing the building will reflect on the business. It was a priority in Elyria, Barber says.

Those basic concerns are part of preplanning, where Forum, says Rosati, "really tries to push the limit of what we can do" while serving a client's needs. Of course, the client ultimately makes those decisions. Knowing most of a project's budget is dedicated to the production processes, the architect's challenge, says Barber, is figuring out how to "achieve this for you without being extravagant."

Austin Aecom raises environmental issues as part of the process in the course of a job, with the working environment generally discussed at the outset, says Pusich. In "a kind of collaborative effort," and working from local codes as the baseline, architect and client consider how a project can be improved within the client's design parameters, which are set during the first, programming stage.

A lot goes into the considerations, he continues, because it makes long- and short-term financial sense to build in sustainability.

Sherick's experience has been similar. When discussing proposed projects with clients, he finds "at least one environmental aspiration," even when it wasn't a stated intent of the project. Then, "when you push a little further," he adds, "it typically leads to others."

In Elyria, the owners "wanted to be able to use LEED concepts where they made sense," but without inflating the costs, says Paul Martin, also Newspaper Services Principal at Forum and formerly Thomson Newspapers Production vice president. As planning proceeded, he says, Forum found many opportunities to bring down costs in such areas as roofing materials, insulation, wiring and lighting. Some of those improvements were sensible and cost-effective, for example, because wall panels would be stripped off anyway.

Exploiting and adding to natural lighting in Elyria's building improved the work environment while helping cut operating costs. Forum recently had put skylights into a 10,000-square-foot addition to Times-Shamrock Communications' Scranton, Pa., plant. Bandy-Zalatoris says the supplier will install the skylights and charge the client only at the rate of savings on lighting costs.

To keep the illumination level constant, he says, "they've added a layer of diffusers to the lights." Fluorescent lights automatically turn on when a cloud passes, he adds.

Exploiting natural light has less to do with the amount of window glass than with a building's profile, says Sherick. The center of a "fat" building gets little natural light and ventilation, while in a longer, narrower building, personnel can be stationed nearer windows. But maximum interior exposure also means not arranging the offices of relatively few executives around the windowed perimeter, he adds. But the shape, size, arrangement and use of production plants is such that skylights are a good solution.

Sherick observed that "as we become more energy aware," designs are reverting to use of natural lighting and ventilation.

In what the May 2004 edition of Metropolis magazine called "the most ambitious lighting experiment in American commercial real estate," the New York Times Co. built a prototype section of its 51-story Manhattan headquarters, now under construction 15 blocks south of Hearst's just-opened headquarters. Erected at its Queens production plant, the large structure was designed for a years-long, round-the-clock study, led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, of how best to supply and control illumination in the new building, which will feature an 800-foot glass curtain wall, as well as artificial lighting, sensors and controls, inside and out. (Lighting systems supplier Mechoshade has archived a PDF of the story on its Web site.)

Natural light is but one design feature that can improve savings and the workplace. The amenities, aesthetics, and ergonomics of workplace improvement are a "benefit of good architecture," says Barber, recalling an industry conference that considered the effects of the working environment on staff in the mailroom -- an area characterized by repetitive work, high turnover, and part-time, often second, jobs. Earlier research at non-newspaper projects, he adds, has shown that better design can improve employee morale to the point that their attendance and even dress improves.

Sherick says studies have shown that improvements to the workplace environment such as natural ventilation and illumination, and furnishing with no noxious emissions, also boost employee productivity, job satisfaction and retention, as well as community relations. He cites a California distribution company that saw a 48% decline in absenteeism and 5% increase in productivity.

In the long view, consideration of LEED issues "supports the client's ROI," says Bandy-Zalatoris. "The better the building is designed, the better it is for the client." Sherick agrees, adding that return on investment depends on how intelligently money is invested "to make a sustainable building."

Among key considerations in sustainable design, probably the first, says Sherick, is for architects to educate clients about the benefits. "They need to understand that there's additional cost" to a green approach, which he very roughly estimates at 10%, or maybe $15 per square foot for an office building. The more-quantifiable paybacks are in energy savings, retention (hiring and training savings) and productivity.

Clearly, newspapers haven't been rushing to spend on green building, as most architects publicly or privately concede. But LEED is still a young program, and even before its birth some newspapers were seeing benefits from improved workplaces and efficient energy use. And Sherick says that in recent years he hasn't been involved in a project where there has not been consideration of "at least some component of the overall program." Few ask for environmentally friendly buildings because it's not at the forefront of objectives, he says. But when asked, clients are often agreeable. "So you have to dive in a little bit."

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