SAVANNAH, United States — As a quickly growing shipping facility, and one that hopes to become the country's biggest and busiest, it's no surprise that the Port of Savannah will soon be home to a major green business park.
At an event at the port yesterday, real estate investment trust
AMB unveiled a 347,000-square-foot facility that is the first of four buildings in its AMB Morgan Business Park. The facility will also be the first industrial building in the Southeast to earn LEED certification; the facility is designed with an eye toward LEED Silver-level performance.
According to Aaron Binkley, AMB's vice president of sustainable programs, the facility will save its tenants nearly $100,000 a year in operating costs through energy and water efficiency programs. Binkley said the building will be nearly 28 percent more energy efficient than a conventional building.
In addition to energy efficiency, the building was also designed to conserve water, something of increasing importance in the water-starved Southeast. Water efficient technologies within the building will save an estimated 300,000 gallons per year in water use, while features like native-plant landscaping will save an addition 300,000 gallons of water per year on the facility's grounds.
In a phone interview, Binkley and Margan Mitchell, AMB's vice president of corporate communications, explained how the new business park fits in with AMB's global strategy, and how trends in supply chain management make these kinds of buildings increasingly common.
The San Francisco-based company has been building high-performance buildings since before the U.S. Green Building Council launched its LEED standard, including its headquarters at Pier 1 on the San Francisco waterfront. But the rise in interest around the globe in green buildings and sustainably supply chains means there are more markets than ever for new and renovated facilities like the Morgan Business Park.
For its existing properties, AMB is working to help tenants make improvements on "low-hanging fruit" like electricity and water efficiency. Binkley explained that AMB can do the research that business owners don't have time to undertake, making it easier to navigate what can be a maze of conflicting information and new technologies and presenting the benefits clearly. "[Business owners] may not all be on board with sustainability ideas," Binkley explained, "but they all understand operating costs."
Ships and shipping ports have been in the environmental spotlight regularly in recent months. At the end of 2007, two California ports
announced plans to reduce emission and pollution from shipping traffic; although the federal government has since
prevented those rules from taking effect, retailers like Lowe's, Home Depot and Target have all joined the
Coalition for Responsible Transportation, a voluntary partnership aimed at achieving the same goals. In February of this year, DHL completed the first voyage of its
environmentally friendly SkySails technology, just two weeks after research from Energy Futures found that container ships were
among the country's biggest transportation-related pollution sources.
