The Phoenix Convention Center received accolades for its environmentally friendly design last year when the U.S. Green Building Council awarded the facility's new West Building LEED-Silver certification.

The site will serve as an appropriate backdrop next week for Greenbuild, the world's largest showcase for green building innovation and ideas hosted by the USGBC. The event will also be carbon neutral thanks to donated carbon credits and renewable energy certificates, one of several efforts aimed at offsetting the conference's hefty environmental footprint.

The recently expanded convention center, which now has 900,000 square feet of meeting and exhibition space and 2.5 million square feet of total space, is now one of the nation's 20 largest.

The expansion project called for the addtion of the all-new West Building; replacing the center's original North Building with a four-level facility that's linked to the West Building by an underground exhibit hall running beneath both structures; renovating the South Building at the center; and creating a pedestrian bridge between the North and West buildings.

The renovations and new structures were designed according to the USGBC's LEED standards. The LEED-Silver-certified West Building was the work of the Leo A. Daly firm and HOK.

Sand and stone construction debris from the West and North building construction sites were sent for recycling, destined one day to find a new life as a concrete additive. The construction materials used were sourced within a 500-mile radius of the site. And inside the facility are more than 21,000 convention center chairs made from recycled car battery casings and seatbelts.

An energy management system keeps consumption and performance optimized. Low-flow toilets and water closets use 42 percent less water than conventional equipment, while high-efficiency irrigation systems have trimmed potable water use for irrigation by 56 percent.

The building's Energy Star-compliant roof sports 732 thin-film solar energy panels, enough to cut the convention center's carbon footprint by 95 metric tons.

The convention center plans to reduce landfill waste associated with the convention with a compost program created in conjunction with the city that will divert food scraps and cutlery. Refillable water bottles also will be handed out instead of bottled water. A robust recycling program already in place helped the convention center recycle more than 500,000 tons of material last year.

A tour of the facility and its green features is being offered Friday afternoon at Greenbuild.

Milliken & Co. and WindCurrent donated carbon credits and renewable energy certificates to neutralize the greenhouse gas emissions generated by the event. Nonprofit Leonardo Academy's Cleaner and Greener program, which offered its services to Greenbuild on a pro bono basis, estimates the conference will consume more than three million kilowatt hours of electricity, while attendants will travel more than 41 million air miles and nearly 2.3 million road miles.

The Cleaner and Greener program helps buildings, companies and events size up their carbon footprints and buy offsets. Certification is given depending on the amount of reduction and offsets achieved. The Greenbuild conference was awarded a Gold-level certification under the program. WindCurrent offered 3,100 MWh of RECs, while the 12,500 metric tons of carbon credits from Milliken are the result of carbon sequestration of its company forests.

Image courtesy of Phoenix Convention Center.