What I Learned at Rocky Mountain Green

Rocky Mountain Green 2015 was an incredible experience! There was over 500 attendees, many incredible education sessions & building tours!

The Opening Plenary laid out the future plans for the National Western Complex. The Complex would like to connect the (3) adjacent neighbors & be a place that is used year-round complete with a farmers market, new transit stations & an emphasis on the South Platte River bordering the site.

The day then commenced with a full schedule packed with education sessions. Some topics included Greening Colorado's Marijuana Industry, Beyond the Building (what a business can be; not what it's supposed to be), Integrative Design & an introduction to Colorado's Contractor Challenge. The Contractor Challenge is an opportunity to be "green" even if your building isn't pursuing LEED Certification. Some of the examples include having a Green Team, recycling materials on-site, incentivising carpooling, using local materials, etc. 

The picture  to the left shows the different stages in integrative design.

To the right is a screenshot of the Contractors Challenge presentation highlighting how waste can be minimized. 

Friday is spent "off-site" with workshops in the morning and a choice of a bike tour or volunteering for the river clean-up in the afternoon. The workshop I attended was in regards to materials & the new applicable credits for the new LEEDv4 rating system. The credits now focus on the Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) of each material going into a project & the third-party verification of these materials. It's a definite game-changer for all of the suppliers & manufacturers involved! These credits are essentially asking for a "nutrition label" for each material on the job.There are 80,000 chemicals used in the construction industry & only 5 have been banned. That's a lot of unknown hazards & new LEED system has set out to evaluate these hazards.

Friday afternoon was spent biking around Denver looking & getting tours of the new green projects in town. These projects included the new LEED Gold apartment complex that sits right next to Union Station, the new Boathouse infill project which now occupies a once small, vacant lot & is home to offices of small start-up companies. We also biked down the new bike lanes that Denver had implemented & ended with a tour of the Alliance Center which is home to incredible non-profit groups devoted to sustainability. 

Looking forward to next year's Rocky Mountain Green!