November 5, 2007

Recreational Facilities

Design of Kingston arenas meet LEED standards

Entertainment complexes pose novel challenges

FRANK ARMSTRONG

CORRESPONDENT

KINGSTON

Developers in Kingston are learning new ways to build green as they apply national environmentally-friendly building standards to the design and construction of two massive arena projects.

A $46.1-million, 5,000 seat sports and entertainment complex is being built downtown by EllisDon Construction while a $33.6-million, four-pad arena is being built in the city’s northwest end by Peak Engineering. Both are being erected to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Silver standard, otherwise known as LEED.

CITY OF KINGSTON

National environmental standards are being applied to Kingston’s new arenas.

Regulated by the Canada Green Building Council, the standard provides a set of guidelines that designers and contractors can follow to ensure their projects meet certain environmental, efficiency and sustainable building standards.

Eric Stephenson, EllisDon’s manager of sustainable building and LEED development, said building an arena to the relatively new LEED standards is a novel challenge because LEED was designed to accommodate commercial buildings, such as office buildings or manufacturing plants, not arenas.

“The sports complex is of quite a bit different nature and certainly with the particularities of air handling systems in an arena, when you add LEED considerations to the design, it complicates matters,” Stephenson said.

While 90 per cent of LEED considerations are design-related, Stephenson said there are still a lot of issues that must be addressed by the contractor.

Meeting LEED standards requires a lot of extra documentation to show that LEED criteria are being met, so someone must be assigned to ensure that, for example, all diversion of construction waste from landfill and the recycling of materials is noted.

Paul MacLatchy, director of strategy, environment and communications for the City of Kingston, said there are a number of novel features being installed at the two arenas to ensure their LEED status.

Front and centre are energy-efficient ice-making machines.

“There are some big opportunities for arenas because making the ice is really energy intensive,” MacLatchy said.

Also, better-than-usual insulation is being installed so the ice machines don’t have to work so hard.

At the same time, the waste heat from these machines will be reused where possible, such as pre-heating the shower water in the locker rooms and heating the floors in those rooms.

The interior ceilings above the rinks will be reflective so the heat generated by people in the stands doesn’t radiate back down at the ice, MacLatchy said.

As with other LEED projects, bathrooms will operate more efficiently with low-flow showers and taps and motion detectors will be installed on lights so they turn off when nobody is there. Motion detectors will also automatically turn on and off washroom taps and flush toilets.

MacLatchy said the arenas are just two of several municipal buildings that are being built to LEED standards as a result of a 2004 council decision to be environmentally responsible and build green.

“By 2014 we want a 25 per cent reduction in our corporate greenhouse gas emissions. One of the ways to do that is we’re going to build our new buildings with a certain energy efficiency,” he said.

The four-pad multiplex is to be completed in March 2008 while the downtown sports and entertainment complex is set to open in December.

LEED was launched in the U.S. in 1999 and has since been adopted by the Canada Green Building Council.

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