As the town of Greensburg celebrates its comeback from a devastating tornado that nearly wiped it off the map two years ago this week, a Winfield man is helping the small battered town make history in another way.
David Spoon, 46, worked as senior construction superintendent for one of Greensburg’s newest and most eco-friendly buildings, The City of Greensburg Sun Chips Business Incubator. Slated as a key instrument for reviving the town’s crippled small businesses, the business incubator ribbon cutting took place in late April.
The incubator already has some new residents – a stained glass shop and a massage therapist, a Greensburg spokesperson said Friday.
Televised construction of the building has gained Spoon some notoriety over the past year, even here in Winfield. Camera crews from the Discovery Channel’s Greensburg and Build it Greener series, as well as Parade magazine, have featured Spoon and documented his part in helping Greensburg recover. He will gain even more recognition as the second season of the Greensburg series unfolds. Episodes began airing Sunday.
Spoon is the first to poke fun at his own celebrity status.
"The neighbor came over the other day wanting my autograph," he says and chuckles during an interview at his home.
A third generation carpenter who has been with Wichita-based Compton Construction Corp. for the past decade, Spoon had no choice but to get used to cameramen following him around Greensburg as they filmed progress.
Why all the hubbub?
The business incubator is the first of several public buildings to open as part of Greensburg’s commitment to rebuild to the highest level of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, standards . The incubator is LEED Platinum – the highest achievable rating – and is the first building in Kansas planned and built from scratch to those specifications.
The rating system was developed by the U.S. Green Building Council in 1998 and sets stringent rules for building. The rating system sets guidelines for such things as on-site recycling of materials, use of non-toxic paints, utilizing natural light and incorporating energy efficient technology, just to name a few. Buildings even get points for having a bicycle rack, which the business incubator has, said Spoon.
Each green item earns the building points and points earn a Certified, Silver, Gold or Platinum rating, with Platinum being the highest achievement.
Sponsored by donated funds – including $1 million from the Frito Lay corporation and another half million from actor and green-building advocate Leonardo DeCaprio – the 10,000-square-foot business incubator is the first planned building in the United States to achieve platinum recognition.
Spoon’s job was to follow the architect’s blueprints as he would at any construction site, but adhering to the environmental requirements was tough.
"The paperwork is tremendous," Spoon says. "A LEED platinum building is a very difficult building to build. It is mechanically intricate and very complicated. There’s a big learning curve."
Spoon sites the 400,000 pounds of recycled construction waste as one of his biggest challenges. Normally, a construction site will park a dumpster on location and toss any unwanted plastic, boards, concrete or glass into it. The waste is ultimately headed for a landfill. Not so with a LEED building and the additional recycling can be costly. Platinum construction adds "30-50 percent more to the cost of a building," mostly because of the extra work needed to process those waste materials, Spoon says.
Construction can be more costly, but it’s money well spent and Spoon can provide a number examples. Three of the building’s biggest advantages came by way of geothermal construction, insulated concrete form, known as ICF, construction and a rainwater collection system.
The business incubator alone required 21 geothermal wells. The wells both heat and cool the building economically by tapping into the earth’s natural thermostat, Spoon says.
The wells reach to depths of 320 feet and because of their efficiency can pay for themselves in just a few years. It’s not just city buildings who are benefiting from geothermal wells. Many Greensburg homeowners are choosing geothermal technology as well.
ICF construction – concrete-filled foam forms – not only adds strength to the building, it also boots insulation values, says Spoon. The technique uses up to 45 percent recycled materials in the foam forms.
The rainwater collection system is being constructed city-wide. The business incubator and other building roofs are designed to collect rainwater that would otherwise be lost. The rainwater will be used for flushing toilets and for landscape irrigation.
"The whole town is designed on their street scapes to use this water for their flowers," Spoon says. "It’s free. It’s Mother Nature’s donation."
One Greensburg business woman is excited about her city’s decision to go green.
Local entrepreneur Glenda Nichols, a massage therapist who also owns La Terra Naturals, 101 S. Main, Suite 117, said Friday the business incubator couldn’t be a better fit for her personally. La Terra Naturals features Nichols’ own line of all-natural mineral-based make-up.
"The building is perfect for me," Nichols says during a phone interview. "I like the natural light. It’s so well lit, in the daytime I don’t even have to turn my lights on. I’m tickled to be here."
Nichols’ former business, Serenity Massage, was destroyed by the tornado. Her make-up line has helped support her over the past two years and she feels her new home in the business incubator will help her financially. Rental rates are set low and geared to help struggling businesses like Nichols’, says Spoon. Not only are the new digs feasible economically, but Nichols says they are in line with her business philosophy.
"It absolutely would have been beyond my wildest dreams" to work in such an environmentally-friendly building, Nichols says. "You never know where life takes you."
GREENING UP
For someone who describes much of the green building project as a "pain", LEED construction wasn’t such a natural fit for Spoon. Spoon can certainly be described as down to earth, the kind of guy who enjoys sitting on his porch watching the rain come down while sipping on a red beer.
His earlier days as a builder taught him a meager swath of insulation was more than enough on just about anything you wanted to build. And one of his first jobs was helping the city of Winfield fill in its underground catacombs.
Catacombs are an old method for collecting rainwater that by today’s standards can be considered eco-friendly. Green wasn’t exactly part of Spoon’s vocabulary until he went to Greensburg.
Now that he’s had a chance to see how aligning a new home according to the sun’s rays can boost a home’s energy efficiency and how 12 inches of insulation can save buckets of money over time, he is a convert.
He’d love to replace the forced air heating unit in his home, which he considers to be antiquated, and replace it with a couple of geothermal wells, but that project is a ways in the future. For now, he’s reworking plans for a loft expansion on his ranch-style home.
He wants to install skylights to harness the sun’s rays and cut down on the need for interior lighting. By angling the windows correctly he’ll also increase the room’s energy savings. Recently he built a small greenhouse in his backyard using some salvaged window panes. These projects are just the start.
"I’m gonna use what I learned (in Greensburg) here," says Spoon.
DOING SOMETHING
Winfielders ought to be thinking about ways to be more energy efficient, something Spoon says is easy. Programmable switches on lights can be readily installed in a home and hot water on demand systems have "very big energy savings," he says.
Winfield City Manager Warren Porter couldn’t agree more. He says residents here seldom think about using less energy, but need to. Winfield also has one of the few city-sponsored curbside recycling programs around, but only about 25 percent of the town’s population takes advantage of it.
"We’ve been one of the first cities in the state to do curbside recycling and we’ve been doing that for a decade," Porter says.
Winfield hasn’t had a big building project in a while, so LEED construction hasn’t come up for discussion. However, the city is taking small steps to go greener, like upgrading a 1969 steam generation engine so it works more efficiently. Whenever old windows need replaced the city makes sure they are upgraded to a better quality product.
Winfield also has a long history of composting excess vegetation.
"We get very regular use of the composting site," he says.
Porter is also keeping an eye on developments in Greensburg.
"It’s interesting to watch the folks out there in Greensburg to see what they are doing," he says.
The green construction being pursued by the town of Greensburg is the wave of the future, according to Spoon.
"It’s coming, so everybody better get ready," he says.
Spoon and his crew will be spending the next year or so building a second structure for Greensburg. The town’s public works building, which will house machinery and equipment, is slated for silver certification.
Spoon lives in Winfield with his wife, Carman, and a menagerie of cats, dogs and fish.
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ABOUT THE INCUBATOR:
Construction costs were between $3-4 million, paid for with donated funds.
16 LEED platinum buildings are under construction or slated for construction in the United States. Six of those will be built in Greensburg.
$250,000 worth of glass was installed.
Lighting technology in the building tracks the sun’s rays and automatically dims or brightens interior lighting.
Polished concrete floors were used in place of more expensive carpeting.
Restrooms feature two-stage toilets that conserve water.
Instructions tell users to pull levers: Up for #1, Down for #2. The urinals are waterless.
Pressed wheat wood was used for cabinets.
Siding for the building came from Belgium and did not earn any points for LEED certification.
The business incubator features an above ground concrete storm shelter with ten times the reinforcement of the building’s walls.
The shelter is FEMA rated and should withstand winds of up to 250 mph.
