What’s up at DMA’s Beyond Green?

What’s Up at DMA’s Beyond Green?
Since uploading our Sustainable Action Plan back in October to the AIA 2030 Commitment Program we have been busy.

For one thing we uploaded our first project successfully to the 2030 AIA Portal. The project is a Courts Building and will be located on the Navajo Nation. The current 2030 Challenge goal as of 2020 is to design to meet a fossil fuel, greenhouse gas emitting and energy consumption performance standard of 80% below the regional average/median for that building type. Modeling of the 100% design with PV Solar results in a net-zero score of zero, however without PV our calculations reveal we will still need to reduce the operating energy consumption. Construction is awaiting funding.

Another exciting project we have been working on may turn out to become Dyron Murphy Architect’s first Net-Zero Project. The initial design, which was completed through DDs back in January 2019, started out as an all-electric design using PV Solar to offset a portion of the electrical loads. While the project was on hold for the last 2 years we went back to take a fresh look at the project design from both an operational energy and embodied carbon perspective. Initial calculations and modeling scenarios were done as part of our firm wide mission to make all of our projects net-zero energy use. This EMS building type for the Navajo Nation will also be our first project where we measure the embodied carbon in the construction materials and actively attempt to reduce the amount of embodied carbon in the construction through deliberate design choices.

Well yeah, but what about water you might ask?
Our design team recently completed our first fully integrated combined rainwater harvesting and greywater treatment system in one of our health care projects. The system is designed to collect and treat, on a yearly basis, 104,000 gallons of rainwater and 167,000 gallons of greywater that will be utilized for toilet and urinal flushing for the 15,000 SF expansion and the majority of the existing 100,000 SF facility. Toilet flushing is estimated at 262,000 gallons for the entire facility. The rainwater system includes a 30,000 gallon underground storage tank and treatment equipment will treat about 1100 gallons per day.