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Three years ago, Plante Moran moved into newer, larger and greener offices in downtown Grand Rapids.

While we expected to reap concrete benefits from our decision to use sustainable building principles, we were surprised at the number of intangible benefits we also achieved.

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Historic buildings were designed decades ago using basic, common-sense sustainable design features. With the U.S. Green Building Council LEED rating system, many of these inherent design features can now be quantified and applied to achieving LEED certification of a major historic renovation project.

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Every school day, thousands of teachers, administrators and staff wake up with the most important job in the world: teaching the next generation. They travel to buildings in the heart of their communities where classrooms are filled with over 1.6 million Michigan K-12 students ready to learn. In fact, during the school year, over 20 percent of our population is in a school building each day.

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On Aug. 1 the second public comment period for LEED 2012 began. It runs through Sept. 14. LEED, a.k.a. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, continues to evolve and with each new version the bar is again raised. It remains the leading catalyst for changing today’s built environment, the buildings in which we live, work and play.

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We can do better than this. Drive through most of our neighborhoods and I dare you to disagree. After seeing far too many jobs disappear and hundreds of thousands of our fellow Michiganders pack up and head south, it’s time for us to stop wringing our hands and start rebuilding. But as leaders in sustainability, we need to consider something far greater than individual buildings — we are beyond the point of considering one green building at a time. The Triple Bottom Line isn’t going to work unless we look at the bigger picture: our communities.

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Lately it seems as though every local paper we see has something to say about another LEED building opening. There is a reason for this: We’re building a lot of them around here, so much so that West Michigan gets noticed nationally. Grand Rapids alone has 71 buildings that have completed all of the paperwork and earned LEED certification. In fact, the cities of Philadelphia, Columbus and Brooklyn combined have only 75 finished LEED projects, even though their combined population is 24 times larger than Grand Rapids.

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According to the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA), the average cost of energy for a typical office building per square foot is $2.56, maintenance is $2.29, rent is $25.05 and wages are $282.23 per square foot. Energy costs, while important, are insignificant when considering the impact of providing for the well being of the occupants as it affects their productivity. A 1 percent gain in productivity will more than cover all building energy costs. We need our employees to be really happy.