Illinois Green Alliance Limelight and USGBC Greenbuild 2018 Chicago

Recently, the Illinois Green Alliance (formerly USGBC Illinois) hosted its annual Limelight celebration—recognizing Chicagoland’s top achievements in sustainability. This fundraiser and reception brings together an amazing mix of nearly 500 of the region’s top industry leaders working in the sustainability field.

It is an important opportunity to recognize the latest achievements in green building design, technology and innovation in Illinois. This year Sloan® was proud to be the Diamond Sponsor for the event which brought in its largest gathering of architects, designers, engineers, building owners and others since the very first Limelight, more than 10 years ago.

Road to Greenbuild

This year’s Limelight was particularly special as it included a Road to Greenbuild event, as Chicago, for the third time, is hosting the Greenbuild Expo and Conference this November. The Road to Greenbuild event included an opening speech by USGBC CEO Mahesh Ramanujam and Chicago Mayor, Rahm Emanuel, and the announcement of the 2018 Legacy Project winner.

This year’s winner is Project Exploration, a science education organization dedicated to making science accessible to youth from communities historically underrepresented in the sciences, especially girls and students of color. They provide high-quality out-of-school time programs to Chicago public middle and high school students, through which they engage in authentic science experiences and work alongside mentors and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) professionals.

Greenbuild is the world’s largest conference and expo dedicated to green building, bringing over 20,000 industry professionals from around the country and features several days of inspiring speakers, industry showcases, specialty workshops, tours of Chicago green buildings and invaluable networking opportunities.

Innovative Carbon Neutral Products

This year, Sloan’s Director of Corporate Sustainability, Patrick Boyle, has been selected to speak at Greenbuild about Sloan’s new innovative carbon neutral product lineup. He’ll be focusing on the actions architects and designers can take to reduce a building’s overall climate impact by specifying materials with lower embodied carbon.

EPDs (Environmental Product Declarations) and their supporting LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) reports contain important data that can be leveraged to guide decisions leading to significant reductions in the greenhouse gases associated with these materials. He’ll describe the approaches and best practices that manufacturers can employ to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, derived from information gleaned from the LCAs conducted for their EPDs.

Reduction and carbon neutral strategies can include increasing the use of renewable energy and improving product durability, using of high recycled content materials, incorporating carbon sequestering materials and purchasing carbon offsets.

Sloan quantified some of our products’ embodied carbon, identified suitable mitigation options through Arbor Day reforestation credits, offset our products emissions and then had our carbon neutral products independently verified with scientific documentation sufficient to support and communicate our environmental claim. This, in turn, has provided specifiers and building owners with verified information to help guide their purchasing decisions.

Sloan’s carbon neutral products not only support the mission of the USGBC (U.S. Green Building Council), they also help architects to achieve goals such as those of Architecture 2030 and the Embodied Carbon Network, whose missions are to rapidly transform the global built environment from being a major contributor of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to a central part of the solution to the climate crisis.

From the 1906 invention of the Royal® Flushometer to today’s automatic fixtures, Sloan’s innovations have saved building owners billions of gallons of water. Want to know more? Talk to Sloan!