A visit to Highland Cleaners Discovery Center on Bardstown Road. “What’s that modern-looking cube
building on Bardstown Road?”
If you have ever asked that question while walking by the 12th branch of Louisville’s Highland Cleaners on Bardstown Road, then get excited: I have your answer!
The small cube is (drum roll) The Discovery Center, your neighborhood place for public education on sustainable architecture. It is a building used for neighborhood meetings free of charge (The Urban Bee Keepers just met there, and Tom Owen has held District 8 meetings in the cube), and hopefully for school field trips. On the back wall there is a television connected to two bicycles; one minute on the bike equals one minute of electricity to power it. This fine television shows videos about the Discovery Center Cube and the Highland Cleaners (HC) two-story building across the parking lot. Both are soon-to-be LEED-certified buildings that incorporate geothermal heating and air, a vegetative roof (on the cube) a solar roof (on the two-story building), and a number of special green aspects that make them both worthy of being a part of The Highland Green Building (HGB) concept.
It’s odd to juxtapose this idea of “green” with the negative connotations associated with the dry-cleaning business. “One of the reasons for building this branch is trying to tell the Highland Cleaners story of being green. We’ve actually always been green,” says Michael Jones, the owner of Highland Cleaners and developer of the Highland Green facilities. Fifty years ago, people in the dry-cleaning business turned from a natural petroleum solvent to the chemical solvent Perchloroethylene or “perc.” “Perc is terrible for people, their clothes, the ground, and the air. It has a well-deserved bad reputation,” explains Jones. “Highland Cleaners never converted to Perc. We stuck with the old, natural cleaning solution, but then 15 years ago they almost stopped supplying it. I formed a national group to fight to keep us in business. Now when people switch back to the natural petroleum solvent, they say they are going green.”
Concerned about the petroleum in the natural solvent, I had Jones expand on the subject. “Highland Cleaners uses the equivalency to 15 gallons a day of petroleum based solvent to clean half of the clothes for the city of Louisville. We use more petroleum in our trucks for delivery than in the actual process. Our petroleum solvent is an inert chemical that doesn’t have problems with air pollution, contact with human beings, or surface contamination like Perc.” Highland Cleaners actually captures their fumes in the dryer, and it comes back down as pure, distilled solvent – a very effective use of the chemical.
Jones walked me around both buildings, all the while explaining every green feature we passed. The Highland Green Building is dedicated to preventing stormwater runoff. According to the EPA, “Stormwater runoff occurs when precipitation from rain or snowmelt flows over the ground. Impervious surfaces like driveways, sidewalks, and streets prevent stormwater runoff from naturally soaking into the ground. Stormwater can pick up debris, chemicals, dirt, and other pollutants and flow into a storm sewer system or directly to a lake, stream, river, wetland, or coastal water. Anything that enters a storm sewer system is discharged untreated into the waterbodies we use for swimming, fishing and providing drinking water.” Jones has invested in pervious pavers, a special brick with strategic cracks built in to allow rain to absorb into the soil underneath the bricks, “so that it stays an active eco-system,” he explains. The HGB stores all of the rainwater it collects in order to irrigate the plants on the vegetative roof and around the structure.
The wire structure seen on the outside of the HC building is actually a trellis that will one day grow into a green screen in which plants and vines will grow. Because it won’t be attached to the brick, there will be no structural harm done. Instead, the building will benefit from the oxygen generated from the plant life and from the insulation the screen will provide. In three to four years, the entire trellis will be covered in green!
Special details in the buildings include light colored bricks to resist the heat island effect, a floor made of reclaimed barn wood from an old tobacco farm in Grayson, KY, motion-sensored lights with low wattage bulbs, low-flow toilets, and sensor faucets. The location is also well thought out: there is a bike rack and a bus stop on the premises, and the location in the Highlands neighborhood promotes walking. Soon, Jones hopes to install an electrical car charging station in the parking lot – he’s just waiting on the parts to come in.
The most amazing part of touring the Highland Green Building was merely sensory for me. Standing by the HVAC units upstairs from the cleaners, I could feel the natural currents of air breezing through my hair as I checked out the picturesque views of Bardstown Road from the many windows lining the building. Every material in the HGB—every material, paint, and even the polyurethane on the floor—was specifically chosen to be non-toxic. And in that moment, I felt like the building was a living, breathing organism – an ecosystem still intact. Buildings like this are going to hopefully effect the choices that people make when remodeling and building new structures. “We have taken this to the nth degree,” says Jones with a smile. “When we decided to make the building green, we went all the way.”
–Stacy Geyer
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GREAT JOB!!