Monday LEEDoff: 200 Delaware Avenue in Buffalo Harvests 7200 Tons of Demolition Debris

Under LEED for New Construction and Major Renovations (“LEED-NC”), project teams can earn two points for diverting up to 75 percent of construction and demolition debris from disposal in landfills or incinerators. A project in downtown Buffalo, New York is taking LEED’s Materials & Resources credit category quite seriously and expects to collect close to 7,200 tons of demolition material during the $68 million rehabilitation of what was once the Thaddeus J. Dulski Federal Office Building into the mixed-use 200 Delaware Avenue. Designed by architects Pfohl, Roberts and Biggie, the project team is slowly razing the existing 15-story building that dates from the 1970s and sorting each component of the structure, from its pipes and wires to light fixtures.

According to co-developers Uniland Development Co. and Acquest Development, the effort should conserve 6,434 tons of concrete exterior panels, 570 tons of interior concrete and brick, 200 tons of steel and metal, and 10 tons of aluminum. Buffalo-based Empire Dismantlement is using five different dumpsters and field personnel to direct the sorting operation and funneling the materials to various local businesses that specialize in the resale of construction debris. Empire president Jerry Williams told the Buffalo News that “[d]emolition would have been a lot faster and easier, but when you take this approach, you see there’s a lot of value in these buildings, a lot that can be reused.”

200 Delaware Avenue will seek an unspecified level of LEED certification and offer a 150-room Embassy Suites hotel on the lower seven floors, 125,000 square feet of office space across the middle five floors, and 40 condominium units on the top three floors that start at $300,000. The developers purchased the property from the federal government for $6.1 million last April during an online auction. Uniland acknowledges a ten percent construction premium for the building’s green features, but expects a five-year payback period thanks to efficient HVAC and water systems. It also anticipates approximate utility costs at 200 Delaware to be $1.75 per square foot, bettering the $2.25 that’s typical for a similar Buffalo-area mixed-use development. The Dulski building should be gutted by mid-April and the refurbished space ready for occupancy by sometime in 2009.

• Recycling the Dulski Building (Buffalo News)