City of Seattle Sustainable Guidelines

BNIM’s research and consulting division, Elements, developed the Implement website for the City of Seattle’s online sustainable building tool. The website is used as a practical how-to-tool that helps people implement the city’s sustainable building policy. The site includes a six-step process informing owners, designers, contractors, developers, and users about how to make a better building.

Elements developed Integrated Design Tools (IDT) together with the city’s facility department. Each building type was rigorously designed and modeled to minimal city sustainable standards and then improved upon, culminating in two IDTs for each building type, a Matrix for Energy and a Matrix for Water. Each matrix analyzes individual sustainable improvement strategies ,informing the user by ranking the strategies from greatest impact to least, all the while adding the strategies up for an impact total.

Environmental impact is measured in the following categories: energy use reduction, USGBC LEED points, annual pounds of pollution, annual operating cost, external cost to society over 20 years, and first cost.

The team designed the site to be informational and user-friendly. The site’s information is housed in an interactive, searchable web-based tool and database focused on graphic clarity and easy navigation.