Our new GREEN Safeway is finally open! I’ll have pictures from the opening festivities soon but in the meantime here are some details on what makes this new Safeway so green.
The Pinehurst Safeway is a ground-up replacement store for the Safeway that originally opened in 1923 serving the community for 87 years. Touted as the “greenest” store in the Seattle Division fleet, the Pinehurst Safeway was designed to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) silver certification standards, a designation given only to buildings that meet strict standards of sustainable design, construction
and operating practices. The 47,000-square-foot store features environmentally focused innovations such as:
- Store will use at least 17 percent less energy than an ASHRAE-baseline building. This translates to an average savings of $31,000 per year.
- Approximately 20% of the building materials purchased on the job, by cost, will contain recycled content.
- Approximately 75% of the construction waste, by weight, will have been diverted from the landfill.
- Approximately 10% of the materials purchased on the job, by cost, will have been harvested and manufactured within 500 miles of the project site.
- All paints, coatings, adhesives, sealants, flooring, furniture, ceilings and wall systems meet strict standards for indoor air quality and low volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
- The Protocol refrigeration system saves over $10,000 per year. Its energy efficiency amounts to taking more than 160 cars off the roads and planting more than 250 acres of trees per year.
- The state-of-the-art exterior signage is constructed from environmentally friendly LED lighting, which uses less electricity than standard signage.
- Bioswale collects runoff from impervious surfaces in the right-of-way and filters water before it re-enters the ground.
- The bioswale filtration also removes 80 percent of the Total Suspended Solids (TSS) from over 90 percent of the storm water.
- Green screen installations help minimize heat reflecting from the building out into the neighborhood, helping to reduce the urban heat island effect.
- Preferred parking spaces are provided for low emission and fuel-efficient vehicles.
In addition to the environmentally friendly construction of the Pinehurst store, Safeway earns its title as one of the greenest retailers in Washington with environmentally sustainable practices throughout all its stores:
- Safeway recycles almost 100 percent of the cardboard they use.
- Safeway recycles 100 percent of their plastic (including plastic bags that customers bring in), fat, bone and grease.
- All stores feature the Safeway lines of Eating Right, O Organic and Bright Green products to support healthy and environmentally friendly living.
In addition to the green aspects of the Pinehurst store, it boasts wall to wall specialty items ranging from: Starbucks coffee kiosk with indoor/outdoor seating and fireplace, soup & olive bars, Cheese World and deli department, bakery department, elite wine area, pharmacy, organic produce, service fish and meat, outdoor seating in front of store/urban garden with seating along 15th and many other surprises. The new store,
managed by Lori Gruber, employs 110 employees, an increase of 65 from the former store’s 45 employees. In total, the Pinehurst grand opening represents the completion of a project cost exceeding $18 million dollars, and an annual tax base in 2010 of $45,107 and a projected tax base of $180,000 in 2011.
Hi all,
Is it just me, or does anyone else find the new Safeways’ parking lot slots designated for “green cars” kind of annoying? I don’t know if there is more than one (I only saw one while I was driving around in circles looking for a spot) but is this part of the package when a business is built under LEED guidelines?
Funny thing, the car that was parked in the “green car” spot, was a big old Buick…..
Just wonderin’ what other people thought….
Janet
I too found it very annoying…just as annoying as the
“stork” parking places at Metropolitian Markets…and “family” parking at Ikea…treat your customers the same…we all spend money alike. Just because your car is “green” or you have a baby or are hauling your kids around is no reason to have prefered parking…we should all be treated as “prefered” because we are YOUR customers. Tonight my 90 year old mother had to walk farther in the parking lot because YOU had two empty “prefered” spaces for special cars. One would think that your customers, and the fact that they have been shopping with you for over 60 years, would be enough to make them prefered…disgusting concept…will shop elsewhere where the concept that we are customers is enough to give us equal parking.
Just for clarification, the preferred parking is part of the LEED certification. It’s laid out in the documentation. And unless I’m mistaken, that certification was one of the requests from the neighborhood. Or at least was discussed/suggested along the way.
Does that make it right? Are those parking places required to be the first places available in the front? If so then something needs to be adjusted in the certification process. I have been in high end retail sales for over 40 years now and I can’t imagine asking one of my clients (customers) to park in a less desirable place because they didn’t have the right kind of car.
To be honest, I don’t know the details that go into the certification though I wouldn’t be surprised if they needed to be someplace specific. The point of them is to encourage fuel efficient cars so it defeats the purpose if they’re far away.
That being said, LEED is only looking at things from a “green” perspective. They’re probably not considering the customers in that respect. And from Safeway’s perspective, they’re buying into the whole package. Or at least earning points to reach the level of certification they’re going for. They might not have had to do those parking spots but the other alternatives were things like cutting the total number of parking spaces which I’m sure they wouldn’t have liked. And it’s a balance because LEED encourages people to shop there even while those spots might be discouraging others.
Oh, and so far I haven’t noticed people paying attention to the signs much. People are either not noticing or feeling entitled to park there anyways, even without the “right” car.
I’ll stick with shopping at my local Wallingford QFC…99% of the time I walk there. They don’t play favorites with their customers and parking, it’s first come…first served…no pretending to be something that they aren’t…no sell-outs for ratings, we are all important to them…and it shows in their sales records…