An Architect Brings Recycling to Entire Building

Architects throughout the region are expressing their dedication to sustainability through design and lifestyle changes.

JoAnn Wilcox

Seattle - A building-wide composting program started with a lifestyle choice. As a result tenants in the Paulson Building in downtown Seattle keep thousands of gallons of garbage out of landfills.

Three and a half years ago JoAnn Wilcox, an associate with Mahlum, Seattle, who was mulching her garden with coffee grounds at home, persuaded seven other employees to join her in a “grounds for your garden” effort. The employees divided up the nine pounds of grounds their colleagues produced every week and took them home to their gardens. Over the course of the program they have diverted 1,638 gallons or 254.8 cubic feet of coffee grounds from landfills.

About the same time, Wilcox persuaded Mahlum to institute a phosphate-free policy for all soaps and to purchase only organic milk products. She also began a vermicomposting program that uses earthworms to deal with food waste that colleagues produce in the Mahlum kitchen. She uses it in her garden. “Riding in my car then was not always pleasant because it usually had buckets of garbage from the office,” says Wilcox.

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Buoyed by this success, fellow employees spearheaded a Greening Mahlum committee to tackle a wide platform of environmental issues that they could effect in their workplace, including new lighting control, eliminating disposables and buying products in bulk, mandating carpooling to company events and switching the office to 100% post-consumer recycled paper products.

A year and a half ago, Mahlum and two other architectural firms housed in the Polson building, ­ Miller Hull and Bassetti, started discussing the possibility of a composting program that would involve all the tenants. Wilcox volunteered to test the concept by taking all Mahlum¹s food scraps and soiled paper home with her for one week to evaluate the impact on the waste stream. In that first week Mahlum¹s kitchen waste was reduced by two-thirds.

By extrapolating the numbers, Wilcox showed that Mahlum alone could divert 23 gallons of garbage a day or 5,980 gallons a year from the Seattle landfill in eastern Oregon. Once she shared her calculations with colleagues, representatives of building manager Stanley Piha and the other architectural tenants, building management decided set up a building-wide composting program.

That program started in August, 2008. All six corporate tenants in the Polson building, itself a recycled industrial building from the early 1900s, participate in the effort. The number of large garbage containers for the building has been halved, from six to three. As for Mahlum, it now barely fills one garbage can a day, compared with the three garbage cans it used to use.

Joyce Hosea, a Stanley Piha employee with day-to-day management responsibilities for the building, says Polson tenants have been receptive to the composting program and have begun implementing other eco-friendly measures such as using compact fluorescent lights, installing sensors to lighting systems and adding soiled paper towels to the composting stream.