The Rutgers Center for Green Building was retained by the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission (NJMC) to perform a Life Cycle Costing and an Environmental Life Cycle Assessment of the Observatory & Classroom building in Lyndhurst, NJ. The building design team applied for LEED Gold certification, with emphasis on energy efficiency, waste reduction, and indoor air quality.
The Rutgers Green Building Center assisted the NJMC in assessing the success of this undertaking by delivering a life cycle costing of the building’s metabolic flows, including heating, lighting, ventilation, water and power consumption, and waste production. The end result was a quantification of any added capital investments encountered during construction and commissioning of the LEED-compliant structure, as well as a use-phase evaluation of the economic impacts of adherence to a green building standard.
The second task performed consisted of an environmental life cycle analysis of construction materials and post-occupancy metabolic inputs to the building, and has since been chosen as a case study for users of LEED v4. This report reviewed the cumulative impacts of the building, from resource collection through decommissioning. As solid waste management and environmental stewardship are two of the founding precepts of the NJMC, this analysis played a valuable role in helping the NJMC reinforce its mission through a continued organizational commitment to managing anthropogenic inputs to the Meadowlands ecosystem.