NRDC's Green Offices
NRDC's offices save energy and the environment by embracing green building design.



NRDC began renovating the first of its offices in 1988, with the goal of putting our environmental principles into practice. Since then, NRDC has incorporated green design features into each of our four offices, in New York, San Francisco, Santa Monica and Washington, DC. Thousands of visitors, including design professionals and policymakers from around the world, have toured NRDC's offices to study their environmental design features.

Since NRDC's New York office opened, major strides have been made in green design, yet it remains a model of energy efficiency. We chose our office space, the top three floors of a 12-story Art Deco building in a neighborhood with few skyscrapers, for its abundance of natural light. Using a combination of this free-flowing -- and free -- resource and energy-efficient technologies, we have cut our energy consumption by 70 percent compared to conventional offices.

Our state-of-the-art Washington office, which opened in June 1996, showcases not only energy-efficiency measures, but also such innovative building materials as compressed straw wall panels, countertops made of soybeans and recycled newspapers, and ceramic tile containing 70 percent recycled glass from windshields and plate glass.

NRDC’s Santa Monica office opened in November 2003, and is at the forefront of green building design in the United States. We purposely chose a downtown location to take advantage of existing services, such as transit and land that had already been developed, and we redesigned the building to conserve water and energy and to showcase environmentally sound materials, adding an environmental learning center on the ground floor.

more:
http://www.nrdc.org/cities/building/foffice.asp