It takes a lot of energy to construct a building, and significantly more energy is consumed during its life for heating, cooling and lighting. According to a report issued in March by the United Nations Environment Program's (UNEP) Sustainable Building and Construction Initiative (SBCI), more than 80% of the total energy consumed by a building takes place during use, and 20% during construction.

Such considerations were top of mind when managers at Anixter International (Alsip, Ill., www.anixter.com) asked ProLogis (Denver, www.prologis.com) and Heitman Architects (Itasca, Ill., www.heitmanarchitects.com) to design its new distribution center on Austin Avenue, just south of Chicago's Midway Airport. The new building, which is leased to Anixter by ProLogis, replaced several nearby

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buildings previously used by the publicly traded distributor of communication products, wire, cable, fasteners and other small parts.

Driving up to the beige-colored structure, the building is not much different from the office buildings in the industrial area. Newer, maybe, but similar. Then the visitor remembers that it's a distribution center, not an office building. Its streamlined look, with clerestory windows on the northeast and southwest sides of the building, belie the racks, lift trucks and other distribution activities going on inside. These windows spread natural light throughout the facility. Vertical strip windows of frosted glass in the northeast and southwest facades bring in even more natural light.

A canopy structure runs along the front of the building to clearly define where automobile and truck parking is. It also shades windows to reduce the need for air conditioning. A bicycle rack and shower facilities encourage employees to use alternative modes of transportation.

"I figured by providing a better environment for employees, I could also improve operations," says Ken Hagaman, director of real estate services for Anixter.

The new building is pending certification to the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system (See box, "Taking the Lead with LEED," www.usgbc.org/LEED). Some of the things Hagaman was looking for in a sustainable building were compatible with LEED criteria, such as a more efficient cubic volume and reduced energy costs. But while LEED certification provides great benchmarking tools, he says that much of the criteria didn't really apply to a distribution facility.

Karl Heitman, AIA, LEED AP, president, Heitman Architects Inc., agrees that the LEED criteria were originally so broadbased that they were more applicable to an office building than a distribution center. "The design for a distribution center already has a lot of the LEED criteria built into it," he says. "The fact that it does not have a lot of wood or metal finishes that aren't locally available, or are not renewable resources."

One of the challenges for such buildings is daylight and access to views. According to LEED criteria, 75% of the occupied space must have access to natural light.

Green from the beginning
In creating a sustainable structure, a company has to begin with the outside envelope in terms of insulation and the use of recyclable and recycled materials. "This building was built with steel that is 100% recycled content. And the major building material is concrete panels that were manufactured locally from locally harvested materials," says Heitman.

Return on investment for specifying more energy-efficient materials is another conversation that must start at the beginning, says Heitman. "People are asking about the material and systems in terms of how much energy costs they'll recoup. There is also the moral issue of how much energy can be saved and what it takes to be a good corporate citizen."

The building in Alsip is Anixter's premier U.S. distribution center for small and unique parts. And it's more than a distribution center. The new design has allowed managers to take on value-added work for customers it could not formerly do. An estimated 35,000 SKUs come from this distribution center. Worldwide Anixter provides more than 350,000 products and maintains more than $900 million in inventory. It operates 212 warehouses with more than 5.5 million sq. ft. of space in 46 countries.

Measuring ROI
Jay Zwart, senior v.p. North American operations for Anixter, says if you went out on the floor and asked the employees, they probably wouldn't know they're working in a sustainable building. "It's really a corporate-level decision to say you want a sustainable building," he says. "We want to be careful, as an organization, with the resources we use."

What is important, from a culture standpoint, is that managers need to take care of their people, he adds. This starts with a well-lit, clean workspace. The building features 170 skylights along with the side panel windows.

"Take a look at the natural light and the balanced heating; that's the message we send employees, and we're doing things that are good for the environment. When we install motion-sensor systems that turn off the lights to save energy when a person walks out of an office or from an aisle that is not in use, those are all good messages."

"Having the right amount of light over a work area so a person can do his job, perfectly, impacts productivity and how the person feels about the job," he says. "Natural light is so much more uplifting for the people and we can get that light in without having to open the doors, which would defeat the energy savings we're trying to achieve," he says.

The building, through its ventilation system, also maintains zero air pressure difference with the outside so that when a door opens there is little or no exchange of air or outside pollution. During warm months, the air management system cools the interior at night and helps maintain the temperature during the day without the aid of air conditioning.

At this facility Anixter has little automation. The product mix dictates that manual storage and putaway are most efficient. It uses hand-held and lift truck mounted data-collection devices for radio-frequency directed inventory picking and putaway management.

"Our business model," says Zwart, "is for a lot of odd-shaped products, distributed in a very dynamic market that changes what we sell all the time."

One way that the building designers found to save on energy costs was to reserve indoor storage for products that require it. They designed an outdoor covered space for storage of huge reels of cable, some weighing as much as 20,000 pounds, that are an outdoor product in the first place and do not have to be kept in the building. The canopied yard keeps the weather off of the reels, which are moved into the building as needed to fulfill orders.

The return on investment in this building for Anixter has been encouraging. Dave Shoemaker, v.p. and general manager, says energy costs are close to 25% less than what it spent in its old facility.

"But what's really encouraging," he says, "is that we've also experienced double-digit growth in what we produce from this building in the past two years." Shoemaker attributes much of that productivity gain to being able to re-evaluate and rearrange the workflows in ways that they could not do in the past when they worked out of four buildings that had been joined together. The previous structures added up to nearly 600,000 sq. ft., compared to the 467,000 sq. ft. of the new building. However, says Hagaman, the new building has the same amount of working cube space because of mezzanines and not having to deal with walls that partitioned space in the former structure.

The two-level mezzanine uses grated walkways to aid ventilation and allow light to pass through to the floor level. Small-part picking in the mezzanine areas and floor below are done onto carts rather than onto conveyor belt or other material handling methods more typical of such processes. About 44% of all orders are fulfilled in the mezzanine area.

Another part of the design, says Shoemaker, was to make the exterior more accessible. The old building had not been designed for rail or truck deliveries. "A lot of our product [reels of wire and cable] comes in on flatbed trucks and goes out as less-than-truckload shipments," he says. "We buy it by the mile and sell it by the foot. We've designed the dock areas for energy efficiency with canopies and door seals to prevent loss of heat in winter or excessive heat entering in the summer."

Getting started
For anyone thinking of constructing a sustainable building, the place to start is with the requirements and criteria of the state where the building will be located, says architect Heitman. "Illinois, for example, has special water runoff requirements and other states have energy codes different from ours," he says. "Many of these state and local requirements will also satisfy the LEED certification requirements for sustainable designs." Using local, or native materials, and recycled materials, is another step toward LEED certification.

Anixter had long worked with the small, south-side Chicago suburb of Alsip to do positive things for the local community. "We've been here a lot of years and we want to be a good corporate citizen," says Zwart. "Since we're a supplier to the building trades, we like to bring in our customers and show them what we've done."

He says many of the innovations installed in the new building will be taken to other Anixter locations as the company expands. "We're already installing some of the lighting systems back into other buildings where we're extending leases," he says. Such energy-efficiency investments offer a payback over the time of the leases in those buildings.

Another part of the LEED criteria is to reduce a building's impact on transportation. Along with promoting the use of public transportation and bicycling, employees recently watched a presentation from an organization promoting shared transportation such as car pooling.

In selecting the location for this new building, management created a map of where its 300 people were located to see if some other location might be more advantageous. Because of the tenure of the employees, and other reasons, they decided that it just made good business sense to locate the new building in close proximity to the old.

Shoemaker is rightfully proud of the new distribution center. He frequently gives tours to customers and potential customers and says people are not always prepared for what they see. There is a "Wow!" factor when visitors first step into the well-lighted expanse of concrete and steel, which lacks the standard cavernous feeling. Instead, there's a feeling of openness and organization. Shoemaker says someone once described it as an office with lift trucks driving around in it.

One thing Anixter has done with the improved working conditions is to move floor supervisors' offices out into the shop area. Now, supervisors are within easy access to all employees, and can better manage hour-to-hour activity.

While not directly related to its new building, Zwart says environmental awareness is something he's hearing more about from his customers. "Contractors on building sites are asking if we can deliver the products to them, at the site, with less dunnage. They don't have a way to efficiently dispose of excess packaging material so we get asked to take waste material out of the delivery."

Anixter is able to provide customers this kind of service through a special program that prepares the necessary wiring for entire building floors, before the products leave the distribution center. Zwart says the challenge then becomes how to safely transport the products that last mile, or whatever the distance, without damage.

"We've developed ways to stage the deliveries to the customers' work site," he says. "We'll use a dedicated carrier, for example, to move the products that last short distance to the job site after we've removed the packing material."

When discussing the benefits of an environmentally sustainable building, as Zwart points out, managers should recognize that the benefits will only increase as energy costs continue to rise.

"If we continue to see the kind of energy-cost inflation we've been seeing, your ROI with a green building gets even better. We've been able to justify what we've done with our energy systems, here, on a five-year deal. When you invest in the energy systems, upfront, justified on today's rates, even though those will probably be conservative estimates, you can expect your ROI to improve as energy costs escalate."

The exterior of the Anixter distribution center features canopies for shading windows from excessive heat, and many windows for letting in natural light.

A canopied storage yard, which requires no energy use, was designed to protect reels of wire from the weather.