NEWS

pcc community markets earns first LBC Petal Certification

PCC Community Markets' Ballard store earned its Living Building Challenge Petal Certification! It's been an honor support this effort to help PCC create the first grocery store in the world to achieve this rigorous designation.

PCC has shown impressive leadership to screen hundreds of materials that go into creating their stores. I've been lucky to see this leadership up close and help execute their vision alongside a stellar team—all learning the LBC requirements, asking hard questions of vendors and manufacturers, and doing business in a new way.

Achieving the Materials Petal focuses on excluding items on the LBC Red List—PVC, lead, BPA, and neoprene, to name a few. We also sourced materials and products close to home—33% of the materials were sourced within 500km of Seattle, and a whopping 97% came from North America. And 100% of the wood is FSC Certified, which helps support a more sustainable and healthy lumber industry.

This project is a grand achievement for PCC that will continue to grow thanks to the volume program developed by the International Living Future Institute.

ILFI announces pilotS with pcc community markets

At its annual Living Future conference, the International Living Future Institute (ILFI) announced a two new initiatives that PCC Community Markets is helping to pilot. We are already testing volume certification with Living Building Challenge 3.1 Materials Petal certification on PCC’s upcoming new stores. Ballard and West Seattle recently started construction, while Bellevue, Downtown Seattle and Madison Valley are in planning. Volume certification allows for great efficiency, especially when creating similar spaces. ILFI also introduced a new certification called CORE, which PCC will test on at least one store in 2020. CORE requires 10 of the 20 Living Building Challenge 4.0 imperatives and sets aggressive yet realistic performance targets.

PCC West Seattle is set to be the first grocery store in the world to pursue Living Building Challenge (LBC) Petal Certification.

PCC community markets receives leed certification for new burien store

PCC Community Markets announced that its newest store in Burien, WA received its LEED certification, making it the first grocery store to successfully navigate LEED v4. We coordinated a large team to make this a reality on a tight timeline. The store opened in May 2018.

Read more here.

Seattle city light announces new program pilot

Seattle City Light is looking for projects to test its Energy Efficiency as a Service program (EEaS), which is an evolution of the MEETS financial structure used at the Bullitt Center. The basic premise is that a building owner can earn a recurring financial reward from SCL for developing and operating a high performing building. Tenants pay “business as usual” electricity bills, and the owner is paid 8 cents/kWh for the difference between this modeled code baseline and the building’s actual metered performance.