Eco Heroes: A green roof on Black Rock

Music Speaker 1: We're here at CBS Headquarters in the Black Rock Building, 52 Street and Sixth Avenue in New York City, this building is a landmark here in New York, it was built in 1964 after being designed by Eero Saarinen, 37 story building, and houses headquarters operation for corporate CBS. We started in 2009, when we received the Energy Star Award, that award was based on a 10% reduction in energy use with no additional cost to us, it was really done through Tom Kane assumed spelling our director of facilities through better efficient operations, better maintenance of our equipment, just really paying more attention to the day to day operation, just through that, we were able to reach this 10% reduction. The savings were attained in a couple of methods, one was we went to a solar film in our windows, which was able to reduce some energy costs. Another way was just better maintenance of our equipment. Tom Kane had looked into cost saving measures, and one of those was in our inaudible HVAC was the fans that we used, we have the four major fan systems here be tested from 2010 to the beginning of 2011, and one of those systems to see if this operation was more efficient and results showed us that it certainly was. So in 2011, went to all four systems, and we replaced these filters with a new type of filter, it saved us approximately $23,000 a year in energy costs, and in addition to that, it eliminated the waste through the disposal of these filters on a very regular basis at the landfills, which we certainly thought about bringing initiative. The savings that resulted from these fan and filter changes resulted in the reduction of 160,000 kilowatts of energy each year. Speaker 1: We're here at Black Rock in New York, in our telepresence room, 2011, we built this room and one on the West Coast. Construction included high efficiency lighting, LED lighting, which would save on energy. In addition to that, the significant cost of travel for our executives has also been a savings. So here we are up on the roof of Black Rock, and we're going to show you something pretty unique, it's our green roof, which we're very proud of, this initiative started in 2009, at that time we needed to replace the roof here at Black Rock and we began to look at all of our options, and when we did that we realized our best option was that we could install a green roof for the same price as the new roof, and we could get all the environmental benefits from that installation. Speaker 2: The CBS green roof is about 8,000 square feet, and it's the largest, tallest green roof in New York City. A green roof is a roof that partially or completely covered with vegetation and a growing medium, some people even call it a living roof. It reduces storm water runoff in areas such as New York City, there are a lot of impervious surfaces, the rain can't really get into the ground, so what happens is there's a lot of surface pollution that gets washed into the watershed, the green roof actually helps mitigate that by allowing the rain to get filtered into the green roof itself. We've actually restored the natural habitats, birds and pollinators actually come up to the roof. On the first day of the installation, we actually had a dragonfly come up and it stayed with us for the duration of the project. It reduces energy cost, basically there's a lot of installation value in the green roof, and as we all know, cooler buildings require less electricity, it also protects the green roof membrane itself from the harmful UV rays of the sun. Speaker 1: It's important to save energy, it's important to save our natural resources, and also important to save money.

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