| North Miami |
August
28, 08 |
McDonald’s Gets The Green Light
North Miami’s Green Initiative Starts With a Revolutionary
McBuilding
By Lee Molloy
The City of
North Miami will soon be home to the third certified green
McDonald’s restaurant in the world, and the first in Florida.
The city council approved a special exception for the project’s
drive-through window, Tuesday, in effect giving a green light to
building the new environmentally friendly restaurant at 12500
Biscayne Blvd., currently the site of a Boston Market. The
building, which is slated to use eco-friendly materials and
processes, and operate using fewer non-renewable resources, is a
landmark addition in light of the city’s recent push for a
greener, more sustainable North Miami.
The
building is “very important,”
said Building
and Zoning Director Jacqueline Gonzalez, because North Miami
“recently passed an initiative for all buildings to go green.”
The design
and architecture of the building has been contracted by
Florida-based firm CPH Engineers.
“We are
working on a pilot program,” said CPH engineer Jason James. “We
are pretty much going to set the standard for all McDonald’s
coming up.”
To provide
that leadership, CPH Engineers must meet the specifications of
the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit organization
committed to the growth of sustainable building practices. More
than 15,000 entities in the building industry have banded
together to create structures that are environmentally sound,
profitable to maintain and healthy places to work in or visit.
The USGBC is
not governed by hard and fast rules but, perhaps befitting a
green organization, a set of guiding principles: to respect the
limits of natural systems and to pursue solutions from renewable
sources, to aspire to equal socioeconomic opportunity for all,
to seek openness and broad participation in decision-making, to
find measurable indicators of success in achieving green goals,
and to recognize the interconnectivity of everything in nature.
The council
follows the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)
green building rating system to establish universal performance
criteria that any new development would adopt for design,
construction, operations and maintenance. There are LEED
projects underway in 41 different countries, including Canada,
Mexico and the world’s largest democracy, India.
In the United
States, LEED initiatives are currently being pursued by federal
agencies such as the Department of Defense and Department of
Energy. Projects are also under-way at the state and local
government levels.
Once built,
North Miami’s new McDonald’s “may be used as a prototype,” Mayor
Kevin Burns said. “North Miami should be very proud.”