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.”