The Laboratory’s Bar Harbor, Maine, headquarters is situated on scenic Mount Desert Island, directly adjacent to Acadia National Park. In fact, the Laboratory’s very existence is in part due to conservation interests. In the 1920s, wealthy summer island residents promoted the establishment of a national park and scientific research laboratories to preserve the island’s natural environment and prevent the incursion of the logging industry.
Since its founding in 1929, the Laboratory has kept that commitment to the environment, and has received the Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnership award for energy conservation leadership in the New England region. The long list of energy efficiency and resource conservation initiatives includes the installation, in June 2012, of the largest wood pellet-burning energy plant in the Western Hemisphere.
"This new biomass boiler is reducing the Laboratory's fuel oil consumption by 75 percent, which is about 1.2 million gallons a year," says John Fitzpatrick, the Laboratory's senior director for Facilities Services. "It is allowing us to replace foreign-sourced heating oil with wood pellets that are Maine grown, Maine harvested and Maine processed. We’ve seen substantial cost savings, but more important, there are huge savings environmentally."
The Laboratory also protects Mount Desert Island’s famously dark night skies by using shielded lighting fixtures, operates a carpool and busing program that reduces the number of employee vehicles on the road, implements environmentally sound landscaping and maintenance practices, and has an extensive recycling program.
The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine facility, currently under construction in Farmington, Conn., will meet the stringent environmental building standards known as LEED Gold. LEED – the acronym for Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design, a program of the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council – is a certification program for buildings, homes and communities that guides their “green” design, construction, operations and maintenance.
JAX Genomic Medicine’s Gold certification level is one step above the Silver-level standard used for most public buildings in Connecticut, according to John Fitzpatrick, P.E., senior director of facilities services at JAX, but it’s the norm for the Laboratory. While JAX doesn’t always apply for the official designation, LEED guidelines figure prominently in new construction as well as renovations at JAX campuses in Maine
and California.
Even the site for the new facility was carefully chosen with the environment in mind. “We looked at a different location, an undeveloped area overlooking a small lake,” Fitzpatrick says. “It would have been a stunning setting for this facility, but we decided instead to make use of an existing building site that was already set up with road access and utilities.” Positioning the structure in a way that leaves undisturbed a small wetland and a stand of sugar maples not only garnered more LEED credit but also allows the natural vegetation and animal life on the site to flourish, he added.
The design and infrastructure of the building itself is where the real Gold resides, though. These measures run the gamut from low-tech to hi-tech, including:
a stormwater collection system that filters parking lot run-off through a bed of crushed coconut shells and a border of water-loving vegetation before draining it into the public sewers, a 20,000-gallon cistern that collects rainwater off the roof for irrigating the natural landscaping surrounding the building, and low-emissions materials for flooring, paints and other surfaces.
On the West Coast, the Laboratory’s Sacramento, Calif., facility has earned the Sacramento Area Sustainable Business Certification, which recognizes that JAX goes above and beyond compliance with environmental regulations in preventing pollution and conserving resources.
A Sacramento campus Green Team has built an environmental awareness program for employees, including new hires, encouraging carpooling and recycling. Since 2010, a campus-wide program has composted and recycled about three million pounds of material that would otherwise have gone to landfill as waste. Soiled mouse bedding and food waste are sent to a recycling service where they are turned into organic compost used by local farms and vineyards. Mixed recyclable materials and metals are sorted and either used to make packaging materials or used by other companies as raw materials for other
In an innovative program launched in February 2014, recycled laboratory gloves are turned into raw materials and used to create useful, eco-friendly consumer products, such as plastic Adirondack chairs, park benches, bulk plastics and other items.
According to Kevin Mehta, head of the Sacramento facility’s Green Team, “going green” is just part of The Jackson Laboratory’s institution-wide commitment to excellence in operations as well as science. “As leaders in the research community, we demonstrate our environmental stewardship by implementing sustainability programs that minimize our environmental footprint,” Mehta says.
The Jackson Laboratory is an independent, nonprofit biomedical research institution and National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center based in Bar Harbor, Maine, with a facility in Sacramento, Calif., and a new genomic medicine institute in Farmington, Conn. It employs a total staff of more than 1,500.
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