Developing Awareness for Water Issues

Green building practitioner Christopher Noble talks about achieving net-zero water, and explores why water sustainability issues deserve more attention now.

In Northeast Ohio, we live by the sixth largest body of fresh water on earth. Water accessibility is virtually a non-issue—which is exactly why we should be exploring sustainable solutions now, points out Christopher Noble, a real estate development consultant working with Smart Hotels LLC, a developer of boutique/off-brand hotels with a sustainable focus on college campuses nationwide.

The bulk of development projects Noble has worked on during his 25-year career have had a sustainable bend. But water conservation and preservation have only entered the picture recently, he says. That’s mostly because those projects have not been “challenged by water.”

A mindset shift is necessary to get people thinking proactively about water as a critical component of development.

“We need to think about the world as it’s going to be as opposed to how it is,” Noble says, relating that developers working on projects in the American West—and people living in this part of the country—are acutely aware of water scarcity. They live it. “[Water] is not being dealt with everywhere; it’s being dealt with where there is drought or access to water issues,” Noble says.

Noble, who served as director of development for Forest City Commercial Group and was a founding member of the Cleveland Green Building Council, had an opportunity to travel to Central America last year as part of a clean fresh water initiative. “Water, as a resource, is looked at differently there than it is here,” he notes.

Tangent Company spoke with Noble about the project he’s working on now in Oberlin, Ohio, and why he supports regulatory reform to give people in Ohio water recycling options.

Tell us about the hotel / mixed-use project in Oberlin and water conservation efforts on that property.

There has been an inn, or hotel, in continuous operation on the Oberlin College campus since the 1800s, and the latest incarnation (prior to current development) was built in the 1950s and added on to in the 1960s. So, by the time Smart Hotels LLC got involved a few years ago, the hotel had served its useful life. The physical plan was getting run down and the college conducted a study to determine whether to tear down the structure or renovate it.

Flash forward, the decision was made to tear down the old hotel and build a new one. In conjunction with that, there was a lot of fundraising initiated by a friend and retired professor of environmental studies, David Orr. He serves as special assistant to the president of Oberlin College on Sustainability and the Environment. David was pivotal in gardening philanthropic donations to support building the new construction to LEED Platinum rating. Leadership in Energy Efficient Design requires meeting criteria in five green design categories: sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, and indoor air quality.

We had discussions about sustainability in a number of aspects, and one of those with water. During that time I also became familiar with the Living Building Challenge, which is a building certification program with the most advanced measure of sustainability possible today. One of the requirements is achieving net-zero water, which is a very difficult target. We realized that there were regulatory barriers, and cost barriers, too. Mostly, we were deep into pursuing LEED Platinum and opted to include some water conservation infrastructure on the site.

We will decrease water consumption through fixtures and devices. And rather than installing a green roof, we chose to utilize the roof surfaces as catch-rain areas because we are capturing water that hits our site and directing it into a 30,000-gallon subterranean cistern. The water can be used for irrigation purposes, and beyond that it’s an opportunity to think about what we can do with the water. We haven’t implemented all of the things we know we can do.

What regulatory barriers did you identify that might keep developers from pursuing a net-zero / water recycling goal?

As part of gaining knowledge and experience about net-zero water concepts from the Living Building Challenge, we realized that getting to net-zero water is really only a problem from a regulatory standpoint. Even in places where water challenges on a local level are far greater than they are here in Northeast Ohio, the hurdle to achieving net-zero water conditions are regulatory ones.

Secondly, we feel that one of the best things we can do in conjunction with the pursuit of new sustainable green building initiatives is to foster economic development activities on whatever scale. That’s very important to us. Advocacy with respect to regulatory issues matters and it goes hand in hand with developing economic opportunities for entrepreneurs.

So, we jumped in to support Senate Bill 179 that includes recycled water as a private water system. This bill breaks down regulatory barriers for recycling water.

What misconceptions do you face with sustainable development efforts surrounding water availability and conservation? Are we as focused on water issues as we should be?

Water is something that most people take for granted in our part of the world—it’s not something people think about a whole lot, at least in our region. You really have to step out of the typical mindset and look at the broader perspective. This is happening in the U.S. in places like California, where it is different now than it was two years ago in terms of water challenges and opportunities.

For most people throughout the United States, focusing on water is a paradigm shift. It takes people thinking on the edge of the equation.

Sitting on top of the world’s sixth largest body of fresh water is a great place to start to propagate ideas about water sustainability and stewardship because we are not currently making decisions from the dire need of necessity, but from a more rational place of holistic thinking. We’re not thinking in crisis mode, so there’s room to innovate.

Where do you see development heading in the future with regard to water sustainability initiatives?

There will be communities that will get as close as they can to net-zero water, but I believe that will be out of necessity. There are opportunities here for us, in a different regulatory environment, to think about more water reclamation and reuse. That can be done not as an economic necessity, but as something we need to think about as a standard—because it’s the right thing to do.