With Hill Construction headquartered along the South Carolina coastline, we have always taken a thoughtful approach to sustainable and resilient building and the impact our construction activities have on the environment.  Hill regularly works with clients to match their ROI goals with sustainability expectations.  It’s surprising to most how many sustainable options have a better life cycle return relative to their code-minimum peers.

 

While the construction industry historically has been wasteful, evolving codes, consumer demands, and technology are making a real change.  Simple changes like managing documents on cloud-based platforms instead of hard copies have drastically reduced paper waste.  Updated energy codes and more widely available energy-efficient systems have made baseline buildings significantly more sustainable now than just a couple of decades ago.

THE LEADERSHIP IN ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN

The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System™ encourages and accelerates global adoption of sustainable green building and development practices through the creation and implementation of universally understood and accepted tools and performance criteria. LEED gives building owners and operators the tools they need to have an immediate and measurable impact on their buildings’ performance. LEED promotes a whole-building approach to sustainability by recognizing performance in five key areas of human and environmental health: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection, and indoor environmental quality.

 

Hill is proud to be a part of the U.S. Green Building Council community (USGBC) with four Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Accredited Professionals (LEED AP) on staff. One of our projects, the Ashley Hall Library and Science Center, was designed and built according to the criteria for “silver” certification of the USGBC. This 25,000 square-foot center boasts sustainability-oriented features such as a terrace garden on the roof, an advanced rain-collection system, and large windows that produce an abundance of natural light, just to name a few.

EARTHCRAFT LIGHT COMMERCIAL

EarthCraft Light Commercial (ECLC) is a regional green building certification program that recognizes small-scale commercial buildings. The program focuses on environmentally responsible design and construction practices including better site selection, envelope construction, and energy and water efficiency. Hill is very proud of our project at Christ Our King Church in Mt. Pleasant, known as “The Beach House,” which has received the first ECLC sustainable designation in the state. As contractor on the design-build team on the project, we participated in a post-construction twelve-month process that evaluated the performance of major mechanical systems. Throughout the entire process, we were able to demonstrate the value of high-efficiency system selection in relation to the overall life-cycle value to the church.