Brown Is the New Green

APA March 2009

More and more brownfields are being developed, not just cleaned up. And they're going green in a variety of ways.

By JoAnn Greco

Since Americans first became acquainted with the idea of revitalizing brownfields, the economic impact of saving these former wastelands has been remarkable. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, its brownfields program has leveraged more than $12 billion in cleanup and redevelopment funding from the private and public sectors and created about 50,000 new jobs.

The agency began distributing funds to local governments through a pilot program in 1994. That program is designed to help states with voluntary brownfield cleanups. As the years passed, the program expanded its definition of what merits cleanup, broadening it to encompass much more than the public health emergencies associated with Superfund sites — a program, officially known as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, that got its start in 1980 in response to New York State's Love Canal disaster.

Then, in 2003, funding for the brownfields program was officially separated from the Superfund program. A lot has changed in the five years since then, especially at the local level. Brownfields are increasingly given priority in economic development offices and, consequently, are increasingly on the radar of planners and private developers.

"More states are channeling resources to properties with a clearly identified end use or economic development activity," reports the EPA in a recent update of state activity. State and local governments have compiled brownfield inventories and instituted other marketing programs to keep developers informed. Thinking has shifted from a "cleanup-only mentality to a cleanup and reuse strategy," the EPA report concludes. And, both facets — cleanup and reuse — are going green.

A long drive from here to there

Cathedral Kitchen, a soup kitchen in Camden, New Jersey, was built on a reclaimed site that once housed a series of light industriesProgress, yes, but there's still a long way to go. The rough-hewn outskirts of America's big cities and small river towns taunt the eye with hulking factories, their windows broken and brick crumbling; seldom-used rail yards, overgrown with weeds and litter; and acres of empty lots protected by barbed wire. Whether filled with muck and ooze underground, or decay and blight above, these brownfields — defined by the EPA as "property, the expansion, redevelopment, or reuse of which may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant" — too often remain unremediated and undeveloped.

According to David Lloyd, director of the EPA's office of Brownfields and Land Revitalization, the nation has between 450,000 and one million of these in-limbo properties. Still, Lloyd is encouraged.

"In the last two years alone, our state and tribal response programs — which include all 50 states and some 60 tribes — reported that they had cleaned 19,000 properties, for a total of 250,000 acres," he says, adding that this exceeds the pace of previous years. And, many in the field agree, the hurdles associated with the cleanup and redevelopment of brownfields are gradually disappearing.

"Slowly, the stigma associated with brownfields is being removed," says Evangeline Linkous, planning analyst at the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, which serves nine counties in Philadelphia and New Jersey. "Planners see them as a development opportunity that can be placed into context with other areas they're interested in, such as transit-oriented development, and developers are becoming more comfortable as they understand the wealth of new choices for remediation and for use."

Governments, too, are coming around. Pennsylvania just passed a bill, modeled on a New Jersey program, that could be signed into law soon. The Pennsylvania act allows up to 75 percent of remediation costs to be reimbursed by the state. And TIFs (tax increment financing districts) are being used in all kinds of brownfield projects. Linkous acknowledges that these financial measures "can be controversial, but we need to remember that brownfields present a strong economic catalyst and opportunity to change the market," she says.

The ravaged city of Camden, New Jersey (pop. 80,000), has come to this realization. It recently hired a locally based consulting firm, Brownfield Redevelopment Solutions, to conduct an inventory of priority brownfields and other underused industrial and manufacturing sites, as part of a plan to reestablish the city's manufacturing base.

"If every municipality did this, they'd get a better handle on whether these properties were sufficiently productive, whether they could be more consistent with surrounding land uses, and whether there was land with contamination issues that still need to be addressed," says Judy Shaw, AICP, of the National Center for Neighborhood and Brownfields Redevelopment at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. (The university also has a major presence in Camden.)

"It puts them in a good position to initiate a discussion with their community and with developers. For too long, it's been very easy to warehouse our brownfield sites," Shaw continues. "But now there's a much stronger understanding of their planning and use aspects and their value. There are developers who will come in and take risks and who know there's money to be made. It's a matter of the community taking a leadership role."

While Camden may be looking for manufacturing sites, ex-brownfields can, of course, be converted into housing, retail, entertainment, and office uses. Some of the largest mixed use developments under construction or recently completed are reclamations of rubber-making plants and railroad yards, of steel mills and textile mills.

These include: Atlanta's $2 billion, 138-acre Atlantic Station; Denver's $1 billion Cherokee Denver; Las Vegas's $6 billion, 61-acre Union Park; Bridgeport, Connecticut's $1.5 billion, 52-acre Steel Point; North Carolina's $1.5 billion, 350-acre multiuniversity research campus; and Elizabeth, New Jersey's $2 billion, 30-acre Celadon. Several redevelopment projects are slated for the sprawling, swampy New Jersey Meadowlands, some of which includes brownfields, and an $800 million casino intends to incorporate much of the massive ruins of Bethlehem Steel in Pennsylvania.

Hundreds of much smaller projects are under way, too, promising to turn ground that once was home to neighborhood gas stations, dry cleaning facilities, and auto repair shops into green community centers, high school athletic fields, and affordable housing developments.

Take the brand new home of Cathedral Kitchen, a Camden, New Jersey, soup kitchen.

Initially, the nonprofit intended to build on a lot it had bought closer to downtown. But because that area is slated for a major redevelopment project to be anchored by the new headquarters of Campbell Soup, the city suggested a swap, offering to pick up remediation costs at a brownfield site. Today, the soup kitchen's low-slung building occupies a reclaimed site that had housed a series of light industries.

"This worked out perfectly for us," says Karen Talarico, the group's executive director. "Not only did we get to design the space from scratch, but we hope our presence will bring other development to the neighborhood." Further, in what looks like a first, Cathedral Kitchen hopes to apply for LEED certification. The building features water-efficient landscaping and interior finishes manufactured from recycled materials. A large quantity of construction waste was salvaged during excavation of the site and demolition of its one burned-out building.

Going green

The building under constructionThis small, $4 million project is just the beginning of a trend that's turning brownfields into green sites. New site remediation strategies are using green technology to limit air pollution caused by particulate matter disturbed during demolition, soil erosion and nutrient depletion, and emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Remedies include leaving as much soil as possible in place during excavation (to cut down both on transportation and on particulate disturbance), taking measures to capture stormwater runoff, and using alternative fuels to run construction equipment.

After they're cleaned, some properties are even being transformed into solar and wind farms. Others redirect gases emitted by contaminated soil, generating fossil fuel.

One interesting example of the latter is a 121-acre landfill Superfund site in Antioch, Illinois (pop. 14,000), north of Chicago, which is transporting methane produced onsite to a nearby high school, which has not only gained cheap heat, but also a new athletic field on top of the landfill. "As part of remediation, the gas has to be captured no matter what," explains Jack Dowden, an area director at Waste Management, the private firm that operates the landfill. "Energy use is one of the few practical applications that really works."

Typically, such gas-to-energy byproducts are sold to manufacturing facilities and industrial boiler systems, Dowden says. He's confident the process has greater applications, especially for older landfills — Antioch's dates to the early 1960s — that were placed closer to residential areas.

Similar convergences between brown and green have been "brewing for a few years now," says Kristeen Gaffney of the EPA's Region 3 (Mid-Atlantic) brownfields office. "Our initial focus on green buildings for brownfield sites is just coming to fruition. These buildings are up and functioning, and there's a lot of success to report. Now we're ready to go beyond just the buildings."

Even though the EPA's main goal is still cleaning up contaminated sites, she adds, "we want to go full cycle — to take the site from being a terrific problem to being a cutting-edge example of green living."

LEED-ND fills a niche

To that end, the EPA helped develop a new LEED certification category, LEED for Neighborhood Development, which evaluates newly built neighborhoods using criteria related to location, neighborhood patterns and overall design, green construction and technology, and water and energy conservation. The program also awards separate points for brownfield reuse and, thus far, an estimated 25 percent of applicants have sought credits in that area.

One already designated project is Union Park in Las Vegas, which is being built on land that once served a rail terminal and switching yard. "Everyone thought we were crazy when we acquired this contaminated downtown land for $32 million in 2000," says Scott Adams, director of business development for the Las Vegas Redevelopment Agency. "But a recent appraisal put its value at between $150 million and $200 million."

The city is operating as a master developer for the entire 17-block parcel, whose individual projects include a performing arts complex and a Frank Gehry-designed brain research center. For Las Vegas, says Adams, "this site cleanup is a top priority; it's allowing us to reclaim the very heart of the city."

The EPA'S Gaffney agrees that many brownfields are desirable because of their central location. "Just think about it: A lot of brownfields are ideally located in the first place," she says. "They're near where people live and work, they're near transportation centers."

In addition to its involvement with LEED-ND, the EPA has worked on several other initiatives designed to encourage communities to green their brownfields. The "Lifecycle Building Challenge," an EPA partnership with, among others, the American Institute of Architects, promises national recognition to designs and projects that maximize material recovery in demolitions and excavations and lead to plans to reuse building components. Early last year, the EPA also released its first Green Remediation Primer, aimed at helping developers understand environmentally friendly cleanup techniques.

Most sweeping of all, the agency announced last summer that it would provide more than $500,000 in technical assistance grants to 16 brownfields sustainability pilots. The projects demonstrate reuse and recycling of construction and demolition materials, renewable energy development, and native landscaping.

"We're hoping that when these projects are complete — and most are already under way — we'll be able to use them as specific examples for other communities, so they don't have to reinvent the wheel," says Lloyd. He cites as an example a 300-acre landfill where the city of Houston hopes to build a solar plant.

One project that was a natural fit is The Waterfront, in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Dunn Twiggar, a developer there, is the only builder to be awarded one of the grants. "Looking at this site, it's not difficult to imagine the reuse and recycling of materials," says Andrew Twiggar, a partner in the firm.

Located along the Lehigh River, this 26-acre brownfield once housed iron and steel plants. What interested the EPA was the potential to restore and enhance a riparian property.

"I've been passing it for 15 years, thinking there has to be a better use," Twiggar says, "something that acknowledges the prime waterfront location." One day his firm approached the property owner with an idea for a mixed use community that would be lively at all times of the day. "We've looked at a lot of successful waterfront developments across the country, and we think we've pieced together the elements of success," he says.

Riverfront park space and walking trails play a large role in the redevelopment, which is not slated to begin for another 18 months or so, or until the leases of the current industrial tenants expire. Twiggar notes that the riverbank is graded on a steep, 30-foot slope, built on slag and other fill material. "It's not attractive, it's not natural — and it's just a waste, in more ways than one. The grant will help us see how we can remediate and remove that slag."

Plants do the work

Summerset at Frick Park was built on a brownfield site five miles from downtown PittsburghOne idea is to put nature to work. That's what Design Workshop, the Denver-based landscape design and planning firm, did during remediation of a Superfund site in Sugar Creek, Missouri (pop. 3,500). The site, a 500-acre oil refinery that neighbors could smell half a mile away on a windy day, presented a major challenge for the firm.

"You'd step in the soil, and the oil would just ooze to the surface and leave a film of scum on your boots," says principal Gyles Thornley. Capping the site by covering it with a thick layer of impenetrable clay would cost tens of millions of dollars and would only "paper over the problem, from our perspective," Thornley recalls thinking.

As he considered the vegetation that had grown back since 1982, when the site had been shut down, Thornley conceived of a novel approach: Why not let the trees and grasses do the heavy lifting through a process called phytoremediation? To minimize runoff, Design Workshop channeled the site's stormwater through swales — "more of a given today, but something new when we began this project several years back," says Thornley — and then lined them with willows and poplars, part of the natural habitat that has taken over the site.

"Plants absorb the bad stuff through their roots, transpirate it through their leaves, and it comes out clean, instead of removing and transporting the soil," Thornley says.

Making use of what's there also helped the site's owners, BP Amoco, save millions of dollars on pipes and treatment plants. Ongoing for 10 years now, and just ready to house new facilities for the town's police and fire departments, the project was a first for Thornley. But he's become a convert.

"The end result, as far as green buildings or green uses goes, is wonderful," he says. "But it's the cherry, a few sprinkles, really, on the great big wedding cake of the cleanup. We can't just continue moving contaminated material from place to place. It's going to come back and bite us. We really need to start approaching these sites differently."

JoAnn Greco is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia.