Last Friday, we visited the Stopwaste.org building in Downtown Oakland to learn what a LEED Platinum building looks like. Outside, what I first noticed was a GREEN building – yes, the building itself was the color green! When we entered, the first thing we saw was a touch screen machine. “What is it?” Everybody asked. The machine showed how much energy the building saved per year, what percent of the electricity was coming from solar panels, and much more.
Then we were ready to continue the tour but before that, chocolate on the front desk was waiting for each one of us. With chocolate in our hands, we entered the largest and tallest room, similar to the main room from our Teen Center. There was a lot of space, light, and fresh air. Walking around the building, we saw their kitchen, which featured lights that turned on with a movement. The bathrooms were Antonia’s favorite. She liked how pretty they were, and the automatic faucets with their own solar sensors to generate power.
We were also impressed with the gallery of recycled art pieces. One that stood out to me was a shirt made of pictures from a magazine. Very pretty! Later we went to the second floor where the offices were located – similar to how our building will be. Everywhere there were desks with brochures and guides of how to be green and how to recycle.
Overall visiting this building was a great experience. It gave us new ideas for our building, a better understanding of what it is to be green, and made us wonder if we were able to do similar things in our building and if we had the budget to do them.
See what we saw - check out the virtual tour of Stopwaste.org for yourself
