This week, the Nature Conservancy’s Nuuanu Street headquarters were certified as having meet the “green” standard established by the U.S. Green Building Council, making the Wing Wo Tai building the first exsiting building in the Islands to win the coveted LEED–it stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design–designation. The work involved photovoltaic installation, a new air-conditioning system and low-flow plumbing.

Honolulu Weekly caught up with Nature Conservancy Hawaii Executive Director Suzanne Case about the significance of the achievement and the lessons learned along the way.

The Wing Wo Tai building has been around since 1877. This must have been a challenge.

It’s a registered historic building, so you have to go through an extra permitting screen to do anything on the exterior. Our work was inside and up on the roof, so it wasn’t as involved as it might have been. I’ve got my eyes on the photovoltaic paints that are hopefully coming down the line, but those aren’t ready yet, so for now it was pretty straightforward. The historic nature of the building created an extra step, but it was totally doable.

What was the most challenging part of the process?

The neat thing about LEED is that there’s a whole group of people that have thought through the best ways to be green. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. [The U.S. Green Building Council is] quite strict about it, so you really have to work through all the steps. The benefit is the resulting confidence in the rigor of the process, and the consistency of it globally. We had the LEED standard as a resource that guided us through the process and we feel great about it.

I think green certifications are helpful–somebody else has done all the research for you. And now that we’ve gone through this, we’ve helped smooth the path for others. Part of the certification is green cleaning, but nobody [in Honolulu] did green cleaning [to LEED standards]. We found someone willing to learn what green cleaning was all about according to LEED certification and to do that work. Now they’re available for whoever’s next.

It creates an infrastructure.

LEED certification for new buildings is great. You have an opportunity to design your building from the ground up. But the vast majority of buildings, obviously, are existing buildings.

LEED is a little bit about certain retrofits and a lot about how you run your business. You learn a lot about business processes– about buying green, for example. We analyzed the kind of paper we were using. I ended up switching to an unbleached paper. We had a donation of furniture, which was super, but under LEED principles, we had to make sure that the furniture we were replacing got used. So we found some other non-profits that needed it, and the stuff that was broken was taken apart and the pieces reused. There’s no more throwing things away.

Anything else you’ve learned that might help others plan for this?

A lot of this is about reducing energy and water consumption–if you’re able to do that, you can make a big difference. It’s a detailed process, and I guess what I would say is that we’re happy to share what we learned with anyone interested.