Quarles & Brady building strikes LEED gold

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The 30-story building that houses the Quarles & Brady law firm and various other tenants at 411 E. Wisconsin Ave. in downtown Milwaukee has received the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED gold certification, Riverview Realty Partners announced Friday.

In a news release, Chicago-based Riverview Realty stated that this marks the first time the designation has been secured for a multi-tenant office building in Milwaukee’s central business district. The building at 411 E. Wisconsin is also the largest in the city to achieve the gold designation.

Besides Quarles & Brady LLP, the building’s tenants include von Briesen & Roper s.c., Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co., Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC, Wisconsin Athletic Club, PNC Financial Services Group and more.

In order for an existing building to receive a gold certification for operations and management, they are evaluated according to strategies to improve the structures’ effects on the environment, Riverview Realty Partners stated in the release.

To achieve this certification, the firm introduced a plan that called for the addition of state-of-the-art equipment, adding new shipping-and-receiving and painting protocols and tweaking waste-management policies.

New installations include energy-efficient LED lights with sensors, Energy Star-rated plumbing fixtures, high-efficiency chillers and a building-automation system. These improvements helped reduce releases of carbon dioxide by 4.3 metric tons over three months, according to the release.

The two new protocols were meant to decrease hazardous emissions from shipping-and-receiving vehicles at the building’s loading dock and from the paint used at the facility. According to the release, these procedures will give a boost to the building’s indoor air quality.

Finally, the new waste-management and recycling policies diverted more than 400,000 pounds of waste from landfills between June and August, the release states.

“The value of embracing environmentally sustainable practices at office buildings is becoming increasingly critical to attracting and retaining quality tenants,” said Jeff Patterson, chief executive of Riverview Realty Partners.

The announcement from the developer comes the same day that the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources welcomed two Kimberly-Clark Corp. buildings, both in Neenah, as Tier 1 structures in the agency’s Green Tier program. Follow @alexzank