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Lincoln Park REI store achieves green certification
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Chicago is now home to a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified REI (Recreational Equipment, Inc.) store. The Lincoln Park facility, the outdoor sporting goods retailer's first downtown Chicago location, opened in October of 2008 and is now certified as Gold by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) under its LEED for Commercial Interiors certification program.
The LEED program certifies that a building is designed and built sustainably, evaluating the implementation of strategies to improve energy efficiency, indoor environmental quality, water efficiency, use of recycled materials, and a host of other metrics. The Lincoln Park REI store was certified under LEED for Commercial Interiors, which according to the USGBC, certifies "high-performance green interiors that are healthy, productive places to work; are less costly to operate and maintain; and have a reduced environmental footprint."
The Lincoln Park store and the store in Round Rock, Texas are the two most recent REI stores to achieve certification, making a total of six LEED certified buildings operated by the retail cooperative. While the Round Rock store is a prototype design for REI, the Lincoln Park store was built using REI's more traditional building design.
In the coming weeks, we will tour the facility and provide a detailed report on sustainable elements of the building design, as well as the economical and social factors driving REI's focus on environmental stewardship. REI has also produced a video outlining its corporate philosophy on sustainability, which can viewed here.
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