Elk Grove Village Takes the Lead In Northwest Suburban Green Initiatives

By Rachel Nardi for SUST 210*

Elk Grove Village, Illinois, has been going green the last few years. On the outskirts of Chicago within the northwest suburbs, this little town has taken on the green initiative with gusto. Back in 2010, the Village received a gold certification for being environmentally friendly.

Elk Grove Village Hall (Chicago Tribune)

At that time, Elk Grove built a new public safety and administration building to replace its old building on Biesterfield Road, which is almost directly off the Eisenhower Highway (which connects Elk Grove to Chicago’s Loop).

In a Chicago Tribune article by Ken Manson, Village Manger Raymond Rummel stated that, “Elk Grove Village is the first municipality in Illinois to get the gold ranking for a newly constructed village hall or public safety building.” Since Elk Grove houses around 4,000 businesses, it is about time that someone sets the standard.

What makes this project unique is that the contractor used around 90% of the debris from the old building. As Manson reports, “During the project, the contractor separated and recycled 90 percent of the construction debris from the old building, and 72 percent of the new material used in construction came from within 500 miles of the project, lessening the impact of fuel use on the environment.”

The new building includes 30,000 square feet of “living roof” that is filled with vegetation, which provides insulation and rain absorption for the building. This translates to savings on natural gas, cooling, heating and water conservation.

This is a good example for the rest of the Northwest suburbs to follow (the sooner the better).

Submitted 22 Feb 2013

* Each week during the Spring 2013 semester, two to three students in the SUST 210 Sustainable Future online/Schaumburg class at Roosevelt University will contribute blog posts to the Schaumburg’s Sustainable Future website.