UC Green - dedicated to sustainability
Want to get involved?
University City Partners seeks volunteers to serve on its UC Green Committee, composed of board members and other interested parties. The UC Green plan of work includes developing an expansive Green website, organizing the annual Green Goats & Gardens festival each spring at Environmental Way, and cataloging University City’s sustainability projects. To learn more, contact Janelle Goodrich by email at jgoodrich@universitycitypartners.org
Many visitors to the Green Goats and Gardens festival came by bicycle via University City's extensive greenway network.
Whether your idea of a green community is nature preserves, a hub on energy research or energy-efficient buildings, you will find it in University City.
For starters, you can slip into natural green here more easily than anyplace else in Charlotte. Our greenway trails let you walk, run, bike or roller-blade for more than 12 miles through shady creek bottoms, wetland preserves and even forests in University Research Park and UNC Charlotte. For a real escape, go hiking in the 1,000-acre Reedy Creek Park and Nature Preserve.
Helping find energy answers
This 200,000-square-foot EPIC building will open in 2011 in the Charlotte Research Institute campus on North Tryon Street.
One of our generation's great challenges is to find ways to balance nature with human needs. University researchers and several of our businesses are working to meet that challenge.
The Electric Power Research Institute is a leader in the development of key technologies that address challenges faced by the electricity industry as it strives to achieve a low-carbon future.
Areva, a French company with offices in Innovation Park, designs and builds power plants.
Siemens Energy, a German company, has placed its nuclear instrumentation and control group in Innovation Park, as well.
Global demand for new energy solutions has created a shortage of trained engineers. The $76 million Energy Production and Infrastructure Center, under construction at UNC Charlotte, will help meet the increasing demand for engineers in the energy field.
Faculty at the university's IDEAS Center (Infrastructure, Design, Environment and Sustainability) are focused on accelerating America's shift from unsustainable infrastructure, housing, and technology design to practices more attuned to the challenges of the 21st century.
Building (and rebuilding) smarter
A traditional 1980s office building in University Research Park has been transformed into Environmental Way.
Saving energy through wise stewardship is also important to sustainable living. Several University City businesses are LEEDing the way. TIAA CREF has received silver-level LEED certification for its main office building in University Research Park. The LEED program recognizes buildings that attain high levels of energy efficiency and resource conservation. The Charlotte Research Institute’s newest building that houses their Bioinformatics.
New owners of a 1980s office building have transformed it into Environmental Way, a workplace laboratory of sustainable systems and design. Not only are they taking a building that was vacant for over 10 years to be LEED-platinum, but they are also showcasing a host of cutting edge technologies and materials in their dramatic retrofit.
Recycling whole buildings
BECOSouth has ambitious plans for its makeover of the former IBM manufacturing plant in University Research Park.
Sometimes the greenest buildings are ones that get reused rather than replaced. Maryland-based BEC0 recently purchased IBM’s former manufacturing center. Their new division, BECOSouth, has launched a one-year, phase one $25 million upfit to transform the 1.9-million-square-foot facility into an office complex appropriately named Innovation Park.
In just six months, Speed Channel transformed another 1980s building, once used to make floppy discs, into a high-tech, all digital broadcast center.
Linda Holden reused items her demolition firm saved from the dump to create a small business center in a tire company's former research building.
While less dramatic, two relocated companies found new homes in buildings that others were leaving. Electrolux merged operations scattered in seven US locations to make the former home of a regional bank their North American headquarters. Nearby, IBM moved across Harris Blvd. to one of Up’s nearest buildings so a French company could relocate in the park.