Plant and Environmental Sciences Building at UC Davis

The FIRST BREEAM USA In-Use Excellent rated building!

Completed in 2001, Plant & Environmental sciences is a 3-story, 126,651-square-foot building that provides state-of-the-art facilities for plant and environmental science research. About 80% of the building is made up of laboratories.

The building was the first to achieve an ‘Excellent’ rating with BREEAM USA In-Use certification in November 2017. In the Part 1 Assessment Performance assessment, the building achieved the full 100% in the Waste category and went on to also achieve impressive scores in Transport (83.33%), Pollution (81.82%), Materials (76.92%) and Energy (73.37%). In the second part of assessment, Building Management further top scores were achieved in Land Use & Ecology (80%) and Management (76.09%).

The building has been specified to host various sustainability features including;

  • Occupancy-based lighting and HVAC control for spaces and fume hoods
  • Variable frequency drives (VFD) on exhaust fans
  • Direct digital controls
  • Low-flow fixtures
  • Non-potable water usage in cooling towers
  • Energy Star computers

Amy Burns, Green Buildings Coordinator says that the UC Davis Green Buildings Team pursued BREEAM as it provides the flexibility to adapt criteria to buildings that do not fit the current green building certification process. That means buildings in any condition can be evaluated and recommendations can be made to improve the building’s environmental performance. The project team intend to continue to monitor the building to identify recommendations to further improve the buildings environmental performance.

Project Team:

Student Team
Simon Han (Sustainable and Environmental Design major)
Ysela Larios (Civil Engineering major)
Cameron Morelli (Mechanical Engineering major)
Zachary Ramalingam (Civil Engineering major)
John Sung (Chemical Engineering major)

Healthy Buildings International Team
Mark Klein (Project Manager)
Ravi Bajaj (BREEAM Assessor)

Energy & Engineering Team
Joshua Morejohn (Project Manager)
Nicolas Fauchier-Magnan (Project Manager)