The Omni Dallas Convention Center Hotel has achieved LEED® Gold certification. The hotel features PPG SOLARBAN® 70XL PACIFICA™ glass and Solarban z50 advanced solar control, low-emissivity glass, which maximize the natural city views while alleviating solar heat gain.
PPG Industries recently surpassed 1,000 requests for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED®, documentation for its architectural glass products.
According to five-year data from PPG’s flat glass business, one in five requests for LEED documentation support was for commercial buildings, followed by higher education (19%), K-12 education (12%) and federal and local government (11%) buildings. Other significant categories include retail (8%), military (6%), health care (5%) and institutional (5%) buildings.
Almost 35% of LEED documentation requests were for buildings in the northeast, followed by 15% in the northwest and 14% in the south central US.
Glenn T. Miner, PPG director of construction, flat glass, said one trend to emerge from the data is that the amount of glass sold for each LEED-documented project seems to have shrunk as the number of requests has increased.
“When we first started tracking LEED documentation requests in 2007 and 2008, the average amount of glass we sold per LEED project was about 24,500 square feet,” Miner said. “By 2012, that figure had dropped to less than 13,000 square feet even though the number of documentation requests we receive each year has more than quadrupled. That seems to indicate that LEED certification and environmental sustainability is becoming a priority for owners of big buildings and small buildings alike, which is an encouraging long-term development for companies like ours that make sustainable building products.”
PPG is among the world’s leading producers of advanced architectural glazings. Since 1999, the company has sold more than 3 billion square feet of coated, low-emissivity (low-E) glass, which improves the environmental performance of buildings. By transmitting high levels of natural light while blocking the sun’s heat energy, low-E glass reduces reliance on artificial lighting and air conditioning, which can account for up to 75% of the energy consumed in a typical commercial building.
In the past two years, PPG has debuted SOLARBAN® 72 STARPHIRE® glass, a solar control, low-E glass designed to provide high visible light transmittance, exceptional clarity and superior solar control performance; and SUNGATE® 600 glass, a multifunctional low-E glass that enhances the insulating performance of buildings in a variety of climates and applications. PPG will also introduce several new advanced glass products in 2013.
In 2007, PPG became the first company to earn recognition through the Cradle to Cradle Certified (CM) programme for its entire collection of architectural glass products. The Cradle to Cradle Certified programme encourages the development of products with materials that can be endlessly recycled, as they are in the natural world.