Wal-Martians Turn Green in ?The Windy City?

Wal-Mart employees aren’t likely to let the grass grow under their feet, but they’re going to let it sprout over their heads — at least in Chicago.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. of Bentonville has taken a “lichen” to Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s green-roof program.

The world’s largest retailer plans to plant a low-profile garden — most likely consisting of sedum, moss and lichens — on half of the rooftop of its first store in Chicago, a one-story, 150,000-SF structure being built in a west Chicago neighborhood known as Austin. The store, which is slated to open in 2005, will be the first Wal-Mart anywhere to have a green roof.

It’s part of an effort to combat the “urban heat island effect,” said John Bisio, a spokesman for Wal-Mart. In the summer, Chicago tends to be seven to ten degrees hotter than the surrounding suburbs because of the city’s vast expanses of concrete and dark rooftops.

It’s one example of what Wal-Mart does to fit into the landscape of many American cities where there’s no room for the company’s usual 200,000-SF big-box Supercenter.

Green Chicago

Rooted in Europe, the green-roof trend is slowly growing across the United States.

Mayor Daley began encouraging the environmentally driven green-roof program in 2001. Since then, about 70 buildings in the city have planted grasses and plants on the roof. The green roofs are part of the building’s roofing system, not just potted plants on the roof.

Mayor Daley set an example with Chicago’s City Hall, which takes up almost an entire block. After spending about $1 million, half of the City Hall roof is now covered with 20,000 different species of plants.

Michael Berkshire, green-projects administrator for the Chicago Department of Planning and Development, said a test on the City Hall roof on a 90-degree day last summer showed a dramatic difference in temperatures. On the half of the building without the garden, the roof temperature was 170 degrees. On the green half of the roof, the temperature was 90 degrees. Green roofs also keep buildings warmer in winter.

That can translate to a 20 to 30 percent reduction in utility bills for the floor directly underneath the green roof, Berkshire said. In Wal-Mart’s case, there will only be one floor in its Chicago building, so the company should save considerably on heating and cooling bills for that store.

Owners of green-roof buildings also save money by not having to replace the water-runoff membrane underneath the roofing material as often. With a green roof, the membrane can last twice as long, or about 30 years, Berkshire said.

Installing a basic green roof costs between $10 and $20 per SF.

“There may be some up-front costs,” Berkshire said, “but if you look at the cost of the element over its life cycle, it will pay for itself.”

And the prices will come down with competition.

Berkshire said an inorganic growing material is often used because it’s lighter than soil and doesn’t usually require a building owner to pay for reinforcing the roof. A three-inch deep spread of the stuff on a rooftop weighs about 13 pounds per SF sopping wet.

Secret Recipe

Apparently, the exact mixture of the “growth media” is a secret recipe that the manufacturers don’t want to reveal. “Volcanic ash, that sort of thing,” Berkshire said in a fit of conjecture. Chicago uses 13 different manufacturers of green-roof products. Berkshire won’t name any of them because the city doesn’t want to play favorites.

Whatever it is, the inorganic material absorbs water for the plants to use, and the green roof cuts down on storm-water runoff — by 50 percent with the standard three-inch layer of the synthetic soil.

That’s important to a city like Chicago, where storm water and sewer systems are combined.

“In large rainfalls, we can have raw sewage in people’s basements and eventually into Lake Michigan,” Berkshire said.

It costs very little to maintain green roofs once they’re installed, Berkshire said. Normally, a bit of watering might be needed. But one building in the city has had a green roof for more than three years, and the owners have done no maintenance. Berkshire said the sedum and grasses there “are doing well.” Sedum seems to be the plant of choice for green roofs. Sedum is a genus of squat, hearty plants that have thick, fleshy leaves. One variety of sedum, with bright red flowers, has a name that’s fit for a horror movie: “Dragon’s Blood.”

“I hear after the second or third season, this stuff can live through anything,” Berkshire said of sedum.

Scientists at Weston Solutions Inc. of West Chester, Penn., believe enough green roofs could lower the temperature of an entire city. They estimate that, if all the rooftops in Chicago were carpeted with a lawn, the city would save about $100 million in annual energy costs. Peak demand would be cut by 720 megawatts, the equivalent output of one small nuclear reactor.

Berkshire said Wal-Mart was open to the suggestion of a green roof on the company’s building in Chicago. It’s the first “big-box retailer” to participate in the city’s green-roof program, he said, although Target Inc. had Weston Solutions install a 9,964-SF green roof atop one of its smaller Chicago stores last year. Wal-Mart’s green roof will be almost eight times that size.

“We talked to [Wal-Mart] about it,” said Pete Scales, a spokesman for Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development. “They seemed to think it was a reasonable thing.”

John Bisio, the Wal-Mart spokesman, said the company has been building stores with white rooftops for at least seven years now, but the foliage on the roof will be an added benefit to urban Chicago.

“It will keep things cooler in the summer, beautify the area and reduce air pollution,” he said.

The beauty of green roofs, however, will mostly be ovserved by people who are looking down from a skyscraper or airplane.

Scales said the most low-maintenance green roofs in the city are planted with sedum, moss and lichens, but the benefits would be the same if they were covered with palm trees.

“You’re not going to see any big prairie grasslands up there, unless they want to do that,” Scales said. “They’re certainly welcome to.”

A restaurant in Wisconsin allegedly keeps a couple of goats on its green roof to trim the grass, Berkshire said, but mowing isn’t usually necessary.

L.A. Redux

In Los Angeles, Wal-Mart renovated two former mall anchor stores. In its television ads, Wal-Mart shows employees and area residents saying the new stores have helped revitalize depressed areas of L.A.

“It creates jobs and hope for the community,” said Peter Kanelos, a Wal-Mart community affairs spokesman in San Diego. Other retailers often open stores in a particular area after Wal-Mart does.

In 1998, Wal-Mart renovated a two-story building that previously housed a Broadway department store in a mall in L.A.’s Panorama City, a northern part of the city that has a large Hispanic population.

Retrofitting an existing building can cost Wal-Mart more than building one of its prototype stores, said Daphne Moore, director of community affairs for Wal-Mart’s southeast region.

“We pretty much just took over the building,” Moore said of the former Broadway store. “The challenge was more for us to adjust operations to an existing building. One of our biggest challenges is in traffic flow, ensuring that we can adapt existing traffic and loading areas to the operations of our store.”

On Jan. 22, 2003, Wal-Mart opened its first three-story store in a 150,000-SF building that previously housed a Macy’s store in South L.A.’s Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, an 850,000-SF mall that was built in 1988. Baldwin Hills’ population is primarily African American and Hispanic. About 1.2 million people live within a five-mile radius of Crenshaw Plaza.

The Baldwin Hills store has about 450 employees, 75 percent of them full time. The Panorama City store has 375-400 employees, Kanelos said. Most Wal-Mart stores have 300-350 employees.

“All of our stores employ people from the general community,” Kanelos said.

Several Los Angeles officials have praised Wal-Mart for opening a store in Baldwin Hills. Bernard Parks, a Los Angeles City Council representative and former L.A. police chief, and John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League, have talked about the positive impact of L.A.’s three-story Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart has two other stores in the Los Angeles area, bringing the total there to four. The company plans to open the first Supercenter in L.A. this year.

Kanelos said he couldn’t talk about financials for individual Wal-Mart stores but said the Baldwin Hills and Panorama City stores “are doing as well as the company expected them to do.”

The Los Angeles Times reported that the Crenshaw Plaza Wal-Mart’s sales were “higher than expected” in the first quarter after it opened.

Warehouses of New Orleans

It may be called “The Big Easy,” but opening a store in the middle of New Orleans has been anything but easy for Wal-Mart.

In New Orleans, a $15 million, 203,000-SF Wal-Mart Supercenter is under construction on a site that was previously home to the St. Thomas housing project in the Lower Garden District. The Wal-Mart will anchor a $318 million mixed-use development on the 50-acre site.

Preservationists weren’t smiling at the idea of a Wal-Mart store in the historic neighborhood, although much of the area along Tchoupitoulas Street is lined with empty warehouses and shotgun houses.

A store in the middle of town would create jobs and keep tax money in the city, Wal-Mart argued. Opponents said the store would hurt small businesses.

Bumper stickers and yard signs reading “Wal-Mart: Proud to Kill Our Home” and “No Sprawl-Mart” popped up all over the city.

To fit in with the existing architecture, Wal-Mart designed a building that looks like a 50-year-old warehouse. The company is preserving a cotton press at the site, Moore said.

The new Wal-Mart is scheduled to open by the end of the year.

Moore said residents of that area of New Orleans spent more than $100 million last year at two Wal-Mart stores outside of the city limits.

Some Garden District New Orleanians may be snooty about their stores, but apparently they don’t mind driving to the suburbs to shop at Wal-Mart.