Office Depot Plans LEED-Certified Store

Office Depot, headquartered in Delray Beach, Fla., has announced plans to build and open its first LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)-certified retail store in Austin, Texas, in mid-2008.

At the same time, Office Depot will investigate incorporating LEED certification into its store prototype. Office Depot has already piloted the green building design concept of “daylight harvesting” in its Greensboro, N.C., store, a concept that removes, on average, 250,000 pounds of carbon and greenhouse gases from the environment each year.

Office Depot is already a leader in the area of green construction, having achieved the following during 2006:

• Saved nearly 66 million kWh of electricity due to energy efficiency and conservation efforts in North American warehouses and stores;
• Avoided approximately $6.2 million in electricity costs due to energy efficiency and conservation efforts in North American facilities;
• Dramatically reduced Absolute Greenhouse Gas emissions by 10.1 percent across N.A. buildings;
• Retrofitted nearly entire store chain (1,186 stores in North American) to T5 high-output lighting; and
• Rolled out an energy management system upgrade to the majority of stores in an effort to track usage and trends in one central location.

 “Office Depot has successfully implemented a number of environmental construction initiatives over the past few years,” says Edward Costa, vice president of Construction for Office Depot. “We see both our membership in the U.S. Green Building Council and our long-term strategy of having a retail store prototype LEED-certified as examples of Office Depot’s environmental vision to increasingly buy green, be green and sell green.”

 More information is available at www.officedepot.com/corporatecitizenship and www.officedepot.com/environment.