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This year, the Puget Sound Business Journal debuted the Environmental and Sustainability Awards program to recognize Washington businesses that are making meaningful steps toward emissions reduction and climate stewardship.
Brad Liljequist’s handiwork can be found in decarbonization projects all around the Puget Sound region and underway at some of the biggest names in tech.
As director of zero-carbon solutions for construction services firm McKinstry, he spearheads its work with clients to design and update their buildings to minimize their climate impacts. And as creator of the International Living Future Institute’s Zero Carbon certification, his influence can be felt in the corporate decarbonization strategies of tech giants like Microsoft and Google and high-profile developments like Climate Pledge Arena, the Port of Seattle’s planned Maritime Innovation Center, and the electrical engineering and computer science building being built at Western Washington University.
It doesn’t stop there. His track record includes two “very deep” green development projects he oversaw during his tenure as a capital projects manager for the city of Issaquah. The zHome 10-unit townhome development was the first certified zero-carbon community in the United States, while Fire Station 72 won international accolades for its energy savings and was the highest-scoring LEED platinum fire station at the time.
Liljequist heads up the design team for McKinstry’s Catalyst building in Spokane, which will be one of the largest zero-energy, zero-carbon buildings in the country, and had a hand in the development of Alexandria Real Estate Equities’ sewer heat recovery system for its South Lake Union biotech hub.
An electrification project he oversaw for the Salt Lake City School District in Utah trimmed the carbon footprint of its heating, cooling, lighting and cooking systems by 25%. Phase one of the project was completed last fall.
In 2016, he published many of his insights in his book, “The Power of Zero: Learning from the World’s First Net Zero Energy Buildings.” Recently, he followed it up by launching a website called Climate Responsible, aiming to respond to a “great sense of malaise” about what can be done to address the climate crisis. In it, he seeks to provide “straightforward information and a roadmap” for people who want to make a difference.
“I have long been struck by the lack of knowledge of individual sources of carbon emissions, and how they can be avoided,” he wrote on the site.
Rather than addressing the evidence of climate change or the ethics of inaction, the site assumes its readers share his “conviction that we are in a slow moving yet massive crisis, and the understanding that the impacts will be borne by the future and those least able today to deal with it — thus, climate responsible.”
Corporate Citizenship Awards
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