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Water Efficiency

Water Efficient Landscaping

Drone of Building Entrance

The Jacksonville Regional Transportation Center at LaVilla (JRTC) utilized a number of Low-Impact Design (LID) features to help reduce the rate of run off of the site and reduce water used for irrigation by 50%. This helps prevent harmful pollutants from entering water bodies and helps alleviate flooding issues. Features include a mixture of bio-swales, rain gardens, and bio-retention areas to pretreat surface water runoff from the site. The central plaza located west of Johnson Street includes specialized paving, grassed seating areas, and a bioretention network which runs throughout the facility. The planting in the bioretention beds consist of hardy plant species that can withstand the extreme conditions – periods of stormwater inundation, and dry periods – within the beds, with limited irrigation needs. The plantings consists of perennials, grasses and shrubs with limited tree usage to maximize the water holding/filtering capacity while maximizing evapotranspiration, or the process by which water is transferred from the land to the atmosphere through evaporation from soil and other surfaces and by transpiration from plants.

 

Water Use Reductions

Bathroom Sink

Conserving potable water, or water that is safe to drink, is an important aspect of the Jacksonville Regional Transportation Center at LaVilla (JRTC). Potable water makes up only 3% of the Earth’s water and comes from a public water supply system far from the building site. Wastewater leaving the site must be piped to a processing plant, after which it is discharged into a distant water body. This pass-through system reduces streamflow in rivers and depletes freshwater aquifers, causing water tables to drop and wells to go dry. The JRTC utilized a number of features to help reduce its potable water use by 35% and minimize the amount of wastewater produced by the building. These features include low-flow toilets and low-flow fixtures on all sinks. The use of water efficient landscaping also reduces the buildings potable water use.