MacDonald-Miller’s Road to Sustainability

Moving Fast Towards Sustainability

The ability to clearly communicate choices has a significant day-to-day impact. Some smaller clients might be reluctant to pursue more sustainable technologies, believing they are too expensive. MacDonald-Miller works hard to demonstrate potential options, previewing long-term benefits and investigating incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act, local utilities, and other sources.

“We’re hearing the market demand for sustainability, and we do side-by-side comparisons,” said Marisa Zylkowski, sustainable design manager. “Here’s a piece of equipment that will save you X dollars in utility bills over ten years, and here’s one that’s not as energy efficient. We’re calculating those trade-offs every day and trying to show how sustainability is quite accessible by demonstrating savings over time.”

These ground-level interactions are just one piece of the company’s long-term sustainability vision. MacDonald-Miller signed the Climate Pledge and committed to the Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing (MEP) 2040 Challenge, which asks companies to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. This was a natural progression for MacDonald-Miller, which has long sought to reduce waste and increase value.

“MacDonald-Miller does a lot of training on lean and lean operations, and a lot of that is eliminating waste,” said Leventer. “Sustainability folds into that really well because we’re trying to be more efficient, less wasteful, and constantly improve our processes.”

Climate Action

Trane recently honored MacDonald-Miller with its Climate Action Award for a large project the company helped build near Seattle. The campus gets most of its energy from 900 geothermal wells, making it one of the largest geoexchange fields in the country. In addition to the wells, the campus features solar panels, 4.6 megawatts of heating, 10,040 tons of chilled water production, including 6,000 tons from heat recovery chillers, and over 45,000 MBH thermal energy storage tanks. Not surprisingly, MacDonald-Miller adopted a robust process to vet all the equipment.

“When we were buying the chillers, we did a scorecard for each proposal with line items for which refrigerant the chiller used and its global warming potential,” said Leventer. “We also wanted to know how efficiently that chiller would run at different temperature points and share all that information with the client to help them understand the project’s different components and make the best decisions.”

With the geothermal wells, the chillers must operate in different modes: exchange heating, geothermal exchange cooling, and heat rejection, so selecting the most optimal equipment was essential. The MacDonald-Miller team also developed a groundbreaking design in which paired chillers were stacked on top of each other on separate floors to help manage space constraints. MacDonald-Miller and Trane modeled solutions on test benches and in the virtual reality lab.

“The biggest driver was space,” said Leventer. “How would this big central plant support the campus with the space they had? The engineering team came in with this fresh, new idea, but then we had to show people it would work. We ended up saving half the building’s footprint.”

Trane played an integral role in this process, and Rourke was constantly on call to provide the necessary technical details to move the project forward.

“We’re going to work closely with partners like Trane to find better ways to do things,” said Warrington, “whether it’s saving space, money, or energy. I couldn’t even say how many times I was in a meeting during that project, and I would text Tiffany a question, and she would have the answer for me right away. That kind of support helps us get the clients what they need.” 

These kinds of close collaborations could easily be called the “MacDonald-Miller Way.” Each project has unique needs, and the company grabs ideas and information from all participants: clients, manufacturers, internal teams, government agencies. Through this rigorous process, they find the best ways to help clients achieve their goals in the most sustainable ways possible.