We walk all over it, but we love it.......

It's probably no surprise that we were careful about the carpet that we selected for the building. A big expense and a big choice in terms of its environmental impact, the carpet had to be functional, attractive and environmentally friendly. The carpet is made by InterfaceFlor and is a line called Entropy.

It's worth a trip to their website on environmental sustainability to learn about this company's extraordinary, industry leading practices. Among other things, the company is committed to carbon-neutrality--that's an admirable challenge.

The Entropy carpet line is between 66% and 74% recycled materials--33% of which is post-consumer and 33%-41% of the carpet is post-industrial.

Because the carpet goes down in squares rather than rolls, it will cost us less in maintenance. When a square becomes worn or damaged, we just replace that square, not the whole roll. And the squares go into the recycling stream, not the waste stream!

So when you visit the building, be sure to look down. We're proud of our carpet and the role it played in making the building more environmentally friendly.

Video

We've posted a video about the building on our YouTube channel. To view it, click here.

Where to Park

We love having visitors to our building and boy are we getting a lot of them! Not a day goes by without a couple of tours going through the building. The Lawrence R. Pugh/VF Corporation Community Conference Center is busy with meetings.

We'd hate to have someone's visit marred by a parking ticket. So here's some advice on where to park when you come visit. First, there's on-street parking along both Court Streets and Third Street. Plan to "feed the meter" on those spots, but they're great for a quick visit.

When we built the building, it was designed specifically to use the Chiarelli Parking Garage (pictured) which is owned by the Reading Parking Authority. We even pointed our entrance to the corner to make the walk across the street as short as possible. The rates are very reasonable.

For visitors with a handicap placard on their car, there's a spot behind our building, with an entrance on third street or the Chiarelli garage has spots. If you park behind the building, it maybe easiest to enter the building from back-side garden level entrance. Just push the buzzer next to the door.

Unfortunately, we don't have space in our small back lot for other visitors and non-employee cars parked there may be ticketed by the parking authority. The large lot next door is owned by the church and is also not available for visitors.

Our own sparkling wine!

At our ribbon cutting, Ed Anewalt, the owner of Anewalt's Landscape Contractor presented all the members of The Community Foundation staff with a commemorative bottle of Brut sparkling wine from Clover Hill Winery. Ed's family owns the winery and designed a special label to commemorate the opening of the building.

I still see a lot of bottles around the office, but they're all empty!

Water Bottles

According to "All about water.org" about 1.5 million tons of plastic are used bottling water. Of course, there are places where bottled water is a great way to get hydrated, but our building isn't one of them.

We placed filters on all the taps in our building and have banned water bottles from the building. It's one little step toward cutting down on the waste in our landfills and reducing energy usage in bottling and transporting water.

And we're finding that we like Reading City tap water just fine!

The plants....

There's not a lot of space for landscaping around the building, but we wanted to use what space we had to create at least a small urban green space. We hired Jonathan Alderson Landscape Architects to design a landscape plan that reflected the environmental mission of the building. We think they did a great job and that the landscaping will be a nice addition to downtown. By using native plants, we reduce the amount of water that is required to maintain them. In fact, after they're established, the plants should thrive on their own.

Fortunately, we found a great local landscaping company, Anewalt's Landscape Contractors to install the landscaping and last week, it was all completed. The rainy summer we've had has continued, so the plants have needed very little watering, but of course, all the water that we would use comes from our cistern, meaning we're not using Reading Water Authority water where we don't need it.

Where do those soda bottles go?

It's too bad that we had to build a fence between us and Zion Baptist Church. The church didn't want it, and neither did we, but the City of Reading requires it.

We made the best of it, and like all things tried to make it as green as possible. The fence is made of a product called "Trex," which is made of post-consumer plastic and can be used to replace wood. It's virtually indestructible, and keeps the plastics out of the landfill. Amity Fence Company from Reading installed the fence.

Trex is also used in the bike rack we installed. So far, we've had two events in the building and the bike rack was used both times!!