University of North Texas Apogee Stadium

As the first newly constructed football stadium in the U.S. to achieve LEED Platinum certification, Apogee Stadium boasts many sustainable design attributes including 20% recycled content, 47% regional materials, and low VOC emitting materials. But to truly tap into the stadium’s sustainable design potential, we had to go beyond LEED.

Through research and careful planning, we were able to replace 6.2 million pounds of Portland cement with fly ash for an overall replacement of 35%, which is well beyond industry standards. The equivalent carbon offset is equal to the environmental impact of the stadium’s electricity production for 3 years.

Walter P Moore volunteered to develop an educational outreach program to share information about the stadium with the students of University of North Texas. We gave three classroom presentations on the environmental impacts of construction materials and the strategies to reduce embodied CO2 through material selection, cement replacement, and sourcing.

Finally, we specified salvaged steel for select highly visible elements to highlight the sustainable design. As no standard master specification exists for salvaged steel, we wrote our own which included requirements for sourcing, documentation, testing, and fabrication.