Penn Transit ramps up sustainability efforts

If bottles can be recycled, why can’t buildings? That’s what Penn Transit Services did to increase its sustainability efforts.

Penn Transit hosted an open house Wednesday at its new headquarters located in the former DuPont Marshall Laboratory at 34th St. and Grays Ferry Ave. The University acquired the property in September.

“They say that the most sustainable building is one that has been repurposed,” Vice President for Business Services Marie Witt said, adding that this was the idea behind the new offices.

Last January, Penn Transit relocated their operations from 32nd and Walnut streets to give way for the new Krishna P. Singh Nanotechnology Center, director of Penn Transit Brian Shaw said. Its office occupies parts of two buildings on site.

The department repurposed many pieces of furniture left behind by the DuPont company, including desks, shelving units and work tables, assistant manager of Penn Transit John Gustafson said.

“We tried to be as green as we [could] in getting this building up and running,” Gustafson said.

The old offices were contained in a trailer, where employees worked “on top of each other” in a tight space, director of Communications and External Relations for Business Services Barbara Lea-Kruger said. “It wasn’t very comfortable.”

At the former location, vehicles were repaired in the parking lot. Nuts and bolts were stored in portable tin boxes.

Now, Penn Transit has transformed an old building into a maintenance facility, featuring a two-bay garage where they can “do the heavy-duty work we have never had the place to do before,” Shaw said.

The new location also boasts a dispatch center, administrative offices, a training room and lockers for drivers.

Shaw proudly showed off a new shelving unit featuring nuts and bolts sorted into small compartments.

To improve sustainability, the walls were painted with low volatile organic compounds paint, which contains fewer ozone-depleting compounds. The low-VOC paint-on flooring in the maintenance garage also keeps oil from seeping into the ground.

Ceiling tiles in the building were made from recycled materials, and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-certified tiles were used on the floors.

Penn Transit advertised pieces of furniture and equipment it didn’t need on Ben’s Attic — a website that allows University departments to exchange objects that would otherwise be discarded.

Valerie Johnson, city and community relations coordinator for the University said she visited the open house and was impressed by “the sustainability efforts that they used instead of buying new things.”

In addition, Penn Transit has pushed for sustainability by adding bike racks to buses, making special pricing agreements with Philly Car Share and Zip Car and using biofuel in its buses for lower emissions, Shaw added.

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