4/3/2021 ASCE headquarters debuts a more sustainable parking lot | Civil Engineering Source

PROJECTS SUSTAINABILITY

ASCE headquarters debuts a more sustainable parking lot

January 14, 2021 5

The new courtyard at ASCE’s headquarters includes engraved pavers in its patio. A FocalPoint biofilter captures and treats
stormwater that has infiltrated from the adjacent parking spaces, where Stormcrete precast porous concrete panels have been
installed. (Photograph Courtesy of the ASCE Foundation)

When is a parking lot more than a parking lot? When it is a test bed for low-impact
development techniques, best management practices in stormwater control, and
sustainable development.

Last month, ASCE completed a project at its Reston, Virginia, headquarters that is all that
and more. Finding its entire parking lot in need of a complete overhaul in 2018, the
Society turned to the ASCE Foundation for a solution that would demonstrate its
commitment to the principles of sustainable design and environmental stewardship. The
Foundation rose to the challenge by engaging donors, volunteers, and vendors to design
and install permeable pavement, stormwater filtration systems, and other technologies
that could help keep more than half the site’s potentially contaminated stormwater runoff
out of the local watershed.

“The Foundation saw this as an opportunity to lead by example, using (the Society)
headquarters as a guide for how to retrofit a parking lot with environmentally friendly
practices and using the site as a learning laboratory to highlight potential interventions,”
says Matthew J. Jones, P.E., LEED AP BD+C, M.ASCE, a senior principal of Magnusson
Klemencic Associates and the parking lot project manager. The effort, he says, offered an
“ideal opportunity to incorporate green stormwater infrastructure to improve the quality
of runoff leaving the site as well as to slow the release of stormwater from the site.”

Reston is located in northern Virginia, within the Difficult Run watershed, which drains into
the Potomac River and eventually into the Chesapeake Bay. According to U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency data cited by chesapeakebay.net, 80 percent of the
bay’s tidal regions are partially or fully impaired by toxic contaminants. “Difficult Run, and
in particular the portion that ASCE’s headquarters lies within, is highly urbanized,” explains
Mike Rolband, P.E., PWD, PWS Emeritus, M.ASCE, the chief technical officer for Wetland
Studies and Solutions Inc. and a core member of the large team of experts who donated
their expertise to the project.

When is a parking lot more than a parking lot? When it is a test

bed for low-impact development techniques, best management
practices in stormwater control, and sustainable development.

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4/3/2021 ASCE headquarters debuts a more sustainable parking lot | Civil Engineering Source

“Much of (Reston) was developed prior to the implementation of current stormwater-

management requirements (that were enacted) to control water quantity and quality,”
Rolband continues. So nearby streams are subject to high levels of total suspended solids,
phosphorus, and nitrogen — all of which can eventually damage the Chesapeake Bay.

By renovating the parking lot with more environmentally responsible techniques, ASCE
hopes to do its part to help reduce stormwater runoff and improve the quality of the
water that does discharge from its surfaces. The new parking lot includes sections built
with two types of permeable pavers and two types of underground stormwater filtration
units. The remainder of the parking lot surface was milled and repaved with asphalt
containing recycled tires.

Let it flow
Twenty-four parking spots at the front of the building were rebuilt with permeable
interlocking concrete pavement supplied by the Interlocking Concrete Pavement
Institute’s Foundation for Education and Research. David R. Smith, ICPI’s technical director,
explains that the 80 mm thick, roughly 100 by 200 mm pavers are made of solid concrete
but are spaced roughly 10 mm apart, their joints filled with a permeable aggregate that
traps sediment as water flows through.

The water flows to stone base and

subbase layers that serve as a reservoir.
“The 300 mm thick pavement base and
subbase consists of open-graded
aggregate with a porosity of about 40
percent,” Smith explains, “so it can store
about 100 mm of water while infiltrating it
into the soil subgrade.”

The stone reservoir can store and infiltrate

flows from a 100-year storm event, he
says. “Because the soil subgrade is sloped,
there are 30 mm thick, 200 mm high,
(polyvinyl chloride), vertical check dams
spaced about every 5 m to detain and
infiltrate the water stored in the subbase
reservoir, rather than allowing it to run
downhill on the subgrade.”

Around the corner from this area, 11

parking spots were created using
Twenty-four spaces at the front of the building were paved with
Stormcrete precast porous concrete concrete modules that have permeable aggregate between
panels, made by Porous Technologies LLC. them to enable stormwater to flow to a treatment reservoir
below. (Photograph Courtesy of the ASCE Foundation)
The panels are “manufactured with a
concrete mix that has a uniform coarse aggregate gradation and includes minimal fine
aggregates,” explains Gregg Novick, the president of Porous Technologies. “These
materials are used in a proprietary mix that results in a large volume of interconnected
voids — 15 to 20 percent voids.” The voids allow stormwater to pass through the panels
into the soils below and, from there, into a biofiltration structure called FocalPoint, made
by ACF Environmental.

Rob Woodman, P.E., M.ASCE, the New England/New York regional manager for ACF,
explains that the FocalPoint system uses high-flow media to treat the runoff faster and in
a smaller footprint than traditional systems. “The system treats for common urban runoff
pollutants, including total suspended solids, phosphorus, and nitrogen, while also
providing reductions in oils, grease, and bacteria,” he says. After that treatment, the runoff
flows through an outlet pipe to the existing storm drain. “A domed overflow riser holds
and conveys larger storm events to this same ultimate discharge location,” Woodman
says.

Another innovative technology that is being tested as part of the project is called Filterra,
made by Contech Engineered Solutions LLC. Frank Birney, the firm’s senior stormwater
consultant for northern Virginia and Washington, D.C., explains that this 13 by 7 ft filtering

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unit was “shoehorned” into a spot in the sidewalk near the building’s front steps “between
finished pavement and existing utilities, behind the curb, and next to the building.”

Runoff will enter this unit not through the pavers but through an existing curb inlet, Birney
explains. Stormwater will flow through a specially designed filter-media mixture
“contained in a landscaped concrete container,” he says. “The filter media captures and
immobilizes pollutants; those pollutants are then decomposed, volatilized, and
incorporated into the biomass of the Filterra system’s micro- and macro-fauna and -flora.”
The treated runoff is then discharged.

Rubber meets the road

The remainder of the parking lot — some 105,750 sq ft — was repaved with 1,241 tons of
asphalt made with recycled tires, supplied by Asphalt Plus LLC. William G. Buttlar, Ph.D.,
P.E., M.ASCE — a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at
the University of Missouri and holder of the Glen Barton endowed chair in flexible
pavement systems — identified Asphalt Plus as the industrial partner for the asphalt
paving part of the project. Buttlar also assisted with the mix design and performance
testing at the Mizzou Asphalt Pavement and Innovation Laboratory. He explains that the
pavement for the project included 11 lb of Elastiko brand chemically engineered crumb
rubber per ton of asphalt, which equates to roughly 722 scrap tires that were recycled and
kept from landfills. 

Engineered crumb rubber is ideal for pavement — not just for parking lots but for
standard roads and highways as well — for a number of reasons, Buttlar explains. “Rubber
helps to stiffen the mix, reducing rutting potential,” he says. “It makes the pavement more
strain-tolerant, which reduces the rate of cracking. And when microcracking eventually
starts, the rubber crumbs help to slow or stop the movement of the cracks.” Moreover, he
says, the pavement lasts longer, requires less maintenance, and uses less material than
standard pavement. “In terms of life-cycle cost, crumb rubber asphalt roads are cheaper
than standard hot-mix asphalt roads.”

The parking area also includes a new vegetated courtyard, which features pavers engraved
with the names of members, ASCE Foundation donors, and others. Without these
donations, as well as the in-kind and materials donations made toward the project, the
cost would have been $700,000. With those donations, the actual outlay that the
Foundation made for the services and materials was reduced to just $440,000.

The project, which incorporated ASCE’s technical guidance and engineering standards in
its design construction, will serve as a demonstration of all these technologies. Special
signage explaining its various components will help tell the story to visitors, including
Society members and local students, once COVID-19 restrictions are lifted.

“I hope this project will demonstrate how a parking lot can be retrofitted to improve
stormwater runoff leaving a site while highlighting a few of the green stormwater
infrastructure elements that are available to project teams,” says Jones. “As civil engineers,
we have a duty to find ways to make the built environment more environmentally
friendly.”

This article first appeared in the January/February 2021 issue of Civil Engineering as “With a
More Sustainable Parking Lot, ASCE Walks the Walk.”

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