Humming with the familiar sounds of machinery and cluttered with stacks of waste waiting to be discarded, the rear of New Orleans' Ernest N. Morial Convention Center looks like an industrial loading dock fitting for a facility that dates back to the 1980s.
But the building's color-coded recycling system tells a different story — one of a more modern system of waste disposal and massive recycling operation that have earned the Convention Center a sustainability certification that few facilities of a similar size have.
“It very much is new meets traditional,” said Linda Baynham, the Convention Center’s director of sustainability and corporate social responsibility.
On a tour through the Convention Center last week in honor of Earth Day, Baynham said the facility recycled over 248 tons in 2024, just the latest in a series of feats geared toward transforming the building into a leader in sustainability.
Walking alongside Baynman, Chief Operating Officer Adam Straight touted the facility’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, certification, a rating issued by the U.S. Green Building Council and used worldwide.
"We are the largest facility in the world to achieve gold LEED certification with the new standards," Straight said. "The new standards are real-time data, so you have to not just tell your story of what you're going to do ... but you have to release the data that says, 'OK you guys are really doing that.'"
The Convention Center received the certification in 2022 and is working to renew it this year.
While other facilities will likely meet the new standards, Straight said the Convention Center officials will hold onto that honor as long as they can. Getting there involved a lot of changes that are part of the center’s ongoing capital improvement plan, he said.
The Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans Friday, Aug. 2, 2024. (Photo by Matthew Perschall, The Times-Picayune)
Going green
The signs of sustainability are everywhere in the Convention Center.
While walking through the mammoth hall, Baynham pointed to the lights, saying over 4,000 were replaced with more energy-efficient LED light fixtures. Inside the unusually empty exhibition hall, disposal bins are labeled with which items can be recycled or composted.
The Convention Center's loading dock includes recycling instructions in both English and Spanish. The pillars are colored-coded to represent the main materials that combined in 2024 to create the center's significant recycling record: yellow for landfill, blue for the plastic sheeting used to protect carpets, green for cardboard, red for scrap metal and brown for wood. Traditional materials like bottles and cans are also recycled.
Along with recycling and conserving energy, the Convention Center’s linear park, a green space near the entrance of the building, boasts 200 trees, which lower the facility’s carbon footprint through oxygen production and a stormwater management system that channels rainwater to irrigate the plants and trees, according to statistics provided by the convention center.
Baynham said the center also reduced its water use by installing low-flow plumbing fixtures in the restrooms in addition to upgrades to energy equipment and cooling towers. The center’s water use has been reduced by 16% since 2019, enough water to fill 670 backyard swimming pools, Straight added.
Beginning in 2020, the convention center installed 87 water bottle-filling stations to reduce the use of plastic water bottles. There were over 500,000 bottle refills in 2024, Baynham said.
The convention center still has plenty of projects going forward, and the team plans to stay green.
"A lot's getting done here in the next 5 to 10 years" Straight said. "Any future construction not only inside the building, but future construction outside the building, will take on that same model."