page_title: Bank of America Tower (Manhattan)
section_title: Environmental features
hierarchical_section_title: Bank of America Tower (Manhattan) / Details / Environmental features
caption_attribution_description: Buses navigated the snow in Midtown Manhattan in the early parts of a snowstorm on January 21, 2014. Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Patrick Cashin.
context_page_description: The Bank of America Tower is a 1,200 ft skyscraper in the Midtown area of Manhattan in New York City. It is located at One Bryant Park, on Sixth Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets diagonally opposite Bryant Park.
  The US$1 billion project was designed by COOKFOX Architects. Work on the Bank of America Tower started in 2004 and it was completed in 2009. The Bank of America Tower was appraised in July 2019 at over $3.5 billion, ranking it among the most valuable office buildings in the city.
  The Bank of America Tower is advertised to be one of the most efficient and ecologically friendly buildings in the world. It is the fifth tallest building in New York City, after One World Trade Center, 432 Park Avenue, 30 Hudson Yards, and the Empire State Building, and the seventh tallest building in the United States.
context_section_description: The design of the building makes it environmentally friendly, using technologies such as floor-to-ceiling insulated glazing to contain heat and maximize natural light, and an automatic daylight dimming system. The tower also features a greywater system, which captures rainwater for reuse. Bank of America states that the building is made largely of recycled and recyclable materials. Air entering the building is filtered, as is common, but the air exhausted is cleaned as well. Bank of America Tower is the first skyscraper designed to attain a Platinum LEED Certification.
  The Bank of America Tower is constructed using a concrete manufactured with slag, a byproduct of blast furnaces. The mixture used in the tower concrete is 55% cement and 45% slag. The use of slag cement reduces damage to the environment by decreasing the amount of cement needed for the building, which in turn lowers the amount of carbon dioxide greenhouse gas produced through the normal cement manufacturing process. Each ton of regular cement produced creates about one ton of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
  Temperature control and the production of some of its energy are accomplished in an environmentally friendly manner for the tower. Insulated glazing reduces thermal loss, lowering energy consumption and increasing transparency. Carbon dioxide sensors signal increased fresh air ventilation when elevated levels of carbon dioxide are detected in the building. Conditioned air for the occupants is provided by multiple air column units located in the tenant space that deliver 50 °F air into a raised access floor plenum. This underfloor air system allows users to control their own space temperature as well as improving the ventilation effectiveness. When building churn occurs, workstation moves can be performed more easily with lower cost and less product waste. The cooling system produces and stores ice during off-peak hours, and allows the ice to melt to help cool the building during peak load, similar to the ice batteries in the 1995 Hotel New Otani Tokyo in Japan. Ice batteries have been used since absorption chillers first made ice commercially available 150 years ago, before the invention of the electric light bulb.
  Water conservation features in the tower include waterless urinals, which are estimated to save 8 million US gal (30,000,000 l) of water per year and reduce CO₂ emissions by 144,000 lb (65,000 kg) per year (as calculated with the Pacific Institute water-to-air model). The tower has a 4.6-megawatt cogeneration plant, which provides part of the base-load energy requirements.
  Time magazine reported in August 2013 that the Bank of America Tower used twice as much energy overall as the Empire State Building, due to the large energy usage in the Bank of America Tower and the comparatively small occupancy rate of the Empire State Building.
  In summer 2013, the Durst Organization employed Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm to install and maintain two honeybee hives on the building.
caption: Street level, January 2014
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