Back in March, Treehugger ran an article critical of new “green” corporate campuses being developed by Apple, Facebook and Google. The article mentions the abundance of greenery being swathed over each of these mega projects including acres of green roofs, restored wetlands and a forest of 6,000 newly planted trees. The renderings for each of these projects show lush vegetation throughout, the buildings themselves nearly lost in the sea of green. But under that greenery is hidden something very un-green, very dirty, and very big: Parking garages.
Treehugger dug a little beneath the trees and the grasses and the green roofs and found parking and lots of it: fifteen hundred spaces for Facebook, ten times that for Apple, and probably that much for Google, the article speculates. The article estimates that 6,300 gallons of gasoline will be burned each day “just getting all those Apple engineers to and from work.” The article concludes that far from being the greenest possible projects, as touted by the companies building them, they are instead just “gas-guzzling suburban office park[s]” and that “all that money spent on solar panels and green gizmos … just so 10,500 cars can fill its parking lots” is an “exercise in futility and misdirection.” They look great on the outside but are not so green on the inside.