MacDonald-Miller’s Road to Sustainability

Quick Facts

Topics: Sustainability • Contractor Spotlight

MacDonald-Miller is a large design-build firm with a deep commitment to sustainability. The company combines advanced technology with tried-and-true relationship building to complete projects, large and small. MacDonald-Miller works closely with clients, Trane, and many others to identify climate-friendly solutions and find the most cost-effective ways to implement them.

Seattle’s MacDonald-Miller is a large, 1,400-person company with a small company feel. It’s the kind of place where the leaders know the employees’ names and different teams work closely to find solutions. MacDonald-Miller is tackling sustainability head-on, and its small-company culture plays a big role.

“Communication is really strong here, and different groups feed off each other,” said Ben Leventer, MacDonald-Miller’s senior project manager. “If our controls or energy services units see new sustainability regulations or technologies, that gets shared across the company and incorporated into the next big job. There’s constant feedback.”

The company is structured to make that part easy. Engineers are placed in multiple departments to better share ideas and information. There are frequent conversations about energy code changes in Washington State and Oregon and how equipment performs in the field.

Tiffany Rourke, Trane system sales manager, has worked with MacDonald-Miller for over a dozen years, watching the company grow while maintaining its founding values. “They’re the type of company that’s going to take care of their customers, which makes them great to work with,” said Rourke. “They’re going to do what’s right for the client, what’s right for the building, and what’s right for the end user.”

Old and New Ways to Share Ideas

Clients trust MacDonald-Miller to help them balance the costs of new technologies with the payoffs from energy savings. The first step is understanding each client’s needs and providing honest feedback. It’s a process that often builds long-term relationships.

“We’re known for delivering superior products that meet the needs and desires of our customers,” said Bart Warrington, engineering principal at MacDonald-Miller. “But we also make a conscious effort to be better and move the industry in new directions, so we’re constantly thinking outside the box. I always approach projects as if I’m using my own money.”

The company combines old-school customer service with advanced technologies. One example is MacDonald-Miller’s MLAB, a virtual reality space that helps the company demonstrate different options in an immersive, 3D environment. The MLAB offers unique opportunities to visualize novel engineering and designs. One project featured a unique piping layout.

“To help the client see the advantages of the new layout, the MacDonald-Miller team drew it up two different ways and demonstrated it in the MLAB,” said Rourke. “The customer put on the goggles and walked virtually around the pipes. It helps give clients a real feel for a project, so they can be comfortable with what they’re buying into.”

Moving Fast Towards Sustainability

The ability to clearly communicate choices has a significant day-to-day impact. Some smaller clients might be reluctant to pursue more sustainable technologies, believing they are too expensive. MacDonald-Miller works hard to demonstrate potential options, previewing long-term benefits and investigating incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act, local utilities, and other sources.

“We’re hearing the market demand for sustainability, and we do side-by-side comparisons,” said Marisa Zylkowski, sustainable design manager. “Here’s a piece of equipment that will save you X dollars in utility bills over ten years, and here’s one that’s not as energy efficient. We’re calculating those trade-offs every day and trying to show how sustainability is quite accessible by demonstrating savings over time.”

These ground-level interactions are just one piece of the company’s long-term sustainability vision. MacDonald-Miller signed the Climate Pledge and committed to the Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing (MEP) 2040 Challenge, which asks companies to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. This was a natural progression for MacDonald-Miller, which has long sought to reduce waste and increase value.

“MacDonald-Miller does a lot of training on lean and lean operations, and a lot of that is eliminating waste,” said Leventer. “Sustainability folds into that really well because we’re trying to be more efficient, less wasteful, and constantly improve our processes.”

Climate Action

Trane recently honored MacDonald-Miller with its Climate Action Award for a large project the company helped build near Seattle. The campus gets most of its energy from 900 geothermal wells, making it one of the largest geoexchange fields in the country. In addition to the wells, the campus features solar panels, 4.6 megawatts of heating, 10,040 tons of chilled water production, including 6,000 tons from heat recovery chillers, and over 45,000 MBH thermal energy storage tanks. Not surprisingly, MacDonald-Miller adopted a robust process to vet all the equipment.

“When we were buying the chillers, we did a scorecard for each proposal with line items for which refrigerant the chiller used and its global warming potential,” said Leventer. “We also wanted to know how efficiently that chiller would run at different temperature points and share all that information with the client to help them understand the project’s different components and make the best decisions.”

With the geothermal wells, the chillers must operate in different modes: exchange heating, geothermal exchange cooling, and heat rejection, so selecting the most optimal equipment was essential. The MacDonald-Miller team also developed a groundbreaking design in which paired chillers were stacked on top of each other on separate floors to help manage space constraints. MacDonald-Miller and Trane modeled solutions on test benches and in the virtual reality lab.

“The biggest driver was space,” said Leventer. “How would this big central plant support the campus with the space they had? The engineering team came in with this fresh, new idea, but then we had to show people it would work. We ended up saving half the building’s footprint.”

Trane played an integral role in this process, and Rourke was constantly on call to provide the necessary technical details to move the project forward.

“We’re going to work closely with partners like Trane to find better ways to do things,” said Warrington, “whether it’s saving space, money, or energy. I couldn’t even say how many times I was in a meeting during that project, and I would text Tiffany a question, and she would have the answer for me right away. That kind of support helps us get the clients what they need.”

These kinds of close collaborations could easily be called the “MacDonald-Miller Way.” Each project has unique needs, and the company grabs ideas and information from all participants: clients, manufacturers, internal teams, government agencies. Through this rigorous process, they find the best ways to help clients achieve their goals in the most sustainable ways possible.