March Chapter Meeting:

Ecolab Allan L. Schuman Campus Challenges and Adventures In Eagan
By Terry Olsen

As a Saint Paulite, I take for granted Ecolab being in my backyard (or a block away from my downtown office).  Since participating in a recent tour of their Schuman campus in Eagan, I have gained a much greater appreciation for the company, for the new campus they have created, and especially for the efforts to bring this remarkable facility to fruition.

When I think Ecolab, I think “clean.”  Ecolab office cleaners are used by janitorial staff, dish cleaners are used in restaurants, and hand cleaners are used in toilet rooms.  I was introduced on the tour to a few of Ecolab’s other 6,000 products and services, such as infection control for hospitals, vehicle cleaners for car washes, and pest elimination (more on that later!).

Ecolab has been in business in St. Paul since 1923 and now does business in more than 160 countries.  Ecolab is a Fortune 500 company with annual sales of $5 billion.  Before this campus expansion, Ecolab experienced growing pains, with over 1,500 people in several buildings in downtown St. Paul and 350 people in Research, Development and Engineering in Mendota Heights.  They needed to find 290,000 square feet of relocation space and growth opportunity. 

Where it All Began
In April 2004, Ecolab took the opportunity to purchase an existing building in Eagan, formerly owned by Cray.  At that point, the facility built in 1991 had only one tenant, occupying 20,000 square feet of the 480,000-square-foot building on a 90-acre campus.  Although the campus has 480,000 square feet under roof, after accounting for the connecting hallways, utility rooms, and open areas, there was only about 370,000 square feet usable for offices and laboratories.  In addition, due to special requirements, Ecolab actually needed to build a 23,000-square-foot addition.  As the program was developed, the RD&E user groups determined that the 26,000 square feet of wet labs in the original project scope needed to be increased to 36,000 square feet.  To quote one of Murphy’s cousins, “Users provide information on what they want, after you have provided them with what they asked for!”   Imagine the surprise when Ecolab’s senior management team realized the 480,000 square feet facility just wasn’t large enough!

When Cray built the facility in 1991, one of their requirements was for every office to have natural light, from either an outside wall or interior court.  However, due to the many hard-walled offices, the floor plan was like a maze.  (And the Hansel and Gretel concept of leaving breadcrumbs just isn’t suitable to a cleaning supply company.)  It also was not suitable for the research functions or for providing tours.  So an amazing transformation occurred, through the hard work of many people, including Bruce Nettleton, Ecolab director of Engineering and Property, Jim Wilson and Art Luedtke of Ecolab RD&E, Doug Wild, architect and project manager with BWBR, Rex Rundquist, mechanical engineer and project manager with Michaud Cooley Erickson, and Ken Seiler, project manager with McGough Construction.

Starting by gutting the Cray building, the hard-walled offices came down, leaving the open expanses of floor plates in the natural setting like a giant tree house.  In the spirit of being environmentally-friendly, the metal studs were salvaged and the gypsum wallboard recycled.  To break down the large, expansive building, levels and “pods” define zones to assist in orientation.  A key means to show customers and visitors the breadth of Ecolab’s capabilities is conducting tours of the RD&E Center.  More than 200 tour groups come through the RD&E facility each year.  To help the guests stay oriented, the tour route needed to be located along the outside walls of the building.  Clerestory windows at tops of gypsum board walls and showroom window walls were added along the tour route to allow natural light to penetrate into the labs.  The corporate culture would eventually come through with signage, messages, words painted on the walls, actual product displays, artwork, images, and of course the showroom testing labs.

The Many Challenges
Some of the challenges experienced by the design and construction team, beyond working with an existing building and a defined budget, were the tight timeline and fast tracking, where the design team was often only a week ahead of construction.  In addition, when a buyer for the former Ecolab RD&E Center in Mendota Heights was found, a firm move date was set and the pace of the project had to pick up.  Moves were phased, with labs in the old campus kept operational until the last possible moment.  Fume hoods and cabinets needed to be repainted prior to moving the next group, equipment needed to be disassembled, moved, and reassembled into working condition (who of us hasn’t been challenged with that on our own residential scale, only to find out that making the final result operational is easier said than done!), and utilities needed to be operational in the labs before the next group was brought over.  Though the cycle of extending the utilities to the next lab was at times excruciating, shutting down the systems, making the connections to the loops, purging the systems, and setting the new lab into operation without affecting the labs that had already moved, the field superintendent kept it all flowing, so to speak.  One of the key requirements to successfully implement a project of this complexity is a detailed equipment list that identifies all of the utilities required by an instrument.

 “Water, water everywhere and nary a drop to drink.”  Well, the water in Eagan is drinkable, but a new issue came to the surface during the program development.  For 83 years Ecolab had performed their testing in St. Paul, using St. Paul city water.  Their baseline test data and results for comparison were based on this standard.  The City of Eagan uses well water, which has much more hardness than water from the City of St. Paul.  To work around this, water of similar hardness to the City of St. Paul is manufactured by blending Eagan city water at 17 grains of hardness with purified DI water.  The water systems to the laboratories are very complex with the labs requiring both hot and cold Eagan city water (17 grain); hot and cold soft water (0 grain); DI purified water; and hot and cold St. Paul water (5 grain) which is a blend of the well water and DI water.  There are seven types of water delivered to each lab, with six of those in copper tubing and the pure water in polyethylene pipe. In addition, given the nature of the products used in the laboratories, all of the process drain piping is stainless steel.  The price of copper increased 250% during the construction period, creating another major challenge.  There are literally miles and miles of copper tubing throughout the building.  Pretty incredible. 

How about a structural challenge - or two?  To create larger floor plates for laboratories and open offices about 15 atrium light wells that brought light into the building were filled.  Filling in a floor without the use of a crane inside an existing building led to an innovative implementation using precast concrete planks. 

The existing building was designed as an office building with surplus cooling capacity for the mainframe computers.  However, a laboratory requires 100% exhaust and considerable outside make-up air, far surpassing what is required for an office building.  Three air-handling units needed to be lifted onto the roof of three laboratory pods, to allow vertical stacking of the labs.  But, of course, nothing is ever easy.  The locations of the labs dictated that the air handling units be located to the back of the property, where there are no roads and instead a rolling natural setting.  The only way to access these roofs was from the front of the building.  So McGough rented the largest crane available, not for the weight capacity of the crane, but for the length of the boom.  The front of the building was cleared of all people, in the unlikely event that the crane would tip, and the air-handling units were placed.  Someone asked if installation by helicopter was considered, but, as this site is directly in the flight path of the Minneapolis International Airport, that alternative was not pursued.

Tunnels connecting the building came in handy for the expansion of the utilities.  Fortunately, these were sized adequately to add pipe racks without expanding the tunnels.  (Whew!)

As if these challenges weren’t sufficient to keep our design and construction team entertained, they were also working to attain LEED certification for the building.  Intending to use LEED NC (New Construction), the architect and engineers were handling the paperwork.  Materials were reused as much as possible, such as the aluminum windows, acoustical ceiling panels, and even the toilet partitions.  Things were going smoothly until the USGBC issued an interpretation that required all LEED NC buildings to either have no Freon-based chilling systems or to have a plan in place to replace those systems.  The existing building has three 920-ton chillers, one 750 ton chiller, and one 375-ton chiller that have significant remaining life.  Ecolab’s cooling load only requires operation of two chillers with the rest as back-up capacity.  Since it was not feasible to replace all the chilling systems containing Freon, attaining LEED NC was not possible.  Ecolab is now pursuing LEED EB (Existing Building), which is more owner-driven.  LEED EB is more focused on how the building is operated and requires documentation of policies and procedures for how the owner will operate the building and site.  The benefits of LEED EB are more applicable and attainable for this building.  The downside is that completing the LEED EB application is taking longer than anticipated.

In keeping with the LEED theme, the design of the campus helps the employees appreciate the 90-acre natural setting of trees and native vegetation.  The “fish pond” is actually stocked, although not tested.  During the tour, we had a “taste” of the natural wildlife that even tried to join us, as a wild turkey eyed the hors d’oeurve table from outside the glass wall.

Cameras were not allowed inside the Ecolab
R&D Center, however, a member sneaked a photo of Tom Turkey!

In addition to the challenges mentioned above, there were some interesting design issues for the labs that needed creative thinking for suitable final results. 

The End Result
The completed campus is now home to a number of neat labs.

In the pest control lab, two rooms are used to test products to catch and kill bugs.  The scientists get to grow their own cockroaches, (hissing cockroaches!  HUGE cave cockroaches that look like something from the jungle), flies (such as fruit flies), and other things that go “bump” in the night.  These labs are under negative pressure.  Insect screens are installed on the ductwork and on floor drains and plumbing drains to prevent “escapees.”  The previous RD&E facility had to occasionally deal with runaways, but no breakouts have been noted in this new facility.

Some other fun labs include the laundry lab, where detergent is tested by drum washing machines.  Trenches were provided for the water, but a lot was learned about the dynamics of vibration control and dampening (and not just the laundry gets dampened!).

The floor care application lab tests floor-cleaning products that would be used from Florida to Arizona.  Of course, rather than having their scientists earn frequent flyer miles, they had to recreate Florida and Arizona in Minnesota.  The challenge for the mechanical system design was to go from 80 degrees Fahrenheit at 75% humidity to 60 degrees Fahrenheit at 20% humidity, and be able to attain this even in the middle of a Minnesota winter.

There is a smoking room - no, not a lounge but a stainless steel room where a machine smokes to test filtration and products.  (I neglected to ask how many cartons it smokes a day, and if it has tried the patch.)  Mechanical for this lab is completely isolated. 

In the analytical lab, the relationship of magnetic resonance, metal objects, and clean power was a carefully planned dance.  And I suppose if the metal objects get too close to the testing, they may quite literally dance, too.  There is also a scanning electron microscope (SEM) that requires clean power and must be isolated from the thumping laundry lab.

The bio level 3 lab has a vestibule and bio-hoods for bio-safety, complying with NIH standards.  This room is under negative pressure with the air 100% exhausted. 

The central application lab is where the engineers get to “play,” by crushing items, and testing products to their ultimate limits.  This laboratory is next to the model shop, where prototypes are designed and tested.  The weight of the equipment used in these areas required installation at grade level.  This requirement was one of the main reasons an addition was needed.  With all these toys in their playground, I expect the wall displaying over 800 patents will soon grow by several hundred more.

After an April 2004 purchase and the items noted above, it is pretty amazing that Ecolab moved into their campus in July of 2005!  Many things were learned and shared from this fascinating project.  One of the things I find fascinating is that, despite all their trials and tribulations, they were able to accomplish this wonderful achievement.  And what’s more remarkable, through all the challenges, they’re still talking to each other.  And thankfully, they’re talking to us as well.  Thank you to Ecolab for opening your doors to share this exciting adventure and to the design and construction team for overcoming challenges and making the vision reality.