The Green Building Initiative announced a diverse list of recently completed projects in the institutional, commercial and retail segments that have received Green Globes certification, according to GBI president Jerry Yudelson.

“These projects represent several major new growth areas for Green Globes: retail, office, research and higher education. We anticipate major growth in each of these market segments in the future,” Yudelson said. “Our pragmatic approach to green building certification appeals to a project teams in a broad array of industry segments who want to reach their goals faster and with less paperwork.”

Some of the significant projects certified in the first quarter of 2014 include:

• Eleven different Fidelity Investments offices located throughout California, Washington, Colorado and Utah
• Whole Foods grocery in Lincoln, Neb.
• Residence Inn by Marriott in (downtown) Omaha
• Porter Neuroscience Research Center (NIH – National Institutes of Health), Bethesda, Md.
• Purdue Multidisciplinary Cancer Research Facility (NIH), West Lafayette, Ind.
• University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Belk Residence Hall
• University of Maryland Building and Landscape Services, College Park, Md.

“We recently completed our first Green Globes-certified project—a Whole Foods store in Lincoln, Nebraska—and couldn’t be more pleased with the transparency and responsiveness working with GBI,” BRR Architecture Inc. project team lead Mark Sherrer said. “The project as a whole ran efficiently, with a simplified certification process that reduced time spent on questions, paperwork and administrative procedures, enabling our team to jump right into our design objectives and sustainable goals.”