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SLIDESHOW: Admiral Safeway opens with a green focus and community embrace

More than 150 people lined up for the new Admiral Safeway’s grand opening on August 11, lauded by Safeway officials as the most environmentally friendly store in their fleet.

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The Admiral Safeway was closed for just under a year as the original building was demolished – it was built in 1961 – to make room for the new modern facility with a long list of green features that earned the store a LEED Silver rating, a green building certification system.

Green highlights The new store’s green features were revealed by Seattle Safeway’s Public Relations Manager Sara Osborne prior to the noon ribbon cutting and include energy efficient lighting, occupancy sensors to turn off lights if a room is not in use, a reduction in ambient light (and several large windows to let in the natural variety), and controls to reduce lighting at night since the store is open 24 hours a day. Employees will use only green cleaning products in the store and several components - from fans to water fixtures to refrigerators – are all more efficient than the original store’s.

Outside, Osborne said the parking lot allows runoff to seep directly into the ground below the concrete instead of running into Puget Sound, there are many bike racks available and prime parking on the rooftop lot for hybrid vehicles like the Prius. Native and drought tolerant landscaping will be planted soon.

As part of their LEED Silver certification process, Osborne said 99 percent of the original store’s materials were recycled (they shot for 100 percent, but someone accidentally took a small load to the dump instead of the recycling plant) and new building materials consisted of 20 percent recycled materials and 20 percent regional materials.

Shopping experience highlights Beyond the green highlights, the actual shopping experience has some new features including indoor and outdoor seating for 68 people, an expanded organic food section compared to other Safeways in the area (500 items), a gelato and sushi bar (with sushi chefs working on-site), a salad bar, an oven for customers to have a fresh loaf of bread baked while they shop and a butcher on the sales floor available for custom meat cuts.

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