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Good Stewards, Big Footprints: Helping Corporate Clients Go Green with Steven Jones

Author

Charlie Cichetti
November 05, 2026

QUICK TAKE

Almost every certified project at Steven Jones’s firm lands at LEED Gold or higher, including three Platinum buildings on Walmart’s home office campus.

His real secret is the work that never gets a plaque: a “sensibly green” approach where any project could be certified, whether or not the client pays for the paperwork.

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🌱BREAKING GROUND ON BETTER BUILDING

In this episode, Steven Jones shows how a regional firm made high-performance design its default setting, plaque or no plaque.

[Key Insight #1] “Sensibly green” beats all-or-nothing

  • What's outdated: Plenty of clients want to be seen as good stewards but balk at the cost and paperwork of full LEED documentation.

  • The innovation: MBL’s “sensibly green” approach, a name coined by one of its clients, keeps the strategies that make financial sense and drops the paperwork. For JB Hunt, a trucking company with a large carbon footprint, the firm designed facilities to LEED criteria and installed exhibits explaining the heat island strategies, recycled content, and reused site materials.

  • Impact: Clients get real performance and a story they can market to customers and employees. As Steven puts it, any project MBL designs “could be LEED certified.”

[Key Insight #2] Make Gold the floor, not the goal

  • What's outdated: When the requirement is Silver, it’s tempting to design to Silver.

  • The innovation: Bake the basics into every project: siting, sun orientation, ample daylight and views, and durable materials written into the specs so they don’t need replacing soon.

  • Impact: Every MBL project but one has certified at Gold or higher. The exception met the University of Arkansas’s Silver minimum, and three buildings on Walmart’s home office campus are Platinum. Campus-scale master planning helped make those Platinum ratings possible.

[Key Insight #3] Re-skin the “disposable” building

  • What's outdated: Pre-engineered metal buildings are often treated as disposable once they’re 20–30 years old, and their embodied carbon ends up in a landfill.

  • The innovation: On a project now under construction, MBL is keeping a 25-year-old metal building’s structure and slab. The team is re-skinning it with better insulation, a tighter envelope, a new roof, and more natural light.

  • Impact: It cost considerably less up front and avoided new structural materials. Steven admits the team hasn’t run a life cycle analysis on it yet. That’s the next frontier, as carbon reporting moves toward the permit counter.

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✅ CONNECT AND CONTINUE

🌿 Access full episode resources: Green Building Matters Podcast 

📄 Read the transcript: HERE

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