The Tree Growing Inside a 7-Eleven

The 7-Eleven in Monterrey was the first ecological store the company built in Mexico. When leaders at the chain realized the building site was home to a 50-year-old walnut tree, they decided the best way to honor their commitment to sustainability was to keep it. So, they built the store around the tree.

The store earned a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, ensuring that the building meets certain "green" standards, such as energy efficiency, origin of building materials, and circularity in the use of elements like water. Generally speaking, they are given to habitational or large-scale public buildings, which makes it peculiar to find a small convenience store with the certification. Yet in the city of Monterrey, under the shadow of a large, decades-old tree, this is exactly the case. In addition to this obvious bit of greenery, other measures used in this store (the chain's 500th in the city and metropolitan area) include natural light usage to reduce electricity consumption by 20 percent, low-impact building materials, and recycling water from the air conditioning units to water the tree itself.

The tree is known as a nogal, the Spanish word for the family Juglandaceae. The tree grows through this "Supersiete" (a term that regiomontanos, Monterrey's demonym, use to refer to 7-Elevens), with the base of its trunk found inside the store and its canopy towering above the roof.