Alex Wilson is the Executive Editor of Environmental Building News. For more than 25 years Alex has written about energy-efficient and environmentally responsible design and construction. Prior to starting his own company in 1985 (now BuildingGreen, Inc.), he was executive director of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association for five years; before that he taught workshops on the construction of solar greenhouses in New Mexico in the late '70s. Alex is author of Your Green Home (New Society Publishers, 2006) and coauthor of the Consumer Guide to Home Energy Savings (ACEEE, 8th edition, 2003) and the Rocky Mountain Institute's comprehensive textbook Green Development: Integrating Ecology and Real Estate (John Wiley & Sons, 1998). He has also written hundreds of articles for other publications, including Fine Homebuilding, Architectural Record, Landscape Architecture, the Journal of Light Construction, and Popular Science. Along with writing about design and construction, Alex has written four guidebooks on quiet-water paddling published by the Appalachian Mountain Club—covering all of New England and New York State. (You can order Alex's books online.) Alex served on the board of directors of the U.S. Green Building Council for five years and he is currently a trustee of The Nature Conservancy - Vermont Chapter.
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Recent Entries by this Author
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But this year, I was also looking forward to some vacation time following the conference. Jerelyn and I took five days' of vacation after Greenbuild to explore southern Arizona and celebrate our 25th anniversary. As day transitions to night on the flight back east, I reflect on that time.
On Saturday morning, we traveled southeast from Phoenix, past Tucson, to the Hacienda Corona do Guevavi bed & breakfast in Nogales, Arizona, just a stone's throw from the Mexican border. The region is rich with wildlife and draws thousands of birders and others from throughout the world each year. Along with hundreds of bird species in the canyon oases sprinkled throughout Cochise Country (we saw about 60 species in our travels) are such exotic mammals as coati, ringtail, antelope jackrabbit, collared peccary (javalina), cougar (mountain lion), bobcat, and maybe (at least before the border fence) the rare cats ocelot and jaguar. Other than the antelope jackrabbit, we didn't see any others of those mammals, but it was great imagining them watching us from hidden spots rock ledges during our daily hikes.
On all of these hikes, at least when I wasn't trying to identify another new bird species, I spent time thinking about — and discussing with Jerelyn — the water crisis facing this region.
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I just toured Bonded Logic's Chandler, Arizona plant, 20 minutes outside of Phoenix, where each month the company converts 300 tons of post-industrial recycled denim and other cotton fabric into the UltraTouch line of cotton insulation, sound-proofing materials, duct insulation, and related products. I never knew there was so much I didn't know about cotton insulation!
Liz Obloy, the publisher of Sustainable Facility magazine, and I saw the manufacturing process first hand, from the bales of incoming raw materials to the packaging of finished product. This plant gets the cotton after it's already been fiberized — broken down into the constituent fibers. Bales of polyester and polyolefin "binder" fibers that give the material loft also come into the plant.
The fiberized cotton is treated with a borate solution to make it resistant to fire, mold, mildew, and pests.
 Robotics at the Trane factory  In the Trane factory |
I took the last train into Clarksville, Tennessee this week (that will mean something to those with enough gray hair) to visit Trane's commercial HVAC equipment manufacturing plant. I was invited, along with a half-dozen other editors, to report on Trane's transition to an ozone-safe refrigerant in its commercial HVAC equipment.
Trane used the opportunity to show off the state-of-the-art mechanical systems at the new 270-bed Clarksville Gateway Medical Center, and give us a wonderful tour of their massive, 1.2-million-square-foot Clarksville factory (one of Trane's largest). This was followed with a presentation by the Ingersoll Rand president and other company managers to the assembled 1,300 employees in celebration of the company's 18-month conversion from R-22 to R-410A — an effort that cost the company more than $100 million. (Ingersoll Rand acquired Trane in June 2008.) That was followed by a great barbeque under tents outdoors, and an exhibit of the company's 17 newly introduced, redesigned, ozone-safe products.
I've got to admit that I love touring industrial facilities. Seeing massive pieces of machinery turning raw materials into complex functioning equipment somehow gives me faith that we have the skills and technical know-how to solve the really big problems we're facing, such as climate change.
 The living space in this new home built by Global Green in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans is elevated four feet (1.2 m) to keep it above expected flood level. Numerous other "passive survivability" features are included. |
We need to continue these efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon dioxide, but the reality is that it's too little, too late to prevent climate change. Even if the CO2 spigot were turned off tomorrow, the earth would still see significant warming and the other predicted impacts of climate change: more intense storms, flooding, drought, wildfire, and power interruptions. It's time to design our buildings and the built environment to adapt to the very different climate that scientists say is going to be with us.
That's the subject of the feature article in our September 2009 issue of Environmental Building News: "Design for Adaptation: Living in a Climate-Changing World" (requires log-in) (no login required — see Alex Wilson's note in the comments, below).
Andrea Ward and I interviewed some of the nation's top climate scientists, including Stephen Schneider, Ph.D., of Stanford, and Jonathan Overpeck, Ph.D., of the University of Arizona, to establish context for the article — making the case that not only is climate change happening, but it's happening more rapidly than the best climate models predicted just two years ago.
We address the question of mitigation vs. adaptation — whether we should put effort into preventing climate change or adapting to it — and argue that we must do both simultaneously. "The bottom line is that you've got to adapt to what won't get mitigated," says Schneider in the article.
Moving on, we focus on measures for adapting to climate change. We describe 36 strategies, organized into five categories, providing context for each of the categories and succinct explanation for each strategy. These strategies are listed briefly here (details appear in the full article):
 Chart from the feature (requires login): Human Health and Environmental Concerns with Polystyrene Constituents (click image to enlarge) |
The August EBN feature article, "Polystyrene Insulation: Does it Belong in a Green Building?" (requires BuildingGreen Suite membership) and an accompanying editorial "Rethinking Polystyrene Insulation" (free content) has led our company to reexamine some of the products we list in the GreenSpec Directory.
As those articles (and the related blog post, "Avoid Polystyrene Insulation") point out, there are some troubling health and environmental concerns with both extruded and expanded polystyrene insulation (XPS and EPS). These concerns relate both to the underlying chemistry of polystyrene (especially the benzene used in its manufacture) and a flame retardant, HBCD, that is used in all building-related XPS and EPS products.
Given these concerns, our editorial staff reached the conclusion that polystyrene insulation made with HBCD is "less green" than most other insulation materials. This doesn't mean that there aren't green products made with EPS or that alternative products are necessarily benign. But when there are alternative insulation products that we consider to be more attractive from a health or environmental standpoint and when they offer comparable energy performance, then we consider those alternative materials to be preferable.
So, what does this mean relative to our GreenSpec listings?
Due to environmental concerns with ozone-depleting HCFC blowing agents (which are to be phased out by the end of this year), we do not, and have never, included XPS products in GreenSpec, so there is no change there.
We did remove several EPS boardstock insulation products, and we are working hard to replace them with what we believe to be greener products, such as additional rigid mineral wool insulation products.
However, there are a lot of EPS-based products that are remaining in GreenSpec because we believe that their energy-saving benefits outweigh the health and environmental concerns. These are mostly structural insulated panels (SIPs) and insulated concrete forms (ICFs) — of which we list dozens of each — as well as some specialized products, such as exterior insulation systems used for insulating existing buildings. These products are being used in many of the lowest-energy buildings being built today. Note that our inclusion of these products may be reconsidered in the future if good, non-EPS alternatives emerge in the marketplace and EPS manufacturers fail to find an alternative to HBCD. While we very much hope to see the HBCD flame retardant removed from these products — and we are confident that manufacturers are working to identify safer replacement chemicals — we recognize that energy performance of buildings is a top environmental priority, and EPS continues to play a vital role with many such products.
We look forward to participating in a dialog about life-cycle concerns with polystyrene insulation and hope that our position begins that discussion.
We welcome any comments you wish to post about this issue — use the comment function below.
You can follow my musings about this and other issues through Twitter.
Polystyrene Molecular Structure
That said, insulation materials are not all created equal. When we consider the health and environmental impacts of products over their life cycle (with life-cycle assessment or LCA), some materials look a lot better than others. That's just as true with insulation as it is with any other product, from flooring to adhesives and paints.
This brings us to the issue of polystyrene insulation. Recent concerns have been raised about the brominated flame retardant HBCD (hexabromocyclododecane for the organic chemists among us)—see our coverage in EBN about this—that is found in all polystyrene insulation, both extruded (XPS) and expanded (EPS). HBCD may not (yet) be a household word like bisphenol-A has become, but it's been raising plenty of concern.
 Calmac IceBank tanks at One Bryant Park, one of the nation's greenest high-rise buildings. Photo: © Gunther Intelmann for Cook+Fox Architects |
A number of very well-known green buildings rely on ice-based TES cooling. One of the newest such buildings is the 2.1-million square-foot (195,000 m2) Bank of America building in New York City at One Bryant Park. I visited the sub-basement (three floors down) to see the 44 eight-foot-diameter, insulated CALMAC tanks in the building that collectively provide about a quarter of the building's cooling. Each of these tanks holds about 1,600 gallons of water that is alternately frozen and thawed by circulating a glycol solution through about three miles of plastic tubing. It's high-tech, but the result is surprisingly simple.
Benefits of ice-based TES include the following:
For the EBN feature article this month I spent weeks learning about building-integrated wind. I'm a huge fan of wind energy in general, and the idea of putting wind turbines on top of buildings — or actually integrating them into the architecture of buildings — was really appealing. Why not generate the energy right where it's needed, and by putting turbines on top of buildings wouldn't you be getting them up higher where it's windier? What a cool idea.
Unfortunately, as I point out in this month's feature article, "The Folly of Building-Integrated Wind," it's actually pretty hard to get wind turbines to perform well on buildings and, even if you can, the economics are not very good. A huge challenge is noise and vibration. Spinning things tend to generate noise and vibration, and that can be a big problem when people are occupying the building those turbines are mounted on. I went from being open-minded about the practicality of building-integrated wind to believing that it's usually a pretty dumb idea.
Another big drawback to building-integrated wind is that even though it's often windy on top of buildings, that wind tends to be quite turbulent. It's twisting around and not nearly as effective for wind turbines as laminar flow.
But a lot of rooftop wind turbines are being installed — how are they working?
 At the 2008 "Summer Camp" in the Adirondacks. Photo: Mike Cox |
Gail has been a key part of the green building movement since its earliest formative days. She was one of EBN's most enthusiastic supporters since joining our advisory board at the beginning of 1994, and was always willing to share wisdom and encouragement whenever asked. For architects, Gail was perhaps best known as chair of the National AIA Committee on the Environment (COTE) during a particularly formative period when the annual Top-10 awards were launched.
For thousands of architects, builders, developers, and facilities managers, Gail is remembered as an enthusiastic and inspirational teacher. She led more than 200 workshops and charrettes on green building, and never failed to brighten and inspire those participants.
I remember sitting in one of those charrettes — I can't remember where or when. After each of the 30 or 40 of us sitting in a circle introduced ourselves, I was astounded to hear Gail repeat each of our names. It was one of Gail's many gifts, and it helped each of those participants feel listened to and important. It was all about them, the students, not about her, the instructor.
Among the many charrettes Gail was involved with were the Greening of the White House, the Greening of the Pentagon, the Sustainable Design Initiatives for the National Park Service, and the Sustainable Design Training Program for the Department of Defense. I remember her describing the bizarre ending of a charrette at a military base on September 11, 2001. President Bush was diverted to this base on his return from Florida to Washington after the terrorist attacks. The military personnel didn't know what to do with these civilian instructors in their midst so, in the panic, locked them up in a room.
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