Notes from BuildingGreen's breakfast gathering at Greenbuild for partners and Sustainable Design Directors from forward-thinking firms around the U.S.

Overarching Issues
Several topics seemed to permeate the conversations among all of the breakfast attendees.
• Expanding the Reach of Green Design: Many attendees discussed how to get green design skills into the hands of more people in their firm, or how to bring these ideas to their interior designers, or even how to how to make relevant green product information available to their Asian-based design teams.
• Understanding Building Performance: This topic came up in several forms throughout breakfast. The contexts ranged from defining what metrics to track to how to share project performance information within each firm and among firms. Everyone was interested in learning how to tell when they'd gotten it right.
• Meeting the Architecture 2030 Challenge: This was the topic that we at BuildingGreen had brought to the breakfast, following pre-breakfast conversations with Charles Brown of sfL+a Architects and Kathy Wardle of Perkins + Will. The topic seemed to resonate on many levels with all of the breakfast attendees.

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It's not all about magnets. Two other nonchemical water treatment systems that have exhibited at Greenbuild for at least the last couple years are worth noting... for one reason or another.

During the '06 show in Denver, I spent some time learning about the VRTX—say it "vortex"—sidestream "hydrodynamic cavitation" and filtration system. The company was there again this year. As I understand it (and please do understand that I don't claim to really understand it), it works by blasting two spinning, high-velocity cones of water into each other, which releases high localized heat, creates a strong vacuum, and generally bangs things into each other.

A paper assessing an installation at the Ford Motor Company describes it like this:

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Sometimes it's hard to suspend disbelief enough to make an unbiased judgement about a product, particularly when it's from an industry with a history of charlatanry, if not outright chicanery. For instance, chemical-free water treatment—which most people associate with sticking a speaker magnet on a pipe under the kitchen sink. The systems I'm talking about, though, are industrial-sized... used for cooling towers, boilers in big buildings, even large fountains.

There were a small handful of companies offering such non-chemical systems exhibiting at this year's Greenbuild. At least three of them use advanced magnetics for at least part of the system, and that's a giant hurdle for a lot (probably most) specifying engineers and prospective clients to get past.

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• One of the posts at the gb.07 Journal (written by USGBC staffers Lauren Kuritz and Doug Smeath) is about the ASID / USGBC collaboration, ReGreen, "a collection of tools to help you focus your renovation projects toward sustainability, durability, comfort and style." Peter Yost, Jennifer Atlee (best researcher I know), Alex Wilson, Amie Walter, and Julia Jandrisits of BuildingGreen all spent long hours finishing up the initial draft of the Residential Remodeling Guidelines for this initiative in time for Greenbuild so it could be included on the ReGreen program website for its launch. (The Residential Remodeling Guidelines are in a public comment period through Monday, December 10. After you look them over, please fill out the comment form linked from the ReGreen site. Feel free to praise the photo on page 42, which I took during a remodel in our turn-of-the-century offices in the old Estey Organ Factory.)
• Freelance reporter Brian Libby kept a running Greenbuild journal at betterbricks.com—some of the best real-time "actual news" from the event that I've come across. The posts are in reverse chronological order, and I think it reads better that way.
• "The Ups and Downs of GreenBuild Chicago" by John F. Wasik is an article that appeared mid-event on the Eco Investment Club website. Some might consider it harsh, others realistic. I hope it's seen as constructive criticism in quarters where it might make a difference down the road in overcoming some of the difficulties this year's event faced.
• Another longer, newsy one-off at gbNYC—"The Green Scene: Special Report from USGBC's Greenbuild Chicago 2007," by Paul McGinniss, covers a few doings of interest and bits worth knowing.
• The GreenSource team put together a couple handfuls of entries on a range of subjects. Theo Bowen's contributions are comprehensive and thoughtful. Jenna McKnight's post, "Greenbuild: The Final Score," and Joann Gonchar's "Surprise! The U.S. Spends Next to Nothing on Green Building Research" are also particularly readworthy, but scroll through them all.
• Be sure to check out the video archive of the plenary sessions at greenbuild365.org.

Mark posted earlier about David Eisenberg and his organization, DCAT, getting USGBC's Organization Excellence Leadership Award at Greenbuild 2007. David has certainly been a great friend and mentor to many of us here at BuildingGreen.

Personally, I have to say that no one has had more impact on my career in green building than Gail Lindsey (except, of course, BuildingGreen's fearless leader Alex). You can see a summary of her achievements in this online bio (PDF format).

Gail was recognized by USGBC for her role in creating Community, which is certainly apt. She has an amazing ability to make connections—between people, ideas, projects, you name it—everywhere she goes. In conversations about specific projects, whenever there is the suggestion that a choice has to be made between two competing possibilities, Gail speaks up as the "And Police"—not "this OR that" she says, but "this AND that". Nothing can be excluded in her holistic view of the world.

Another favorite inside joke is that when Gail is involved in structuring a document or event you always end up with five categories, no more and no less. Ever wonder why LEED has five topic areas? Because Gail was involved when LEED transitioned from an alphabetical list of credits to its current category structure.

Gail's influence on BuildingGreen, and on me in particular, has been nothing short of profound.

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In a brilliantly cruel stroke of scheduling irony, the morning after our party with the GreenSource folks at the Funky Buddha, we held a breakfast for our BuildingGreen Suite firm-wide subscribers: organizations that have an account for every person in their operation. It was some heady company to be in, with movers and shakers from the likes of Gensler, HOK, Perkins + Will, William McDonough + Partners, Sasaki, Rocky Mountain Institute, Mithun, and SmithGroup, among several others.

We don't buy these folks breakfast once a year at Greenbuild just to honor them. These are the best and brightest: Knowing what's on their minds, and what their professional information needs are, helps us help them. Plus, it's so much fun to talk with people who are at the top of their game.

For more information about firm-wide subscriptions, email our Network Accounts Manager, .

Oh—did I mention the view?

I haven't yet posted from Greenbuild, mostly because this was my first time at the conference, and it took most of my mental energy just to sort through the experience of 22,000 people and all of the information I was taking in.

Not posting, however, has given me some space to start thinking about some of the big-picture themes of the conference. The most striking is the influence of social justice and social movements on green building, and vice versa.

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While there were lots of highlights at Greenbuild, the only way I can really be productive at such a big conference is to narrow my focus. I'm researching water conservation and water efficiency for an upcoming EBN feature article, and I made great progress on that in Chicago.

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I wrote earlier today about grumbling at a Greenbuild session on life-cycle assessment, and I assigned the blame to bad news delivered by Stanley Rhodes of Scientific Certification Systems.

The biggest shocker might have been Stanley's analysis that a given unit of electricity produced by wind resulted in increased greenhouse gas emissions compared with a unit of electricity produced by traditional fossil fuels (unfortunately he did not name the specific wind project analyzed).

Because wind begins and ends abruptly and unpredictably, it delivers a fluctuating amount of electricity. Power companies therefore need to be prepared to spike the power grid with electricity from conventional power plants like those using natural gas. These plants need to be on "hot standby" to be ready for this spike, which is an inefficient way for them to operate, hence resulting in increased emissions, according to the analysis.

If this is true, why would any power company use wind power? One answer would be renewable portfolio standards, which require a certain percentage of power from renewable sources. Another is customers who buy wind credits to "green their electricity" (discussed in the EBN feature article "Greening Your Electricity"). But I bet there's a lot more to this story.

Based on some of the audience Q&A I think that much of the audience left grumbling after Thursday's session, "Demystifying Sustainability: A Life-Cycle Perspective," convened by the energetic Meredith Elbaum of Sasaki, with Stanley Rhodes of Scientific Certification Systems speaking along with Nancy Harrod of Sasaki and Melissa Vernon of InterfaceFlor.

I put Stanley's name first because I think he was the source of the grumbling. At a conference where "Was the session inspiring?" is one of the questions asked by the educational session evaluation form, Stanley made pointed criticisms of LEED and registered alarm about consequences of carbon emissions, like oceanic acidification (he polled the audience on its awareness of this issue—which was lacking, so here's a great LA Times article on the issue).

But I found Stanley's presentation exciting.

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