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After months of hard work and collaboration, they're ready: the Regreen Residential Remodeling Guidelines, produced under a partnership of the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) Foundation and the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). The guidelines were developed by a technical committee of diverse industry experts, and refined by public comment, to synthesize product selection, systems integration, and proven technologies. Organized according to the ten most common types of remodeling projects, the guidelines address scope, integrated pre-design issues, and environmental considerations, and provide a topical library of strategies as well as case studies of successful renovations.

Download it now if you haven't already.

A hearty handshake to the following people from BuildingGreen for the tremendous effort they gave to this project: Peter Yost, Amie Walter, Rachel Navaro, Julia Jandrisits, Alex Wilson, and Jennifer Atlee. Phil Scheffer isn't acknowledged in the document, but he did the tedious and valuable job of adding all the clickable links. These folks did a vast amount of work. (And I watched them do it. I did take the photos on pages 31 and 43, though, and they're clearly the most important pictures in the guide. Yep. I ain't proud.)

The "Gut Rehab" shot was taken during our office expansion in the old Estey Organ Factory buildings in Brattleboro, VT.

Environmental Building News first reported on the Regreen project in December '07: Guidelines in Development for Residential Remodeling.

Twice each month, BuildingGreen publishes an email news bulletin with current news and product information briefs. Sign up here — it's free. We will never share or sell your email address, and you may unsubscribe at any time.

The current issue of Environmental Building News reports that PV prices have been going up, reversing the declining cost trend of previous years. Seems to be due to a combination of demand exceeding supply coupled with polysilicon shortages.

But PV is still part of the good answer. A few days ago, a report titled Emissions from Photovoltaic Life Cycles was released, authored by representatives from the PV Environmental Research Center of Brookhaven National Laboratory (New York), the Center for Life Cycle Analysis of Columbia University (New York), and the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development of Utrecht University (The Netherlands).

From the abstract:

"Based on PV production data of 2004–2006, this study presents the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions, criteria pollutant emissions, and heavy metal emissions from four types of major commercial PV systems... Overall, all PV technologies generate far less life-cycle air emissions per GWh than conventional fossil-fuel-based electricity generation technologies."

For more, see Low Emissions, Quick Energy Payback for Thin-Film PV.

The title of this post is taken from a question we received about the source of recycled rubber used for a parking-bumper and speed-bump manufacturer. It motivated me to do some digging to get a better understanding of the scrap tire industry. As it turns out, it's actually kind of fascinating. The following is unverified single-pass research, and any thoughts, additions, or corrections are welcome.

The Rubber Manufacturers Association (RMA) provides a bunch of info on domestic scrap tires in a 2006 report titled Scrap Tire Markets in the United States. According to their data, in 2005 almost seven-eighths of domestic scrap tires were finding their way to end-use markets — about 259 million tires. Nearly seven-eighths, or 87%, is an exceptionally respectable rate of reuse. (The EPA estimated an 80.4% end-use market rate in 2003, two years earlier.) For comparison, a reclamation fact sheet from the The Aluminum Association shows that just 52% of aluminum cans were recycled in 2005 (down from a 1997 high of 66.5%).

The RMA estimate appears to be based on U.S.-manufactured tires only, however. Their report says that "about 299 million tires were generated in the U.S. in 2005" — seven-eighths of that number is right in the neighborhood of the number of scrap tires generated. It's not clear, however, that the scrap tire number excludes tires of non-domestic origin, which would change the figure some. A 2006 article in the Toledo Blade titled U.S. tire maker betting on China reported, "Nearly 102 million passenger tires were imported into the United States last year, estimates the Rubber Manufacturers Association. And although $7.7 billion worth of rubber tires and tubes were imported into the United States last year, only $2.8 billion worth were exported, according to the U.S. Census Bureau." It's a little frustrating that they switched from units to dollars in mid-stream, but we can derive that in 2005 we imported about 36% more new tires than we exported, and it appears that something over 25% of the tires sold in the U.S. came from somewhere else. (In 2005, anyway. In 2006, Tire Business magazine ran an article titled Off-shore tire influx deepens amid slumping domestic production that reported, "Every other replacement market passenger tire sold in the U.S. today is made outside the U.S. Three out of five replacement light truck tires sold in the U.S. are made elsewhere. Two out of three replacement medium truck tires sold in the U.S. are made outside the U.S.")

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The GreenSpec review team has been debating the relative environmental merits of steel cabinets as compared to other alternatives. (GreenSpec is reserved for the very top green products — and within that top few percent, those products that rise above the rest.)

Generally speaking, the up-side is that steel cabinets don't support mold; are low- or zero-VOC (depending on finish, principally); are long-lasting; almost always have some amount of recycled content; and have good end-of-life recyclability. All of these things can also be true of cabinets made from wood and other materials. In special purpose applications such as sterile and particle-free environments, metal may be the most appropriate solution.

Thin steel — including things like metal studs and roofing — is typically produced in basic oxygen furnaces, which are more polluting than the electric arc furnaces used for heavy steel. And while heavy steel typically has a very high percentage of recycled content, light steel only contains up to 30% recycled content (i.e., 70% or more virgin steel). How does this stack up against sustainably harvested wood or ag-fiber?

Steel cabinets are sometimes fitted with non-steel faces, such as wood or thermofoil-laminated MDF, which alters the equation. Is the wood from certified sources? How is it finished? Is the MDF high VOC? And what is thermofoil? (It's PVC.)

Certainly there are stinky, poorly-made, environmentally catastrophic wood cabinets available just about everywhere. But how does steel stack up against the best wood cabinets? And among steel cabinets, are there any that are substantively "better" than others?

So far, we haven't pinned it all down. Any thoughts?

There are a couple big-picture links I want to put right out front. You can come back to them later, but I want you to be aware of them in case they're not already on your radar.

• Energy Information Administration — Official Energy Statistics from the U.S. Government
• 2007 Buildings Energy Data Book

OK.

The Energy Star people have been putting out occasional interview-style podcasts on topics like the energy use of computers (including servers and data centers) and imaging equipment. But the first three, in late 2006, were about consumer electronics — and those are the ones that have really stuck with me. Though rooted in the residential sector, the takeaway is broad. The following long bullets are taken from those podcasts, which are also available transcribed.

• "Consumer electronics is probably the fastest growing category of electricity growth in the home. And in a home that has a lot of the latest devices, it could easily represent 15 to 20 percent of a home's electricity use."
• "If you go back about 25 years, about 5 percent of the energy used by your home was consumer electronics. And that has almost tripled to current rates of about 13, 14 percent. We're estimating right now we'd probably be somewhere closer to 20 percent of the home energy bill in 2015 being related to consumer electronics devices."
• "The typical American owns 25 consumer electronics products and spends more than $1,200 a year buying them, according to the Consumer Electronics Association."

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