Are there any sustainable materials? What does that even mean?

Near the end of another exciting and exhausting Greenbuild, I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with three other women deeply invested in sustainable material management: Lindsay James, InterfaceFlor; Gail Vittori, Center for Maximum Building Potential Building Systems, and Sarah Brooks, Natural Step Canada. We started the session with the question "Are there any sustainable materials?" and ended with the question " What does material stewardship look like in a sustainable society?"

In between these two questions lives a world of aspiration and complexity followed, if you're lucky--or defiant--by deeper aspiration. The thing is, this stuff is hard. It's complicated and can be messy. Simple answers can lead to different problems. The deeper answers we need to figure out together--no one can single-handedly provide the roadmap.

What became very clear to us as a panel, in all our discussions leading up to Greenbuild, was that we wanted to continue and deepen the conversation. It is our belief that the shift toward sustainable materials--and likely sustainability in general--will require dialogue across boundaries.

Read more...

There's already been a lot of excellent debate around the new LEED Pilot Credit 43. I find myself agreeing with both sides! Here's where I stand in what may be the eye of the storm.

LEED is supposed to be about buildings--and market transformation

On the one hand, LEED is fundamentally supposed to be about designing high-performing green buildings, and product and material selection is one integrated component. It's not supposed to be about cobbling together a building out of greener products and materials. If the core purpose gets lost amidst the debate surrounding one material (yes, I'm talking FSC/SFI), we all lose.

On the other hand, LEED is at this point a major market driver for green building products. We need to use all the levers we can find to create truly sustainable manufacturing and sourcing if we're ever going to make it through these pivotal times into a vibrant, thriving, truly sustainable world. So we ought to use LEED for all it's worth in pushing real substantive improvements down through the supply chain.

Read more...

Based on its own videos, the Arizona-based maker of recycled-denim Ultratouch insulation still doesn't get it when it comes to installation quality. 

What do you do when a green product doesn't live up to expectations? Here at BuildingGreen, we really want to see green building products succeed in the marketplace, and make it easy for professionals to find the best of the best in our GreenSpec guide.

But when we see something substandard, we feel it's important to point it out. To win the mainstream over to sustainability, we have to deliver on promises of reduced environmental burdens along with superior performance.

A little while back, I took Bonded Logic to task for flaws its Ultratouch cotton batt design and installation process.

The problems with Ultratouch

The worst flaw I found was that the product is too thin. After being compressed in bags for shipping from Ultratouch's Arizona plant, the post-consumer-denim cotton batts never regain their "loft." That means that insulation is going into wall and ceiling cavities with air spaces around it. Air that is completely stagnant insulates very well--at R-5, even better than Ultratouch's R-3.7. But air in wall cavities moves around with convection, contributing to heat loss and crippling the nominal R-value of the insulation. (Read more here on How Insulation Works.)

Read more...

Recycling, and recycled content are good, right? Yes, but with some products you must look beyond that to decide if a product is truly green.

In a recent webcast on green building product certifications, I gave a counterintuitive example of greenwashing: a "recycled steel cabinet." Based on the number of questions I got about this, I realized this needed some more explaining.

Don't get me wrong: I'm very much in favor of recycling and laud the steel industry for its recycling rates. But a claim of recycled content in a product can be misinterpreted, and there's also more to the relative greenness of a cabinet than recycled content. Here's what I mean:

Recycling metals, including steel and aluminum, is vital. It dramatically reduces the embodied impact of the material relative to virgin (mined) metals. Continued focus on increasing reclamation and recycling rates is of great importance.

"Recycling = Good" is a sensible rule of thumb, but your actual mileage will vary. Using recycled content is generally an improvement over virgin material, particularly for metals--but watch the environmental impact. For example, according to ICE the average embodied carbon (kgCO2e/kg) of new aluminum is 12.79, while that of recycled aluminum is 1.81. In contrast, new glass is 0.91, while recycled glass is 0.59. It's possible, either in a specific stream of materials, or in a specific material type, that the environmental impact of collecting, and recycling would be greater than the impact of collecting and processing a virgin material or an alternative material. In that case, the rule of thumb wouldn't hold.

Read more...

Our new report, Green Building Product Certifications: Getting What You Need, covers every relevant certification in the field. But of course, as we all know, things keep changing. To ensure you have correct and current information, this errata covers all updates, corrections, and clarifications that we know of to date. If report readers learn of other updates in this constantly evolving area, please let us and fellow readers know by commenting on this blog or emailing news@buildinggreen.com.

Read more...

New, improved guidelines from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) about how to deal with a broken compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) are intended to take some of the mystery out of the purchase and use of CFLs. But by suggesting a response that borders on Hazmat lockdown, the guidelines may potentially add to consumers' uncertainties.

While CFLs have become more popular and less expensive in recent years, they still enjoy only around a quarter of the total market share for residential light bulbs--perhaps in part because of exaggerated reports about mercury toxicity and the difficulty of cleanup and disposal, some of which have prompted debunking sites like Snopes.com to clear the air. The average bulb contains around 5 mg of mercury, about 100 times less than an old-fashioned oral thermometer.

Still, mercury in any quantity should not be taken lightly, particularly in a home where children or pets live. Mercury in fish and other foods is a serious issue, but mercury vapor is even more toxic. Ingested mercury is not well absorbed by the body, while in contrast, inhaled mercury enters the bloodstream readily.

The new guidelines

The new EPA guidelines focus on preventing mercury inhalation. The key steps to safely cleaning up a CFL include the following.

Read more...

The number of green product certifications is large and growing--perhaps 100 so far in the U.S. alone. This month's EBN feature article provides guidance on the growing field of multi-attribute certifications. The editors of EBN and our GreenSpec Directory provide a lot more guidance like this in BuildingGreen's new special report, "Green Building Product Certifications."

This 87-page, no-nonsense guide enables designers, purchasers, and manufacturers to steer clear of irrelevant claims and focus on what is significant and relevant for each building product sector. It provides a bird's-eye view of the certification world, distinguishes the key green certifications spanning multiple building product sectors, and provides a sector-by-sector look at finding the green certifications that can help you specify green on your projects.

The report has a list price of $79, but EBN and BuildingGreen Suite subscribers can get it for only $49. If the report doesn't save you many hours of research, we'll cheerfully refund its modest price. Visit BuildingGreen.com/certifications and enter coupon code EBNCERT to get your discounted report.

Architects, designers, engineers and others who need an affordable, comprehensive, flexible tool for specifying green building products will benefit from the a strategic partnership we just announced at Greenbuild. BuildingGreen will link our Web-based green products resource, GreenSpec, with the Healthy Building Network's Pharos Project to provide one trusted, authoritative, independent source for specifying green building products, information, and research.

GreenSpec provides a listing of approved products and guidance on how best to use those products in green buildings. Pharos scores products in specific categories based on what they're made of, in a highly transparent, data-rich tool. Our customers have asked to see the capabilities of GreenSpec and Pharos in one place, combining the in-depth research opportunities of Pharos with the direct advice offered by GreenSpec, and we believe this strategic partnership is the best response to their needs.

A new website, www.GreenSpecPharos.com, offers immediate access to GreenSpec and Pharos from one location, along with updates on joint efforts. You can sign up for an online tour and free trials for both products. By mid-2011, we'll offer joint memberships in the two sites.

We also formed a research collaboration with the goal of accelerating the pace of independent research on products and materials. We're excited about the fruits of this partnership--stay tuned for more!

Figuring out the structure of concrete at the molecular level will go a long way toward greening this ubiquitous building material. Photo: Michael David Rose Photography.

When I began researching concrete for last month’s EBN feature article "Reducing Environmental Impacts of Cement and Concrete," one of my goals was to figure out how toxins are bound within concrete’s structure. I naively assumed that after over the 2000 years or so that concrete’s been in use, we had figured out everything there is to know about the material. How wrong I was.

Turns out that concrete’s crystalline structure was only just discovered in 2009 by researchers at MIT. It’s a major breakthrough but only the first step toward understanding concrete’s true carbon footprint and how cement interacts with ingredients like fly ash. “Concrete is a complicated material with a disorganized atomic structure,” according to Hamlin Jennings, executive director of MIT’s newly formed Concrete Sustainability Hub. Funded by the Portland Cement Association to the tune of 10 million dollars over the next five years and with technical assistance from the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association, among others, the team’s research is “at the edge of modern computational ability” and employs a team of scientists from diverse fields not typically associated with concrete. One of the research center’s goals is to map the molecular structure of concrete to improve its environmental footprint, performance, and allow for predictive performance computer modeling of mixes without expensive and time-consuming testing. “On the molecular modeling side, it’s the best team ever put together,” said Jennings.

Perhaps the research investment is simply an acknowledgment of the cement industry’s need to adapt to rising fuel costs, stricter emissions regulations, and a changing building industry, but the center’s mission is forward thinking by any measure, especially for an industry with a history of being conservative and slow to change. I’m looking forward to tracking the progress of their research in the upcoming years. Hopefully the investment will pay off and we’ll see the materials breakthrough needed to minimize the environmental problems posed by current portland cement production.
 

The last couple weeks I've written about two of the common myths of green building: that it has to cost more to build green and that green building is mostly about materials. This week I'll cover another myth: that green building products don't perform as well as conventional products.

A lot of people still point to products like early water-saving toilets, compact-fluorescent lamps, and recycled-plastic-lumber decking as evidence that new-fangled green products don't work very well. Clearly, there were some poorly performing products out there as manufacturers scrambled to respond to consumer demand and new regulations. But, for the most part, we've climbed up that learning curve, and current-generation products work very well.

Let's take a look at the history of a few of these product categories.

Read more...