ICFs (Insulating Concrete Forms) are permanent, stay-in-place forms for making insulated poured-concrete walls, floors, and roof decks.

Most of them are made with expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam produced with a non-ozone-depleting blowing agent (unlike XPS, an option to avoid from some manufacturers), while others are made with EPS beads (typically from recycled sources) or mineralized recycled wood chips glued together with portland cement.

Generally, the pure-foam sort are direct replacements for standard removable forms and are used to make regular, flat poured-concrete walls with an equal amount of insulation on both sides; while the cement-bonded foam-bead or wood-chip type usually have voids that get filled with concrete to make structural grids, columns, or "waffles" encased in insulation. This is usually the way it is; there's some overlap and variation.

From here on, it gets tricky and sticky.

Read more...

Recently, I broke one of my long-standing rules and blogged about something BuildingGreen-related at my own blog. My Costanzian fears were indeed warranted, and I've been egged on to cross-post it to the Live blog. Here she is, warts and all: my unvarnished opinion on the very best parts of the BuildingGreen product GreenBuildingAdvisor.com./BF

I don't often blog about worky stuff here, but decided this week that my "Worlds Will Collide!" fears are probably completely unwarranted. Besides, I'm working on some cool stuff these days. And finally, when my wife asks me, "What have you been doing?," when I come to bed at an obscene hour, I have an acceptable answer: "Changing the world, baby. Changing the world."

BuildingGreen launched a new property several months ago, GreenBuildingAdvisor.com (GBA). Now, this was in process as I came into the company in September 2008 and involved a whole lot of organization and reorganization to get the team in place for even content production, but I can't get into much of that here. What I *CAN* get into are what I think are the absolute coolest content areas on this Drupal-based site.

Green Basics

It's really important to come at a new field with a common vocabulary. Think of this as a vocab-building primer of terms and concepts bandied about in Green but seldom explained or contextualized. Click anywhere on that page and you get access to detail diagrams and explanations of key concepts and terms. I subscribe to a couple of building magazines and use their sites a lot. NOTHING is as good as this, period.

Green Homes

Now, case studies are not something new for BuildingGreen given the popularity of the High Performance Buildings Database, but there's one aspect in the corresponding Green Homes feature area that stands out: these pictures are gorgeous and inspiring. Sure, I can look up a product if I hear about and learn enough to put it in myself... but watching it get installed? Or seeing it in a context that gives me another product idea?? Reading about the compromises that lead to selection of that product in tandem with another? That's pretty awesome.

Product Guide

The Product Guide is some content syndication from GreenSpec, another key BuildingGreen property that provides a ready-to-use index of green products, manufacturers, and product categories. They sum it up on the GBA page with this: "Product manufacturers can not buy their way on to this list." These are a true best-of and where I first turned for ideas when we did our kitchen remodel this year.

Summary

Now, I know I've probably alienated some portion of the site that's behind the payed membership wall (oh yeah, some of this content is part of a paid GBA Pro membership that gets you even more like CAD Details & whatnot), but these are the stand-outs from my perspective and key to what makes this site a truly amazing asset. At the time of this writing, you can get a 10-day trial to the premium GBA Pro content - the energy savings I've realized alone have outvalued the cost of this annual or monthly membership - or be a lurker for a while before you take the plunge. Personally, I'm probably not renewing some of those magazines whose sites I use in favor of this totally righteous tool.

The press release says,

This partnership pairs a respected and independent source of green building information with a platform that enhances the usefulness of green product information. The GreenSpec Directory helps the green building community find sustainable products, while ecoScorecard offers an effective way to identify and evaluate products against every significant environmental rating system.

ecoScorecard is a web-based system where manufacturers provide detailed, SKU-level information about its products. Those details are run through a calculation engine to produce submission documentation for LEED, GGHC, Labs 21, CHPS, NAHB, Re:Green and third-party certifications. Verrry handy for architects, designers, and other building professionals.

The two systems aren't interchangeable — not all products in ecoScorecard will be listed in GreenSpec, and vice-versa. The collaboration provides users with a combination of ecoScorecard's thorough reporting with GreenSpec's independent review process.

This partnership is similar to the arrangement between GreenSpec and the Construction Specifications Institute's GreenFormat program.

BuildingGreen doesn't charge for listings, or accept advertising. The editors have sole control of product selection and product descriptions. For information on how products get listed in GreenSpec, see the article How do products get listed in GreenSpec?

On Friday, May 19, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal published a damning story based on the leaked minutes of a private strategy meeting of food-packaging executives and chemical industry lobbyists that took place in Washington DC the previous day. The story's authors spoke with the chairman of the North American Metal Packaging Alliance (NAMPA), John Rost, who verified the talking points, but indicated that the summary wasn't complete. "'It was a five-hour meeting,' he said."

On Saturday, NAMPA responded by distributing a press release claiming that the leaked minutes were "blatantly inaccurate and fabricated."

On Sunday, the Washington Post released its own story on the leaked minutes. They spoke with Kathleen M. Roberts, a lobbyist for NAMPA with Bergeson and Campbell. She happens to have been the meeting's organizer, and she also verified that the information in the summary was accurate.

This looks pretty bad for NAMPA.

So here's what happened.

Read more...

A design competition for professionals and students, the Lifecycle Building Challenge is sponsored by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, the American Institute of Architects, and West Coast Green. The competition is focused on design for adaptability, material reuse, and minimizing lifecycle impacts from products.

Registration and participation is free. Submission deadline is August 30 2009.

From the website:

Lifecycle building is designing buildings to facilitate disassembly and material reuse to minimize waste, energy consumption, and associated greenhouse gas emissions. Also known as design for disassembly and design for deconstruction, lifecycle building describes the idea of creating high-performance buildings today that are stocks of resources for the future.

• Create designs that facilitate local building materials reuse
• Consider the full lifecycle of buildings and materials — from resource extraction through occupancy and, finally, deconstruction and reuse
• Focus on quality and creativity of designs and concepts
• Develop strategies that maximize materials recovery
• Reduce the overall embodied energy and greenhouse gas emissions of building materials through reuse
• Decrease environmental and economic costs
• Address real world issues

Enter the third year of the Lifecycle Building Challenge competition, to shape the future of green building and facilitate local building materials reuse. Submit your innovative project, design, or idea for reducing to conserve construction and demolition materials and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by designing buildings for adaptability and disassembly.

Read more...

Even though there are extant and occupied earthen homes scattered throughout the northern states and Canada from the mid-19th century, raw earth as a building material is overlooked in most of the USA. See Richard Pieper's article, "Earthen Architecture in the Northern United States" and these photos of earthen houses in upstate New York that I took in 2004, following Pieper's trail.

Those are the tip of the iceberg, of course. The Earth Architecture website notes, "Currently it is estimated that one half of the world's population — approximately three billion people on six continents — lives or works in buildings constructed of earth."

The Adobe Association of the Southwest hosts a biannual conference, which is now just a week away.

The 5th Adobe Conference of the Adobe Association of the Southwest, AdobeUSA 2009, will take place May 15 and 16, 2009 in El Rito, New Mexico on the campus of co-sponsor Northern New Mexico College in Cutting Hall Auditorium.

Engineering and Architect Professionals will be eligible to obtain Continuing Education Units (PDH) during the conference.

Check out the abstracts, including great-sounding titles like:
   · Adobe 2030
   · ASTM earthen building standards
   · Mechanical performance of nonindustrial building materials manufactured with clay as a natural binder
   · The Effect Interior Earthen plasters and Exterior Lime plasters have on Controlling Temperature and Humidity in Building Envelope

What other natural materials can we use?

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?

Read more...

"The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released the first-ever nationwide report this morning on the level of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) found in U.S. coastal areas and the Great Lakes. The report contradicts earlier surveys that suggested PBDEs, chemicals commonly used as flame retardants in commercial goods since the 1970s but in large part discontinued because of health concerns, were found in only a few U.S. sites." — Water & Wastewater News

Building on the recent post about flame retardants, here's an excerpt from the executive summary of An Assessment of Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers (PBDEs) in Sediments and Bivalves of the U.S. Coastal Zone, a study developed by NOAA's National Status & Trends Program:

"In recent years, PBDEs have generated international concern due to their global distribution and associated adverse environmental and human health effects. Laboratory studies indicate that PBDEs may impair liver, thyroid, and neurobehavioral development, and the most sensitive populations are likely to be pregnant women, developing fetuses, and infants. PBDE production has been banned throughout Europe and Asia, and production of some PBDE mixtures has been voluntarily discontinued by U.S. industry, although one form of PBDE is still produced. While production of PBDE flame retardants began in the 1970s and peaked in 1999 they are still found in many consumer products including many household items. Because the application of PBDEs has been so widespread including many consumer plastics, textiles, electronics, and furniture scientists speculate that they may present an ongoing and growing problem in coastal environments."

The toilet from St. Thomas Creations in the video below doesn't qualify for GreenSpec — it's a 1.6gpf toilet (the federal minimum), and GreenSpec requires 1.28gpf or less — but it sure is fun to watch it flush stuff. (More fun than miso in condoms, anyway.)

What do I mean by "flush stuff"?

• 2.5 pounds of carrots
• 4 complete sets of plastic chess pieces
• 3 pounds of large Gummi bears
• 18 large hot dogs
• 78 plastic letters and numbers
• 3.5 pounds of grapes
• 20 golf balls
• 3.5 pounds of dog food

Eat your heart out, Dave Barry.

About three weeks ago I posted here about a product that decreases heat loss, decreases installation time, provides a termite shield, prevents damage, is cost-competitive, and is partly made with PVC. We ended up listing this product in GreenSpec, and to our members' credit, we got some pushback. I cross-posted a response from the members-only system to the public comments of the earlier blog post; now we've received another thoughtful member comment, so I figured I'd bring the concern back here to the blog to hear what you smart people have to say.

A BuildingGreen Suite member wrote to suggest that this product, and any others containing EPS, should be reconsidered for potential removal from GreenSpec due to the use of hexabromocyclododecane (HBCD), "a persistent, bioaccumulating, and toxic fire retardant [...] widely detected in household dust, sewage sludge, breast milk and body fluids as well as wildlife and the global environment. [... P]olystyrene insulation [...] is likely the primary source of the global contamination."

What a great comment. What a can of worms.

I wrote back:

Read more...