When you can and when you cannot count one material as contributing to more than one credit in the Materials and Resources category of LEED has confused me for years. Even the LEED Reference Guide doesn't lay it out clearly. So, after sorting it out for LEEDuser, I thought laying it out in a table might help.

Here's an example. Cotton insulation is typically post-industrial recycled material AND it's a rapidly renewable plant material. So LEED allows you to count the cost of that material towards both MRc4 (Recycled Content) and MRc6 (Rapidly Renewable). If it also happens to be manufactured locally, in LEED-CI you could claim it towards MRc5 (Regional Materials) as well. Three-for-one!

But if you're using salvaged timbers to earn MRc3 (Resource Reuse), you cannot also claim them as recycled materials for MRc4. Sometimes a material can count towards one credit or another — you can choose which, but you can't claim it for both.

Of course, the fact that you're allowed to count one material towards more than one credit only applies if the material actually has the characteristics that both credits require. FSC-certified wood counts for MRc7 and MRc5, but it only gets the latter point if it actually was harvested and manufactured (or, for LEED-CI, just manufactured) within a 500-mile radius of the project.

Anyone have further examples or experiences that might help clarify this situation?

I'm starting a fun new weekly feature on Twitter, #fridayrefresh. Every Friday I will suggest a topic that needs a better solution than the current status quo such as, "building codes don't keep up with green building #fridayrefresh" and "k-cups go straight in the trash #fridayrefresh". In response, please share your thoughts, ideas, solutions, links, and horror stories.

All you need is a Twitter account, if you don't have one you can sign up at twitter.com. Then follow me, username wentzm.

To respond to my posts, just tweet "@wentzm [your message] #fridayrefresh". To follow the conversation, even if you are not on twitter, go to http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23fridayrefresh

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.

As promised, here it is.

GreenBuildingAdvisor.com is dedicated to providing the most useful, accurate, and complete information about designing, building, and remodeling energy-efficient, sustainable, and healthy homes.

A product of BuildingGreen, LLC, a provider of information on sustainable building for more than 23 years, GreenBuildingAdvisor.com also draws on the resources and expertise of partner Taunton Press, the publisher of Fine Homebuilding.

Most of us who bring you GreenBuildingAdvisor.com (Our Team) are former builders, remodelers, and architects. Because of that we know the need for a single resource where design and construction professionals and knowledgeable homeowners can get the full complement of the information — and insight — they need to design, build, and remodel green. That's why we've brought proven construction details, in-depth how-to advice, a green-products database, green business strategies, design tools, and alternate paths to code compliance together in one place.

Who is it for?

I've been scoping it out over the last couple days, and it's already so much deeper than I'd imagined it might be. Here's some quick links to some of my favorite content so far to get you going:

Read more...

Excerpts from a BuildingGreen press release that's being distributed today:

Some heating fuels that used to be quite affordable, such as heating oil, have risen in price dramatically, making competing energy sources such as electricity relatively less expensive. In parts of the Northeast and Upper Midwest, even the most expensive form of electric heat — electric-resistance baseboard heat — is now less expensive than fuel oil.

The challenge in comparing fuel costs is the fact that most fuels are purchased by volume or weight, rather than energy content. It's hard to compare gallons of fuel oil with hundreds of cubic-feet (ccf) of natural gas and kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity. Adding to the complexity, there are big differences in how efficiently energy sources are converted into heat and how efficiently that heat is distributed throughout a building.

Read more...

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.")

Read more...

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?

The GreenSpec team is regularly contacted by manufacturers and their marketers asking how to get products "certified as green." The question itself reveals one of two things: that they either haven't done any work yet to understand what it is they're actually asking... or that they have. In the first case, good on 'em for looking into it. (Although getting the question as often as we do can be frustrating, it's a big compliment to be recognized as the go-to people.) In the second case, the overall state of certifications and ratings systems is revealed as a commingled muck that's as confusing to manufacturers as it is to everyone else.

Environmental Building News to the rescue. The current feature, "Behind the Logos: Understanding Green Product Certifications," identifies over two dozen of the most active of these programs and provides brief synopses — a great general reference, and a launching pad for additional research. Then it goes further, taking a look at where these programs are going... or should be going. BuildingGreen's brilliant researcher director, Jennifer Atlee, along with EBN managing editor Tristan Korthals Altes, pulled this must-read piece together.

If nothing else, at least look at the sidebar "How to Use Green Product Certifications."

Further:
Related articles from EBN
Building Materials: What Makes a Product Green?
How do products get listed in GreenSpec?