I've wanted to write a practitioners guide to addressing chemicals in building products for a while now, and with new developments like the Perkins+Will Precautionary List, The launch of Pharos, The EPA's announcement on a new approach to chemical policy, the time finally seemed right.

By necessity, the March EBN feature article is an overview--glossing over a lot of the details--but while it is true that generalizations can be problematic, the details can also distract and confuse. Focusing on flame retardant chemicals one-by-one led manufacturers to replace the banned PBBs with PBDEs, most of which were later banned except DBDE, which is now starting to get banned. EBN has for many years advocated for a more comprehensive approach--as illustrated by our 2004 editorial, "Beyond a ban of PBDEs."

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As a follow-on to The Great Passivhaus Face-off, take a look at this commentary from a couple years ago in the wake of a visit to Passivhaus examples in Germany by a couple well-informed British authors and researchers — The Passive House: thoughts and reflections.

It begins, "There were a couple of moments when the PassivHaus study tour seemed to lose all contact with normality and enter into a surrealist daydream..."

We recently learned that the Toxics Use Reduction Institute (TURI) is losing its Massachusetts state funding. This strikes particularly close to home for me as I worked briefly with TURI after grad school and was quite impressed with the caliber of their work (and yes, full disclosure, I still have friends there). TURI is one of a select few organizations nationally that successfully champions the needs of both industry and the environment — for 20 years now they've been finding that practical common ground where we can really move forward in widespread adoption of safer alternatives.

With our GreenSpec directory, editors at BuildingGreen constantly struggle to assess the use of a plethora of toxics in building products and manufacturing processes to determine what constitutes safe and healthy products and still gets the practical job done of building quality green buildings today. This requires the kind of pragmatic alternatives assessment that TURI excels at. The lessons I learned at TURI and their current research are a great help in my work here and it would be a huge loss to see their services cut.

This isn't a done deal. There is an effort afoot this week to get a supplemental budget appropriation that would allocate $1.2 million of the business fees collected from TURA filers to support the continued operation of TURI — back to the original financing model that pays for itself with the companies using toxics paying for the reduction program.

People living in Massachusetts can support the effort this week by contacting their representatives and asking them to sign onto the letter to Massachusetts House and Senate leadership requesting the appropriation. I did just that and was pleasantly surprised at the quick and positive response from my reps. Anyone from anywhere can comment on online articles about TURI and make it clear this self-funding program is too good to lose.

This kind of thing goes beyond Massachusetts and TURI. The battle to retain the high-quality, high-impact green jobs we already have, as well as remake our struggling economy into a thriving green one, is going on across the nation through skirmishes like this one — and it is in these local and state level debates where a few voices can sometimes make a surprising difference.

More information in BuildingGreen Suite: Funding Cut for Toxics Reduction.

Its website says:

Repower America is the bold clean energy plan to "repower" our country with 100% clean electricity within 10 years. By making buildings and homes more efficient, ramping up renewable energy generation, constructing a unified national smart grid, and transitioning to clean and affordable plug-in cars, we can address our country's economic and national security challenges — all while making huge strides to solve the climate crisis.

Is it possible? Yes, it is. Will we actually do it? I'm less certain about that.

John F. Kennedy famously said in 1962, "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade." And in seven years, we did. We implemented new technologies and knowledge at a tremendous pace to support a vision, and we pulled it off.

What motivated us? What was at the root of that amazing achievement? We were afraid of the Soviet Union conquering space, and then using space to conquer us. In the same speech, Kennedy said, "Only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war."

Repower America uses this line of reasoning in their pitch, citing "our country's economic and national security challenges" as primary motivators, and noting that it can help solve "the climate crisis" to boot. Should nationalism be a motivator for renewable energy? We don't collectively seem to be afraid of the hellish potential of climate change (yet) to take unified, swift, and sweeping action... and it's not as if they're promoting jingoism, right? And it is unavoidably political after all, isn't it?

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A recent Environmental Building News story, "The Folly of Building Integrated Wind," (May 2009) revealed that attaching spinning things that are supposed to generate electricity to buildings is not a very good idea. In critiquing building-integrated spinning things, however, it is important not to paint with too broad a brush.

The Tibetan tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism gave rise to a building-integrated spinning thing that is energy efficient, relatively low in cost, and non-polluting: the prayer wheel.

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The quake-resistant buildings designed by PAKSBAB (Pakistan Straw Bale and Appropriate Building) are intended to be affordable, energy efficient, and locally built with readily available materials.

Bamboo rods and nylon fishing net act as the reinforcement and tie-down system; the netting is wrapped under a soil-cement-encased gravel-bag foundation (made with old vegetable sacks), up both sides of the load-bearing baled-straw wall, and attached to the wooden top plates. The wall-tall bamboo, which also engages both the foundation and the top plate, is attached upright in opposing pairs on either side of the wall at frequent spacings and 'sewn' together through the bales, providing flexible resistance to out-of-plane forces. The whole assembly is covered with earthen plaster. The roofing is light corrugated steel. The hand-made structural straw bales — there are no posts or other bearing members — are smaller than those produced by automatic balers, which are rare in developing countries.

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Over at buildingscience.com, the online home of Building Science Corporation (where you can benefit from the big-brained research and synthesis of Joe Lstiburek, John Straube, and others), there are tons of great articles like Can Highly Glazed Building Façades Be Green?, Capillarity — Small Sacrifices, and Ground Source Heat Pumps ("Geothermal") for Residential Heating and Cooling: Carbon Emissions and Efficiency.

A new article went up there in the last few days titled Building Science for Strawbale Buildings. Like we said in the May 2005 feature in EBN, The Natural Building Movement, people are getting smarter about these materials and methods.

The Building Science website says:

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The tireless folks from Google's for-profit charity, Google.org, are developing a web-based application called PowerMeter that takes advantage of the increasing availability of "smart meters" from utility companies and independent manufacturers. Millions upon millions of homes and businesses are expected to be upgraded to these meters in the coming years, which (among other things) track electrical use in real time rather than just offering a simple sum of total use. This creates an opportunity for people to discover usage trends — and even help to identify specific loads — encouraging informed conservation.

Google puts it like this:

How much does it cost to leave your TV on all day? What about turning your air conditioning 1 degree cooler? Which uses more power every month — your fridge or your dishwasher? Is your household more or less energy efficient than similar homes in your neighborhood?

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Today the Department of Energy's Building Technologies Program launched the Zero Energy Buildings Database with an offering of three Zero Energy Buildings (ZEBs) and one near-ZEB. A lot of work has been put into defining ZEBs and you can learn about the different types at the Net ZEB page. Also make sure to look at the overview page for each building to learn the associated types of ZEB.

The Zero Energy Buildings Database is part of the High Performance Buildings Database and is hosted and maintained by BuildingGreen in conjunction with the Department of Energy.

I was down in Orlando last week — land of asphalt, ChemLawns, and Mickey Mouse. As is typical in that part of the world, it was too hot outside and too cold inside. In one of the mammoth Disney hotels, I was participating for two days in the Tenth Anniversary Annual Meeting of an organization called FLASH. FLASH is the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes — it used to be the Florida Alliance for Safe Homes, which explains the "L."

FLASH is all about disaster resistance, so the sessions were about communicating fire-resistant construction practices, hurricane codes, 2x4 projectile penetration of wall systems, safe rooms in houses — cool stuff like that. In one session, two different speakers addressed pandemic flu — not because that's in the purview of FLASH, but because the challenges of educating the general public to those concerns are very similar to the challenges FLASH faces in communicating disaster resistance.

Organizations involved with FLASH include insurance companies, manufacturers of building products that relate to disaster resistance (Simpson Strong-Tie, G-P Dens-Shield, etc.), product retailers like Home Depot, state agencies, the National Weather Service, FEMA, a few builders of disaster-resistant homes, such as Mercedes Homes, and the Salvation Army. As the conference progressed, participants at the conference were keeping a wary eye on Hurricane Gustav, which was heading for the Gulf Coast, and a few had to leave early.

I was there to talk about how to get green building priorities more in line with disaster-resistance priorities. I did this by talking about passive survivability — the idea that we should be designing and building houses that will maintain livable conditions in the event of extended power outages, loss or heating fuel, or shortages of water. That presentation was really well received — something new to worry about for a group that lives and breathes disasters and emergencies.

But what I wanted to tell you about isn't passive survivability or even the FLASH conference per se — but rather, an evening event we attended at Disney's Epcot Center. Conference attendees were invited to a special evening reception at Epcot's new exhibit: Stormstruck: A Tale of Two Houses, which is sponsored by FLASH and a number of its commercial partners.

As someone who rebels against everything Disney, I gotta say: Stormstruck is awesome!

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