BuildingGreen.com LIVE - Behind the Scenes

Confronting Water Shortages — Post-Greenbuild Travels in Southern Arizona

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:03:00 GMT

(click photos for larger versions)

Greenbuild in Phoenix was the usual high-energy panoply of educational sessions, new product introductions in an ever-larger trade show, networking events, and — the reason our company sends so many of us — opportunities to promote our green building information resources. But this year, I was also looking forward to some vacation time following the conference. Jerelyn and I took five days' of vacation after Greenbuild to explore southern Arizona and celebrate our 25th anniversary. As day transitions to night on the flight back east, I reflect on that time. On Saturday morning, we traveled southeast from Phoenix, past Tucson, to the Hacienda Corona do Guevavi bed & breakfast in Nogales, Arizona, just a stone's throw from the Mexican border. The region is rich with wildlife and draws thousands of birders and others from throughout the world each year. Along with hundreds of bird species in the canyon oases sprinkled throughout Cochise Country (we saw about 60 species in our travels) are such exotic mammals as coati, ringtail, antelope jackrabbit, collared peccary (javalina), cougar (mountain lion), bobcat, and maybe (at least before the border fence) the rare cats ocelot and jaguar. Other than the antelope jackrabbit, we didn't see any others of those mammals, but it was great imagining them watching us from hidden spots rock ledges during our daily hikes. On all of these hikes, at least when I wasn't trying to identify another new bird species, I spent time thinking about — and discussing with Jerelyn — the water crisis facing this region. [More]

Alex Wilson and Peter Yost Interviews

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:02:00 GMT

These shorts were filmed at West Coast Green; for more like them, see revision.tv.

link to video

Living With Climate Change: How to Design Buildings and Communities for Adaptation

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:34:00 GMT

The living space in this new home built by Global Green in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans is elevated four feet (1.2 m) to keep it above expected flood level. Numerous other "passive survivability" features are included.

A lot of people have been working for a long time to try to head off global warming — and some progress is being made. Buildings are becoming more energy-efficient, fuel economy standards for vehicles are finally rising again, and use of renewable energy is burgeoning. We need to continue these efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon dioxide, but the reality is that it's too little, too late to prevent climate change. Even if the CO2 spigot were turned off tomorrow, the earth would still see significant warming and the other predicted impacts of climate change: more intense storms, flooding, drought, wildfire, and power interruptions. It's time to design our buildings and the built environment to adapt to the very different climate that scientists say is going to be with us. That's the subject of the feature article in our September 2009 issue of Environmental Building News: "Design for Adaptation: Living in a Climate-Changing World" (requires log-in) (no login required — see Alex Wilson's note in the comments, below). Andrea Ward and I interviewed some of the nation's top climate scientists, including Stephen Schneider, Ph.D., of Stanford, and Jonathan Overpeck, Ph.D., of the University of Arizona, to establish context for the article — making the case that not only is climate change happening, but it's happening more rapidly than the best climate models predicted just two years ago. We address the question of mitigation vs. adaptation — whether we should put effort into preventing climate change or adapting to it — and argue that we must do both simultaneously. "The bottom line is that you've got to adapt to what won't get mitigated," says Schneider in the article. Moving on, we focus on measures for adapting to climate change. We describe 36 strategies, organized into five categories, providing context for each of the categories and succinct explanation for each strategy. These strategies are listed briefly here (details appear in the full article): [More]

Men Should Pee Sitting Down

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 21:21:00 GMT

Men should pee sitting down. Now before you call me a strident feminist, let me say that I'm backed up on this one by male colleagues and the reasons aren't what you think. I'm not arguing for toilet equality here. I'm talking about urine-separating toilets, which are much easier to use for men and women when sitting down. The bowl of these toilets takes urine in the front, feces in the back. It's hard enough to aim for the whole bowl (or so the evidence of many bathroom floors tells me), much less the front part of the bowl. One guy put a pee can in the corner, but that seems inefficient: pee in the can, then pour it down the toilet. Why not just pee in the toilet? Why should you care? Because urine contains up to 90% of the nitrogen and 50% of the phosphorous in domestic wastewater. Those chemicals make for great fertilizer — stuff we have to use a lot of energy to produce artificially. In healthy populations, urine is sterile, and removing it from feces makes composting the solids easier and more effective. Two models of these toilets are available in the U.S., both from Ecovita. But before you rush out to buy one and change your life, remember that composting solids and using urine to irrigate your tomatoes isn't legal in most places. You might be able to get special dispensation from the building code folks, but like most things involving wastewater treatment alternatives, it won't be easy. Watch for the coming article in the September issue of EBN. Update - the article is online (members only, though). Urine Separation: The Next Wave of Ecological Wastewater Treatment

How Green is Polystyrene Insulation? EBN's Position, and How It Affects GreenSpec-Listed Products

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:49:00 GMT

Chart from the feature (requires login):
Human Health and Environmental Concerns with Polystyrene Constituents
(click image to enlarge)

The August EBN feature article, "Polystyrene Insulation: Does it Belong in a Green Building?" (requires BuildingGreen Suite membership) and an accompanying editorial "Rethinking Polystyrene Insulation" (free content) has led our company to reexamine some of the products we list in the GreenSpec Directory. As those articles (and the related blog post, "Avoid Polystyrene Insulation") point out, there are some troubling health and environmental concerns with both extruded and expanded polystyrene insulation (XPS and EPS). These concerns relate both to the underlying chemistry of polystyrene (especially the benzene used in its manufacture) and a flame retardant, HBCD, that is used in all building-related XPS and EPS products. Given these concerns, our editorial staff reached the conclusion that polystyrene insulation made with HBCD is "less green" than most other insulation materials. This doesn't mean that there aren't green products made with EPS or that alternative products are necessarily benign. But when there are alternative insulation products that we consider to be more attractive from a health or environmental standpoint and when they offer comparable energy performance, then we consider those alternative materials to be preferable. So, what does this mean relative to our GreenSpec listings? Due to environmental concerns with ozone-depleting HCFC blowing agents (which are to be phased out by the end of this year), we do not, and have never, included XPS products in GreenSpec, so there is no change there. We did remove several EPS boardstock insulation products, and we are working hard to replace them with what we believe to be greener products, such as additional rigid mineral wool insulation products. However, there are a lot of EPS-based products that are remaining in GreenSpec because we believe that their energy-saving benefits outweigh the health and environmental concerns. These are mostly structural insulated panels (SIPs) and insulated concrete forms (ICFs) — of which we list dozens of each — as well as some specialized products, such as exterior insulation systems used for insulating existing buildings. These products are being used in many of the lowest-energy buildings being built today. Note that our inclusion of these products may be reconsidered in the future if good, non-EPS alternatives emerge in the marketplace and EPS manufacturers fail to find an alternative to HBCD. While we very much hope to see the HBCD flame retardant removed from these products — and we are confident that manufacturers are working to identify safer replacement chemicals — we recognize that energy performance of buildings is a top environmental priority, and EPS continues to play a vital role with many such products. We look forward to participating in a dialog about life-cycle concerns with polystyrene insulation and hope that our position begins that discussion. We welcome any comments you wish to post about this issue — use the comment function below. You can follow my musings about this and other issues through Twitter.

Committee tightens up NSF-140 carpet standard

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 19:09:00 GMT

Ah, if only it were possible to be a fly-on-the-wall in every committee for every standard... I know this is a fantasy only a standards-geek could have, and is one of those fantasies you don't really want to actualize, but there's no doubt much of the real work defining the rules of the game is done in committee meetings that most of us never hear about. In their last meeting, with little fanfare, the NSF-140 committee approved a simple change that greenwash-fighters should approve of, while finding the need for it unfortunate. The language in the standard was changed to say, "A certified and non-certified product cannot have the same trade name designation." What this means is that a company can't get, for example, NSF-140 Platinum on select options for a product line, and then go and market the main product line as NSF-140 Platinum. Apparently, this issue was brought to the table because one company was doing just that — marketing the product line as NSF-140 Platinum despite the fact that the platinum prerequisite of 10% post-consumer recycled material was only met with special order options. The discrepancy is being fixed by the company — as is the standard by NSF. [More]

LEED User? LEEDuser.com

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:25:00 GMT

Word's been filtering out recently about LEEDuser.com, which — marked by today's press release and a notice in the current issue of Environmental Building News — has officially soft-launched in beta with partial content. Registration is free, but only for a while. What is it? The press release explains:

Responding to the need for comprehensive help with the new LEED rating systems that's based on real-world experience, BuildingGreen, LLC, publishers of the widely respected Environmental Building News and GreenSpec Directory, have created LEEDuser with support of the U.S. Green Building Council. This new website, at www.LEEDuser.com, provides credit-by-credit guidance for teams working on LEED certification. Included are clear descriptions of credit requirements, tips to streamline LEED submissions, online calculators, and online user forums related to specific credits. LEEDuser facilitates LEED certification for projects using the five recently launched LEED 2009 rating systems: New Construction, Core & Shell, Schools, Commercial Interiors, and Existing Buildings Operations & Maintenance.

Real Life LEED has already weighed in, noting, "If you've been a long time reader of this site you might remember that I think these guys are top-notch, and what I've seen on the site so far gives me no reason to expect anything less from LEEDuser." From the press release:

LEEDuser is available now in beta release with free registration. It already covers the credits that users have found most challenging, and it will continue to expand throughout the summer. Beginning in October 2009 the website will be available by subscription.

For a view from deep inside the project itself, take a look at what one of its technical web developers — our own Brian Fending — wrote. Here's a snippet: "It's INSANE how good this is at delivering the required content... Impossibly awesome and without a single peer in this and many regards."

Making ice at night to cool buildings

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 11:24:00 GMT

Calmac IceBank tanks at One Bryant Park, one of the nation's greenest high-rise buildings.

Photo: © Gunther Intelmann for Cook+Fox Architects

What surprised me most in researching thermal energy storage for the EBN feature article this month is that it's not incorporated into virtually all commercial buildings. In a nutshell, the idea is to use electricity at night to make ice and then use that ice during the daytime as the cooling source for the building. Thermal energy storage (TES) can also involve chilled water (instead of ice) or electric heat stored in bricks or other thermal mass, but I focused on ice with this article. A number of very well-known green buildings rely on ice-based TES cooling. One of the newest such buildings is the 2.1-million square-foot (195,000 m2) Bank of America building in New York City at One Bryant Park. I visited the sub-basement (three floors down) to see the 44 eight-foot-diameter, insulated CALMAC tanks in the building that collectively provide about a quarter of the building's cooling. Each of these tanks holds about 1,600 gallons of water that is alternately frozen and thawed by circulating a glycol solution through about three miles of plastic tubing. It's high-tech, but the result is surprisingly simple. Benefits of ice-based TES include the following: [More]

New to Green Building? Try GBA.

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:30:00 GMT

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.

BuildingGreen and ecoScorecard Announce Partnership

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:39:00 GMT

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?

Putting wind turbines on buildings doesn't make sense

Fri, 01 May 2009 14:56:00 GMT

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? [More]

Tough Choices on the AIA Top Ten Jury

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:37:00 GMT

I've been involved with the AIA Top Ten Awards Program for a long time. In the early years, when Gail Lindsey started it as an informal program to generate some recognition for a handful of green projects, Environmental Building News was one of the very few media outlets available to provide that publicity. Later we participated in conversations with the national Advisory Group of AIA's Committee on the Environment (COTE) as they worked to refine the metrics and formalize the program. In recent years, BuildingGreen has provided technical support to the AIA Top Ten Awards. Because we manage US DOE's High Performance Buildings Database, which also hosts the Top Ten online submission forms, we've supported those submission forms — updating them with changes each year, providing technical support to applicants, and then editing and preparing the winning projects for publication on the www.AIATopTen.org website. As we edited and published the winning entries each year, I thought it would be great to sit in on the jury process and learn more about how they make their selections. So when I was invited to join the jury for 2009, I was thrilled. I'd finally have a chance not only to observe the process, but to participate! The jury that assembled in March to pick the winners was high-powered and diverse. Before diving into the projects themselves, we spent a little while talking about each of our priorities and intentions. That, in itself, was a fascinating conversation. [More]

Redux: What do you do when a good product has bad stuff in it?

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:36:00 GMT

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: [More]

Growing Greener

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 12:46:00 GMT

Over 18 years and more than 160 issues of Environmental Building News, I've written quite a few articles — I hesitate to think about how many — but out of all of those, I think I had more fun and learned more in writing my most recent than ever before. "Growing Food Locally: Integrating Agriculture into our Built Environment" examines opportunities for producing food around, and on, our buildings that few architects, builders, or developers have yet considered. I think I had my first vegetable garden when I was five or six — back in Berwyn, Pennsylvania. There were a few years during college and perhaps some of my time in New Mexico when gardening didn't fit into my life. But other than that, growing some of my food has always been important to me. Thus, I surprised myself to realize a few months ago that I had yet to write — or even consider — an article for EBN addressing the potential for integrating food production into our built environment. I had nibbled (sorry!) around the edges with articles about green roofs and passive survivability, but for some reason it never occurred to me to tackle this topic of food production directly. [More]

Videos from Greenbuild '08 at Greenbuild 365

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 23:40:00 GMT

From the Father of Green Chemistry to that guy from This Old House, a couple dozen videos of speakers and presentations from Greenbuild '08 have been posted at Greenbuild 365, "USGBC's interactive green building learning portal." Among them, there's a very special episode in particular. You may have heard that our own Alex Wilson received a Leadership Award from the USGBC during Greenbuild. (Okay, the story's getting old, but the quality keeps getting better.) Check out Mister Wilson now!