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Mechanical and Electrical Equipment for Buildings - MEEB Like This

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:28:00 GMT

Making Lime Mortars DVD

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:36:00 GMT

Over at The Last Straw blog, Jeff Ruppert has posted a review of Making Lime Mortars, the first of a four-disc tutorial offered by St. Astier Natural Limes. Perhaps the thing I like best about the review is that it doesn't get into the whole "Why use lime" conversation... it respectfully assumes that you already know. But in case you don't know, here's most of the product description for St. Astier's natural hydraulic lime from GreenSpec:

St. Astier Natural Hydraulic Lime, or NHL, is a 100% natural product that has been in production since 1851. St. Astier NHL Mortar is widely used in the restoration of old buildings. This natural hydraulic lime mortar imported from France allows stone to "breathe" naturally. Used in construction as plaster, stucco, mortar, and paint, its high level of vapor exchange and mineral composition can help reduce the risk of mold development and dry rot. NHL products are highly permeable, elastic, low shrinking, zero VOC, self-healing, and recyclable.

Stimulus-Funded Green Jobs = Left-Wing Conspiracy

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:48:00 GMT

Over at GreenBuildingAdvisor, veteran journalist Richard Defendorf combined his abiding interests in green building and politics by taking a look at a Fox News Forum opinion piece from the policy director the conservative advocacy group (natch) Americans for Prosperity. It contained gems like this one:

"Most green jobs consist of hiring low-wage workers with caulking guns to weatherize buildings. We are trading away high-wage, high-value manufacturing jobs for these green caulking jobs. Any time you spend billions of dollars you will create some jobs, but the key question is, what the cost is when you divert resources from higher-value activities?"

Defendorf had the audacity to respond with thoughtfulness and logic. Take a couple minutes to read it: Stick 'Em Up, I've Got a Caulk Gun!

More Toilet Flushing Fun

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:13:00 GMT

Regular readers might remember the toilet-flushing video from March that showed ridiculous quantities of carrots, chess pieces, Gummi bears, hot dogs, plastic letters and numbers, grapes, golf balls, and dog food getting flushed. Fun, but it didn't qualify for GreenSpec because it only met the federal minimum standard for water use. Well, here's one that does. The H2Option Dual-Flush from American Standard offers an industry-first siphonic flush of either 1.6 or 1.0 gallons. And it's fun, too. Be sure to show this to the kids (because they don't already have enough ideas).

20 golf balls (full flush)
1 lb orange peels (full flush)
11 water wigglers (full flush)
56 chicken nuggets (full flush)
2 lbs flushable cat litter (full flush)
5 large hot dogs (full flush)
5 large hot dogs (half flush)

Wieners aside, it would have been nice to see how all of these went down — or not — on half-flush.

Newsletter The Last Straw Expands Online Presence

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:53:00 GMT

As a follow-on to the previous post (Natural Building in the Shadow of the U.S. Capitol), the strawbale journal The Last Straw — which started publishing right around the same time as Environmental Building News — has expanded its web presence in a donation- and ad-supported bloggish setting at http://tls.buildearth.org. A number of articles have been posted, including Earth Plastering Guidelines for Finishes, Figuring the Hidden Costs in Your Building Plans, Native to Place: Sustainable Design Can Forge Stronger Communities, Finishing Bale Walls with Siding, and more. In what must be a marketing oversight, it's difficult to find a link from the blog to the journal's actual website.

Factory Building Rolls Over. Upside-Down.

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:11:00 GMT

In the wake of the pictures of that 13-story apartment building that fell over, here's video of a multistory factory building rolling over and coming to rest upside-down, largely intact.

Success and failure are often matters of perspective.

B'eau-Pal Bottled Water - Dichlormethane, Carbon Tetrachloride, Chloroform...

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:22:00 GMT

The label says:

Bottled at Source — Hand Pump #1, Atal Ayub Nagar, Bhopal, Madya Pradesh, India.

And in tiny print:

Not suitable for human consumption.

The nutrition label says:

Total Fat 0g
Cholesterol 0g
Sodium 22mg
Dichlormethane
Carbon Tetrachloride
Chloroform 0%
0%
1%
-400%
-200,000%
-250%

The website says:

The unique qualities of our water come from 25 years of slow-leaching toxins at the site of the world's largest industrial accident.

The Yes Men's website says:

Twenty Bhopal activists, including Sathyu Sarangi of the Sambhavna Clinic in Bhopal, showed up at Dow headquarters near London to find that the entire building had been vacated.

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Smart Strategies to Market Your High Performance Homes

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:44:00 GMT

Another in an ongoing series of webinars offered for free from our sister site, GreenBuildingAdvisor.com, is coming up on Tuesday, July 14, at 4 p.m. Eastern. The market for green building keeps growing as more and more people recognize that it just makes sense on so many levels. But it's not always as simple as "if you build it, they will come." Smart Strategies to Market Your High Performance Homes will offer effective and inexpensive ways to market green homes, giving you some of the best strategies in this challenging economy. Presenter Dina Lima is a business owner, author, speaker, educator, and the founder and CEO of Living Green Institute. Register for Smart Strategies to Market Your High Performance Homes. Other upcoming webinars from GreenBuildingAdvisor.com. You can also view archived webinars.

Trade Contractor Management for High Performance Homes

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 12:58:00 GMT

Here's a free webinar (this Wednesday, July 8, at 4 p.m. ET) for you green contractor types about getting the subs on board — or at least in line with the goals of green. Chances are good that there will be things worth knowing for non-professionals, too.

Most contractors use trade contractors for the majority of the work on their projects. Effectively managed trade contractors assure higher performance, minimize rework and reduce warranty and callbacks. Carl will address how to create performance-based management systems focusing on the major components of green building. Attendees will see examples of management systems along with guidelines for creating them for their own businesses.

The presenter, Carl Seville of Seville Consulting, is a 30-year veteran of home renovation and construction... a green builder, educator, and residential sustainability consultant. He's also a regular contributor at GreenBuildingAdvisor.com. Register for the free webinar. More webinars coming up.

Rebuilding Green After Catastrophe

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:15:00 GMT

BuildingGreen's Michael Wentz has been coordinating for some time with DOE on case studies of the green rebuilding of Greensburg, Kansas, which had 90% of its buildings destroyed by a tornado in 2007. He described the work in a blog post here last year. Then, in a congressional address last February, President Obama cited Greensburg as "a global example of how clean energy can power an entire community," to which Michael added, "they are also a leader in green building including initiatives to work green building strategies into their building codes." A compelling hour-long documentary about what happened in Greensburg and the community's subsequent decision-making process in the wake of the two-mile-wide, F5 tornado is available to watch over the web. Previous coverage in Environmental Building News:
Kansas Town Rebuilding as the Greenest in America
First U.S. City Resolves to Build LEED Platinum

Residential Green Building Opportunities within the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:17:00 GMT

GreenBuildingAdvisor.com offers up another free webcast on June 29 at 4 p.m. Eastern. Rob Moody, consultant at Organic Think, LEED Faculty member, and partner in the National Center for Sustainability will be talking about current and future funding opportunities for green building projects courtesy the economic stimulus package. Rise above the recession! Register here. Find out about more webcasts from GreenBuildingAdvisor (like Trade Contractor Management for High Performance Homes, and Smart Strategies to Market Your High Performance Homes, and Inspiring Sustainable Residential Interiors...)

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.

"You are brilliant, and the Earth is hiring"

Sun, 24 May 2009 12:53:00 GMT

Paul Hawken gave the commencement address for the University of Portland earlier this month, and it's making the rounds. Deservedly. Its message is as good for the building industry — for anybody living, for that matter — as it was for those graduating seniors. Here it is. Please read it.

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was "direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful." No pressure there. Let's begin with the startling part. Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation... but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades. This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don't poison the water, soil, or air, don't let the earth get overcrowded, and don't touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food — but all that is changing. There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn't bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn't afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here's the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don't be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

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In Response: "4 Years + 15 Million Dollars = Old News, No Actual Solutions"

Tue, 19 May 2009 11:30:00 GMT

Christian Kornevall, the director of the Energy Efficiency in Buildings project of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), sent the following in response to my May 9th post titled "4 Years + 15 Million Dollars = Old News, No Actual Solutions." It thoughtfully addresses my comments — some of which were critical. It also provides clarity about the spirit of their intent and steps going forward. Steps we all need to take together.

The WBCSD and EEB project team members are very interested in receiving constructive feedback on their work, so we appreciate individuals such as Mr. Piepkorn taking a close look at the results, analysis, and recommendations we presented in our recent report, Energy Efficiency in Buildings: Transforming the Market. Fundamentally, Mr. Piepkorn is looking for more specifics on how the tools and approaches outlined in our recommendations can be applied to achieve large-scale change in the building sector. Undoubtedly, many others in the green building field share this desire for some well-defined answers. Unfortunately, finding a true mechanism to foster the necessary market response remains elusive. Our report talks in considerable detail about the barriers to energy efficiency in buildings and what should be done to remove them. Ultimately, however, there is a complex process that needs to be exercised to assemble the political and financial will behind the market forces to drive change. The EEB project, in a credible way and backed by an organization of 200 major international corporations, makes a powerful point that without increased attention to this process to drive change, the "interesting models" to scale the market response Mr. Piepkorn implicitly seeks will not come to fruition. Education is, indeed, the first step. Since we launched this report on April 27, more than 140 separate stories communicating this important point have appeared in newspapers, on websites and blogs such as this, in trade journals, and on TV and radio broadcasts. We estimate that our message has been seen by hundreds of millions of people in more than 20 countries. Although raising awareness is important, as Mr Piepkorn rightly acknowledges, we will continue to do everything we can to get past this stage quickly so we can move on to the real objective: action.

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LEED for Homes: Tips for Successful Projects

Sat, 16 May 2009 12:24:00 GMT

Who could be more qualified than one of the principal authors of LEED for Homes to provide insight on the best ways to make the program work?

LEED for Homes, like other rating systems, is an assessment tool. This means that while it provides some "how-to" information (at the level of individual strategies or "credits"), it doesn't offer any guidance for how to approach the design and construction of a high-performing home differently than a conventional project. Ann Edminster will offer some of that missing guidance in this webinar.

It gets better. Not only do you not have to jet off to some city to sit in some auditorium during some high-priced conference to take this in... it's free. Just sign up and it's yours for the taking on June 2, at 2:00 pm Eastern (1:00 pm Central, noon Mountain, 11:00 am Pacific), right on your computer. A gift from GreenBuildingAdvisor.com. The presenter, Ann Edminster, is a longtime green building mover and shaker. In addition to being one of the main people who developed LEED for Homes (she was its co-chair through most of its making), she's also a past member of the LEED Steering Committee, and a member and past co-chair of the USGBC's Materials and Resources Technical Advisory Group. She co-authored Efficient Wood Use In Residential Construction: A Practical Guide to Saving Wood, Money, and Forests, has written bunches of technical papers and articles, and has been an invited speaker at dozens of regional, national, and international green building conferences over the past 15 years. She's the founding principal of the environmental design consulting firm Design AVEnues.