What are the environmental priorities in your region? How can you find out?

As you may know, USGBC responded to the longstanding call for regionalization of LEED by establishing Regional Priority Credit 1 (RPc1) in its LEED 2009 family of rating systems (NC, CS, CI, Schools, EBOM).

Years ago a friend and I borrowed my mother's minivan, left our small college, and drove west in search of the Great American Wilderness. For months we steered clear of cities in favor of National Parks and Forests, but as we passed through the Sierras we couldn't help but notice how close Death Valley is to that other American extreme: Las Vegas.
Our next feature article for Environmental Building News is on the Passive House standard for ultra-low-energy buildings--a standard that originated about 20 years ago in Germany. Excitement about Passive House in North America is resulting in some really cool products being introduced from Europe. One of those is the Zehnder line of heat-recovery ventilators (HRVs) and associated components.
If you've been following this blog for a while, you know that I wrote about urine-separating toilets last year. You'll also know that I'm rather enamored of the image at right. So you can imagine how gleeful I was when I discovered I had another reason to use it!

Ever since the premier of USGBC's two-day REGREEN workshop in Phoenix, AZ at Greenbuild last November, Annette, Rob, and I have been gearing up for a slew of green remodeling workshops across the country -- the REGREEN Roadshow.

The following is a video that we recorded at our booth at the 2009 Greenbuild conference, when we transformed BuildingGreen's booth into the "Ask LEEDuser" experience, including talks on specific credits from LEEDuser's "guest experts"--the top LEED minds on specific LEED credits.

Go figure I'd finish a feature article (Chemistry for Designers: Understanding Hazards in Building Products) saying there's no certification in the USA for products that are hazard-free and immediately a label gets launched. That's ok, I have no complaints with things moving fast in this field.

Last week I wrote about one of the common myths of green building: that it has to cost more to build green. This week, I'll tackle another myth: that green building is mostly about materials.

We've been writing about the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) in Environmental Building News since the organization was created in 1993. We've watched as FSC pushed the mainstream forest products industry toward more responsible forestry practices even as that industry fought to prevent or slow the adoption of the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED Rating system because it awarded points for use of FSC-certified wood exclusively.

Even if a small house has lower levels of insulation than a larger house, it's likely to cost less to heat. 1. R-19 walls, R-30 ceilings, double-low-e (U=0.36) vinyl windows, R-4.4 doors, infiltration of .50 ACH, and R-6 ducts in attic; 2. R-13 walls, R-19 attic, insulated glass vinyl windows, R-2.1 doors, infiltration of .50 ACH, and uninsulated ducts; 3. Natural gas at $0.50 per therm; 4. Electricity at $0.10 per kWh.
Simple is good, but high-tech can be really cool. In the case of the Parans fiber-optic daylighting system (distributed in the U.S. by HUVCO), high-tech lets you distribute daylight up to sixty feet via optical cables--bringing full-spectrum natural light to various spaces within a home or commercial building.
I'm a "Legacy LEED AP"--one of the 150,000 or so people who became LEED APs before the Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI) retired the old exam and overhauled the LEED AP program in 2009.

Back in 1990, when I built a new garage and office space at my home in Dummerston, Vermont (where BuildingGreen started out), I installed two sections of Lightolier lighting track with dual switching for use of whatever screw-in lamps I wanted to use in can-type fixtures as well as exposed sockets. During the twenty years since, this has been my little testing laboratory for state-of-the-art energy-saving lamps.