You find the darndest things on YouTube sometimes. Southwest Windpower, the maker of the Skystream 3.7 small-scale wind turbine, brought this video (and others like it) to my attention.
A post went up on Treehugger a couple days ago about "an eco alternative to plug-in exit signs" — photoluminescents. I posted the following reply there, and thought I'd just as well share it here, too.
Illustration from U.S. patent issued on January 27, 1880 to Thomas Edison.
Light is one of our most important energy needs. Historically--before the advent of electric lighting--the need for illumination governed architecture. Buildings were designed to facilitate natural daylighting. My office is in one of the old Estey Organ buildings on Birge Street, built in the late 1800s; it's just 28 feet wide, allowing natural light from the windows to reach fully into the building.
I found myself near Washington, D.C., on the day after Thanksgiving. Rather than try to prop up the economy at retail outlets or lounge in a hotel room all day, I headed to the National Building Museum to see its "Green Community" exhibit with my mother and sister.
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I promised participants at my GreenBuild session (Nutrition Labels for Products: Taking control of deciding what is green for you) a list of the efforts to bring clarity - through summaries, comparison tables, databases, whatnot - to the plethora of green building product certifications out there. I should have done this in the session, but here it is now:
Building Products only:
Greenbuild 2008 included the first ever Green Homebuilder's Day, a conference within the much larger overall conference. Homebuilder's Day welcomed old hands and newcomers to the field of green building, and the sessions were full. BuildingGreen organized the event, which coincided with the announcement of our soon-to-be-available, residentially oriented Green Building Advisor.
There were quite a few of these placards in booths on the expo hall floor at Greenbuild. They were nice-looking signs, and seemed to give some green cred. But... no. As it says on GreenFormat's website, " GreenFormat is open to any manufacturer that wants to list a product."
Preston Koerner, over at Jetson Green, posted his "Top 10 Tidbits from Greenbuild 2008." Check out numbers 2, 4, 6, and 7:
2. The LEED AP Program undergoes major overhaul and the GBCI talks about LEED Green Associates, Legacy LEED APs, LEED AP Fellows, and the other family of LEED APs (ID+C, BD+C, Homes, O+M, and ND).
Posted live from Greenbuild.
I mentioned Armstrong Ceiling Systems' booth earlier, and the fact that they don't use any wood that's not FSC, and that they don't have any added formaldehyde in any of their products. I didn't mention that all their ceiling tiles are Class A fire rated, because it started to feel I was cheerleading.
There's one other thing that I didn't mention.
Posted from Greenbuild '08.
A month ago, EBN was the first to report the news that the ASHRAE Standard 189-P committee, which has been developing the nation's first code-level national green building standard for commercial buildings, had been unexpectedly disbanded by ASHRAE.
