By Erin WeaverA bill introduced in the California Legislature would express the State’s intent to reduce chemical flame retardants in building insulation, arguing that they pose a health hazard and are unnecessary in modern construction.

State Assembly Member Nancy Skinner introduced Bill AB 127 in January, saying that California recognizes the toxicity of flame retardants when applied to furniture, but not in the plastic foam insulation sprayed into the walls of homes and businesses. AB 127 notes that 1960s building codes establishing fire safety standards did not specify that those standards be met by the addition of chemicals, but in practice they led to the use of flame retardants such as HBCD and TCPP, which are associated with reproductive and developmental harm and potential carcinogenicity.

After foam insulation was implicated in serious fires in the following decade, in 1976 the State required a thermal barrier such as gypsum wallboard. The bill states that thermal barriers “have been deemed to be sufficient for fire safety;” if passed, AB 127 would announce the Legislature’s intent to enact further legislation reducing “unnecessary chemicals from building insulation, while preserving building fire safety and encouraging healthy building practices.”

By Erin WeaverU.S. water policy could be destroying a future source of drinking water if a project under way in Mexico City to draw drinking water from a mile-deep aquifer proves feasible.

In the face of worsening water shortages, Mexico City’s 20 million residents currently depend on water pumped in from elsewhere and on the region’s shallow aquifers, the depletion of which is causing the ground to sink, damaging buildings and underground water pipes and exacerbating the problem. The newly discovered deep reservoir is still being explored, but authorities hope it will provide up to a century’s worth of drinking water.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), meanwhile, routinely issues permits allowing mining companies and other industries to pollute aquifers currently considered “too deep” to provide drinking water; more than 1,500 such permits have been issued, many of them in western states facing increasing drought. Researchers in Europe have found reservoirs of water several miles underground—depths that, in the U.S., have made aquifers eligible for the injection of thousands of gallons per day of radioactive waste.

Attorney Shari Shapiro points out on the Green Building Law blog that every state provided a governor’s letter stating its intent to comply with ARRA Section 410, linking State Energy Program (SEP) funding to adoption and enforcement of the 2009 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) for residential buildings and ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-2007 for commercial buildings. Section 410 also required a program of training and annual compliance measurement, aimed at 90% compliance by 2017.

Although California, Washington, Illinois, and Maryland have adopted more stringent codes than required by ARRA for both residential and commercial building, 18 states still do not meet the residential requirements, and 15 do not meet the commercial requirements—including eight states with no statewide building energy codes at all.

 

By Erin WeaverToxic chemicals released into the air decreased from 2010 to 2011, but overall toxic chemicals released into the environment increased 8% over the same period, to 4.09 billion pounds.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released its annual Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), concluding that toxic airborne emissions dropped by 8% and releases into water by 3%—but toxic land pollution increased 19%, mainly due to large metal mines, where shifts in the composition of ore being mined can changed the amount of hazardous waste created. TRI data has been collected from industries such as mining and manufacturing since 1998, and recent years have seen a decline in hazardous air pollutants such as hydrochloric acid and mercury—likely due to emissions controls at power plants and shifts to cleaner fuel sources, says EPA.

For more information, see www.epa.gov/tri.

In the report, published in Nature Communications, scientists estimate that cats, especially strays and feral cats, kill 1.4–3.7 billion birds and 6.9–20.7 billion mammals in the U.S. every year, numbers that are two to four times previous estimates and higher than for any other human threat, including poisoning or collisions with automobiles, buildings, or wind turbines (the study did not consider the threat to birds and mammals from anthropogenic climate change). Most of the species killed are native, such as shrews and voles, rather than introduced species like the Norway rat.

Most of the killing (71% of birds and 89% of mammals) is attributed to the country’s 80 million stray and feral cats. What to do about feral cat populations can be a source of friction between environmentalists and animal-welfare activists, but all sides agree it highlights the necessity of spaying and neutering pets.

 

By Paula MeltonThe City of Minneapolis is the latest municipality to require commercial building energy rating and disclosure, meaning building owners must benchmark energy performance against that of similar buildings and report the results to the public (see “Energy Reporting: It’s the Law,”

EBN Aug. 2012).

The ordinance will apply to publicly owned buildings 25,000 ft² and larger starting in 2013; other properties will be phased in gradually, with all privately owned commercial buildings 50,000 ft² and larger benchmarking and publicly reporting performance by mid-2016. The city joins Washington, D.C., New York, and other large cities in taking this approach, which Minneapolis officials say will use market-based competition to encourage energy efficiency.

Although the required Energy Star Portfolio Manager software also allows building owners to benchmark water efficiency, Minneapolis will not require reporting of water use.

By Erin WeaverReducing emissions of black carbon, or soot, could have an immediate cooling effect on the climate, according to a new study published in the

Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

Led by the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry Project, the authors of “Bounding the role of black carbon in the climate system: A scientific assessment” synthesized existing research and estimated effects with climate models and field observations over the course of four years. They concluded that the global warming contribution of black carbon has been greatly underestimated and could be twice that of previous estimates, such as the one in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment. At about 1.1 watts per square meter, black carbon has approximately two-thirds the warming effect of carbon dioxide—making it the second-largest human contribution to climate change.

The authors note that black carbon’s warming effect is exacerbated by co-emissions from some of its primary sources, including diesel engines and household wood and coal fires, making them an urgent target for reducing emissions. Black carbon is a short-lived pollutant in the atmosphere but can darken the surface of snow and ice and increase melting. It is also known to be harmful to respiratory and cardiovascular health.

By Erin WeaverThe urban heat-island effect may not be limited to “islands” and may instead be altering weather far from the cities that cause it, suggests a new report in the journal

Nature Climate Change.

The authors of “Energy consumption and the unexplained winter warming over northern Asia and North America” demonstrate by computer modeling that the heat from buildings, cars, and pavement in large cities rises about a half-mile into the atmosphere, altering high-altitude currents and redistributing heat. In winter, the jet stream is altered in a way that lessens the cold arctic air reaching parts of Alaska, Siberia, and northwestern Canada, warming winter temperatures by up to 1.8°F (1°C). In parts of North Dakota and Minnesota, the authors suggest that this effect increases temperatures by about 0.5°F (0.3°C).

At the same time, autumn and winter temperatures in some places are cooled by this redistribution, with less warm air from the Atlantic reaching Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean and less warm Pacific air reaching the northwestern U.S.

Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology and Gothenburg University, who presented their findings at the ARCH12 conference on medical architecture in November 2012, proposed that aggression results from stressors such as crowding and noise. These stressors can be mitigated by key design elements, including private rooms, moveable furniture in common spaces, access to a garden, daylighting, and views of nature.

The researchers identified a facility that opened in 2006 as having many more of those key features than the building it replaced or another hospital of similar size used as a control; they obtained data from all three facilities on the annual number of incidents in which patients were put in physical restraints or received compulsory injections. Compared to the old building, physical restraint incidents decreased by 44% in the new facility, and compulsory injections decreased by 21%. At the control hospital over the same period, such injections rose 29% for unknown reasons.

 

By Paula MeltonWant to have a say in whether the U.S. government continues to use LEED? The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) is seeking public comments on a long-awaited recommendation regarding green building rating systems. GSA may abandon its prior endorsement of a single rating system, the findings of a special ad hoc committee suggest, instead encouraging each federal agency to make its own decisions about whether to use LEED, Green Globes, or the Living Building Challenge.

Other findings: agencies should specify which optional credits or points must be achieved in a rating system, should try to use one rating system across their entire building portfolio, and should work with rating system developers to improve alignment between certifications and federal green building needs.

The comment period will be open through April 6, 2013. For more information, visit www.gsa.gov/gbcertificationreview.