The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) announced in June 2007 its intention to commit $1 million to green building research, including areas such as human health and productivity, climate change mitigation, the business case for green building, and passive survivability. The structure and schedule for funding by USGBC have not been determined yet. This initiative follows a recent report from USGBC’s research committee demonstrating inadequate funding of green building research on a national level (see

EBN Vol. 16, No. 6). USGBC promised details on funding and grant applications during the summer, while the research committee plans a report on a research agenda for fall 2007. More information is online at www.usgbc.org.

Both houses of the Connecticut legislature and Governor M. Jodi Rell have approved a bill expanding the state’s ban on pesticide use on school grounds and playing fields. A similar bill, passed in 2005, prohibited the use of pesticides on public and private elementary school grounds starting in 2006, but gave schools until July 2008 to eliminate the use of pesticides on playing fields. The new bill expands the ban to include public and private schools with students in grades eight and lower but also extends the compliance deadline for playing fields to July 2009. The middle schools now covered by the ban will have until October 2007 to eliminate pesticides from school grounds other than playing fields. Although several school boards and municipalities in the U.S. and Canada have passed similar bans, Connecticut remains the only state with a comprehensive outdoor pesticide ban for schools. The bill is available at www.cga.gov (search for bill “05234” at the top of the site).

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The Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing (PATH), a program administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, has completed its first “concept home,” which opened to the public in June 2007 in Omaha, Nebraska. Designed to showcase green building technologies and products and promote the market acceptance and affordability of these technologies, the home features a foundation built with insulated concrete forms, a panelized wall, roof, and truss system, and high-performance windows. Graywater is filtered and sterilized, then used for clothes washing, irrigation, and toilet flushing. The house will remain open to the public until July 2007, when it will be turned over to its new owners. PATH plans to build its next concept home in Charleston, South Carolina. More information is available at www.pathnet.org.

ASTM International has published a new standard for investigations of indoor air quality problems in residential buildings. Standard D-7297 contains guidelines for an initial assessment of possible indoor air quality problems and a subsequent three-phase process for finding the sources of any problems. A first-phase walk through the house is followed by more extensive, second-phase investigations of the airflows in the house, the heating and cooling systems, the potable water supply, and other possible sources of contaminants. The third phase of the protocol calls for detailed measurements of air quality to determine the types of contaminants, including volatile organic compounds, pesticides, and dust. Standard D-7297, which references several other testing standards, is available at www.astm.org/standards/.

New European Union (EU) regulations of harmful chemicals have been toned down and made law. The final version of the Registration, Evaluation, and Authorization of Chemicals (REACH) bill requires that persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic (PBT), and very persistent, very bioaccumulative (vPvB) chemicals manufactured in or imported into the EU be registered and approved for use by the European Chemicals Agency in Helsinki, Finland, and recommends that less harmful alternatives be used when they exist and are economically feasible. Due in part to lobbying efforts by chemical industries, the U.S., and other chemical exporting countries, language was removed from the bill

requiring that companies develop safer alternatives to PBT and vPvB chemicals if none already exist. The amended bill allows the use of carcinogenic and mutagenic substances if manufacturers prove that they are “adequately controlled.” The regulations go into effect June 1, 2007, and are expected to require the registration of 30,000 chemicals within 11 years.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has released version 2.0 of its EnergyPlus modeling software. Compatible with Windows and Linux operating systems, the new version of the software features additional weather and materials data, a new green roof simulation tool, and enhancements to its ventilation and mechanical systems modeling tools. More information is available at www.eere.energy.gov/buildings/energyplus/.

The American Institute of Architects, American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers, Architecture 2030, Illuminating Engineering Society of North America, and U.S. Green Building Council have reached an agreement setting a baseline for the goals of the 2030 Challenge, which calls for an immediate 50% reduction in the fossil fuel use of all new buildings, and net-zero use of fossil fuel in buildings by 2030 (see

EBN

Vol. 15, No. 12). The group has agreed that the baseline from which to measure the target goals should be the national average site energy consumption of existing U.S. commercial buildings as reported by the 2003 Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS). The average site energy intensity of commercial buildings in 2003, according to the survey, was 91 kBtu/ft² (1,043 MJ/m²). More information on the 2030 Challenge is available at www.architecture2030.org.

The Athena Sustainable Materials Institute has released a new life-cycle assessment (LCA) tool for assemblies. The EcoCalculator for Assemblies draws on results from Athena’s Impact Estimator for Buildings to give instant LCA results for over 400 building assemblies, including those for walls, roofs, floors, and windows. Commissioned by the Green Building Initiative (see

EBN

Vol. 16, No. 3) and created in cooperation with the Morrison Hershfield Group and the University of Minnesota’s Center for Sustainable Building Research, the tool will soon be available free to the public at www.athenasmi.org.

The California Energy Commission (CEC) filed suit against the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in April 2007 to require DOE to uphold California’s washing machine efficiency standards. In December 2006, DOE denied the State’s 2005 request for a waiver from federal washing machine standards; the waiver would have allowed California to enact standards, passed in 2002, that required washing machines to use fewer than 8.5 gallons of water per cubic foot (1,100 l/m³)of capacity (water factor) by 2007 and fewer than 6.0 gallons (800 l/m³) by 2010. DOE cited technical infeasibility, among other reasons, in denying California’s petition for a waiver, saying in its final ruling that the State’s standard might result in the unavailability of top-loading washing machines by 2010. By comparison, the current EPA Energy Star standard requires a water factor of 8.0 gallons per cubic foot (1,070 l/m³), and the Consortium for Energy Efficiency (CEE), in its April 2007 “Clothes Washer Qualifying Product List,” shows 129 models from 17 manufacturers that meet Tier 2 or Tier 3 standards (maximum water factor of 6.0 and 4.5, respectively).

Following a successful nine-month pilot program, a mercury-thermostat recycling program is being rolled out nationwide. Created by the independent nonprofit Product Stewardship Institute and the industry-owned nonprofit Thermostat Recycling Corporation, the program works with municipal hazardous waste collection programs to collect thermostats from consumers. Local programs receive a designated container for a small, one-time fee, and the program pays for the shipping and processing of the collected thermostats as well as replacement containers. The GE Lighting website reports that a typical thermostat contains about 3,000 milligrams (mg) of mercury, compared with about 5 mg in a compact fluorescent lamp (CFL). More information about the program is available at www.productstewardship.us/mercury/.