The Finnish company Upofloor’s PVC-free LifeLine CS commercial resilient sheet flooring uses a tough wear layer and low-emitting materials to create a durable surface. It is appropriate for healthcare, education, and other public spaces prone to consistent, heavy foot traffic.

Conventional hot-water recirculation pumps—a standard appliance in hotels, multifamily residential buildings, and other commercial buildings with high demand for domestic hot water—were never supposed to save energy. These devices are installed to get hot water to the tap quickly to keep tenants and hotel guests happy. If they prevented some lukewarm water from going down the drain, that was a welcome side-effect. But high-speed delivery comes at a price: building owners end up wasting energy and money constantly reheating and pumping water—despite the fact that most building occupants need hot water only once or twice a day. The recirculation systems also act as radiators, their wasted heat being added to buildings even during cooling seasons.

D’Mand Circ, from Enovative Kontrol Systems, is the first (and so far only) system to offer the next logical step for commercial hot-water recirculation. Designed as an energy retrofit for buildings that already have a recirculation pump installed, the system uses technology developed by the U.S. Department of Energy and commercialized by Advanced Conservation Technology.

Manufacturers are improving photovoltaic (PV) module efficiency and bringing down costs, but the most efficient PV systems today use silicon crystal technology that is decades old. At the same time, thin-film technologies offer a cost-competitive solution with some advantages but with lower efficiency. With the hundreds of modules on the market today, how do you choose the best product for the job? This overview of current PV technologies should help sort out what to prioritize in decision-making, and the table shows representative products from our

GreenSpec product guide.

Is your flooring still “green” if you install it with a less-than-green adhesive? Many flooring products, from linoleum to cork to bamboo to carpet tile, have long burnished their green credentials, while flooring adhesives remained an afterthought left to the contractor. When Healthy Building Network (HBN) began reviewing flooring adhesives for the Pharos Project,

EBN and

Transpired solar air heating was developed by Conserval in the mid-1980s and sold as the SolarWall. These systems typically use dark-colored, perforated metal panels, or collectors, installed a few inches away from an exterior wall (usually facing south) on non-residential buildings, forming a gap that acts as a plenum chamber for air distribution. When the sun hits the collectors, air on the surface is heated. The building’s air intake pulls that heated air in through the holes and into the plenum, where it can be used to preheat incoming ventilation air. In summer, dampers are closed so the hot air is vented up and out through holes.

EBN July 2009). Products can be certified as level 1, 2, or 3 under this multi-attribute, life-cycle-based assessment.

Two companies, Knoll and Steelcase, contribute all of the level 3 product certifications, which were awarded through Scientific Certification Systems (SCS). Stowe Hartridge-Beam, environmental certification services director at SCS, told

Fiberglass insulation provides good thermal insulation when properly installed, and its vapor and air permeability can aid the drying of a building’s structure, but this permeability is also its weakness. If outside air gets into a home’s interior through cracks and penetrations in the building envelope, the result can be moisture damage, mold, and energy losses.

Knauf and Owens Corning created their sealants in order to bring their fiberglass insulation products up to par with other insulations that provide better protection against air infiltration, such as spray polyurethane foam (SPF) and dense-pack cellulose. “We looked at our core product, fiberglass insulation, and recognized the conversation was shifting away from just R-value to total home performance,” said Matt Girand, Owens Corning’s director of products.

EonCoat and EonCoat HT (for high-temperature applications) are waterborne, ceramic, corrosion-resistant coatings made for commercial or industrial use on steel, though they can also be used on aluminum, masonry, wood, wallboard, and other materials. Unlike most corrosion-resistant coatings, Eoncoat contains no volatile organic compounds (VOCs), hazardous airborne pollutants (HAPs), or toxic heavy metals such as chromium, cadmium, or cobalt. Yet it appears to offer protection far exceeding that of traditional coatings. And, in a fascinating twist, the basic ingredients in it are phosphoric acid and milk of magnesia.

According to company CEO Tony Collins, EonCoat is the culmination of 15 years of research by the U.S. Department of Energy at Argonne National Laboratory directed toward shielding radioactive waste, plus three years of combined research between EonCoat and Argonne to develop more widely applicable coatings. Applied with a spray gun, this two-part coating—part A is phosphoric acid (a ubiquitous soft-drink ingredient) and part B magnesium hydroxide (milk of magnesia)—is mixed in the spray valve during application. Prior to application, metal surfaces require only brushing or a power wash rather than sanding down to bare metal. And EonCoat does not require a primer, since it reacts with, and stabilizes, the surface of metals and then builds a ceramic surface on top of that layer. It dries in a few minutes to an eggshell finish and can be tinted with mineral pigment tints.

Two new low-VOC interior wood stain systems are arriving on the market: Vermont Natural Coatings’ zero-VOC Woodtone Series Concentrated Tints with a zero-VOC base, and Sansin’s Purity Interior 0-VOC Stain base with low-VOC Eco-Tone Color System tints. Both systems offer low-VOC options in a category known for high-VOC products.

Vermont Natural Coatings

Forget zero-VOC:

EBN is seeing more “negative-VOC” interior products. With its new AirRenew wallboard, CertainTeed aims to actually remove volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from the room where the product is installed. It won’t remove all VOCs, but the company claims that it does a good job with one of our most prevalent—and troubling—VOCs, formaldehyde (as well as other aldehydes).