Are you sitting down? Take a moment to appreciate the many complex environmental stories lying beneath (and woven into) that sofa or chair.

Lounge seating typically contains wood or metal framing, steel coils, adhesives, treated upholstery, and various foam padding and cushioning materials that can come from all over the globe. As designers have taken an interest in seeing better health and environmental vetting of these complex products, the Business and Institutional Furniture Manufacturers Association (BIFMA) launched in 2008 the multi-attribute e3 Furniture Sustainability Standard and, based on that, the “level” third-party certification program.

Every time hot water goes down the drain from showers, sinks, dishwashers, clothes washers, and yes, even toilets, energy is wasted—to the tune of about 350 billion kWh, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

A few wastewater treatment plants have started recovering some of that energy by using heat pumps to deposit excess heat in the summer or extract heat in the winter from the effluent in their holding pools, but much of the heat energy dissipates as the water is pumped to the facility. Individual buildings can employ small drainwater heat exchangers to take advantage of the hotter water before it enters the sewer, but as they’re incapable of handling chunky solids, any heat energy contained in the building’s blackwater is lost, and the gadgets are dependent on relatively high flows.

With the local science fair coming up, 14-year-old high school freshman Steven McDowell told his teacher he planned to solve California’s current water crisis—one of the worst in the state’s history. The incredulous teacher had his doubts, but McDowell set out to prove him wrong and began tinkering with a system that combines rainwater storage and fencing. His idea won the science fair (and several other regional awards), he applied for a patent, and the aptly named Water Fence was born. Interest in McDowell’s concept has continued to grow, and Water Fence has gone from a science fair project to a rainwater storage system that solves two major problems: size and aesthetics.

How do you make a large tank look good?

From a one-inch rainfall event, you can capture 620 gallons for every 1,000 ft2 of roof area: that’s a lot of water. Yet most rainwater systems are either too small to capture large volumes of water or too bulky (and ugly) to be practical for most uses.  (Rainwater Hog, which earned a Top-10 award from us in 2008, is an exception, with a tank system that fits between studs in walls or decking.)

About a year ago, I posted my green building products wish list. One of those wishes came true: introduction in June 2014 of a polyisocyanurate boardstock insulation containing no halogenated flame retardants from Johns Manville.

So what’s on my list now? Can concrete that sequesters carbon go to scale this year? Will manufacturers stop putting flame retardants in foam furniture cushions and insulation? Here are a few things we’d like to see.

Even as other household appliances have become more efficient, residential clothes dryers have been stuck in the past, with their decades-old electric-resistance heat and tumble-dry technology mostly unchanged for the last 40-plus years. Dryers are now the largest energy-consuming standard appliance in most U.S. homes, and they account for 6% of residential electricity use, according to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

The most energy-efficient dryers available today—ventless, heat-pump models—have been available in Europe since the late 1990s, but the U.S. has been slow to adopt the technology. That is finally changing, with Whirlpool now offering the U.S. EPA Emerging Technology Award-winning HybridCare ventless heat-pump dryers in North America.

For a little while, zero-VOC paint was good enough for most green projects. Now, designers concerned about healthy products and trying to meet Living Building Challenge and LEED disclosure requirements are demanding deeper information on paint ingredients, and at least one manufacturer is providing it.

Gleaning ingredient information beyond the high-level ingredients appearing on a material safety data sheet (MSDS) is almost impossible. Companies typically say they can’t divulge their trade secrets, so we can’t know what “proprietary”—and potentially toxic—ingredients are in paints. ECOS Paints is out to change this mindset. The company’s interior paints now list all of their ingredients via a Health Product Declaration and sport a Declare label validating that they are free of Living Building Challenge Red List chemicals. While only sold as residential for now, the paints have a commercial track record, and the company is working to get the necessary testing to verify their quality and sustainability for the commercial market.

Even if they’re motivated to install solar, most people can’t install enough photovoltaic (PV) panels to meet their energy needs because they rent, don’t have the budget, or don’t have the right site—either lacking in roof space, land, or solar orientation.

Pooling resources with other projects to create community-based solar “farms” has long had the potential to make PV more accessible, but the practice has been slow to take off. Challenges include complying with relevant state and local regulations, financing and insuring systems, navigating the demands of utilities, and managing customer billing. One company has solved many of these issues, however, and is developing community solar arrays throughout much of the U.S.: Clean Energy Collective (CEC).

Camera opens on a brightly lit cancer ward at a veterans’ hospital in Pittsburgh. An assistant turns on the water so a doctor can wash her hands. Camera follows the tap water upstream, into the faucet and the hospital’s plumbing system, where a sinister slime creature clings to the walls of the pipes. As the creature laughs maniacally, microscopic bits of its body break off and are carried up the pipe. The camera follows these back down the faucet to the doctor’s hands, then follows the doctor to the bedside of a veteran who is dying of pneumonia. The family is gathered around, weeping, as the heart monitor flatlines.

This isn’t a B movie. It’s a documentary.

LEDs are a digital technology: they rely on semiconductors to emit light, the same tiny computer chips that are used to light many smart phones. But our use of this lighting platform to realize health benefits in interior design hasn’t been very smart.

By adding tunability of color temperature to the efficient, flexible platform already offered by LEDs, manufacturers are now turning a corner in lighting design that has taken hundreds of years to reach.

BuildingGreen, publisher of EBN, has announced the winners of its annual Top-10 Green Building Products awards. The 13th annual awards recognize green building products that make fundamental transformations to “business as usual” in the design and construction industry.

This year’s picks include products that have eliminated halogenated flame retardants, a longstanding health and environmental issue, along with a highly effective air- and weather-barrier system, chairs made from a new biobased plastic, and high-efficiency chillers using near-frictionless compressor rotors.