How UV curing works

UV-cured floor coatings use a

Founded in 1981, Onset has 120 employees in its solar-powered manufacturing facility on Cape Cod and has shipped more than 2 million data loggers to customers worldwide. The product name, HOBO, came from the founder’s interest in all things railroad-related, according to Evan Lubofsky, the director of marketing for the company, and it refers to a person who traveled around the country and did jobs behind the scenes. Later, an after-the-fact acronym was derived for the name: “Honest OBserver by Onset.”

What are data loggers?

Data loggers are electronic data-collection instruments that capture and record measurements at set intervals over a period of time. In buildings, data loggers most commonly collect temperature and relative humidity (RH) data, but they can also capture equipment run-time, events like window opening and heating plant cycling, light intensity, carbon dioxide levels, and flow rates. In outdoor applications, they are used to measure such conditions as rainfall, soil moisture, and wind direction and speed. “You’re only limited by your imagination,” says Gregg Daly, Onset’s director of sales, in describing the breadth of their use.

If you think about it, the way paint is distributed and sold doesn’t make any sense. There are only so many ingredients that go into any given can of paint, but rather than stocking those ingredients in bulk and mixing them to order, paint sellers ship and stock dozens of different base types, gloss levels, and sizes—in cans that don’t use space efficiently. Imagine that your local coffee shop had your cup of grande iced mocha latte on a shelf along with dozens of variations, instead of mixing it to order. With its freshCHOICE latex paint, MicroBlend is reimagining paint distribution as something more like a coffee shop, with low-VOC interior or exterior latex paints to order; and while it has work to do, it is realizing environmental gains in the process.

The heart of the MicroBlend technology is the Automated Paint Machine (APM), a system that includes a computer interface, a paint dispenser, five permanent storage tanks that hold the raw materials, and five shippable totes that are used to refill the tanks. When a specific paint is ordered, a plastic bucket is placed under the dispenser, and the computer calculates the desired quality and performance blend, color, and sheen. The machine calculates the exact amount of paint necessary to fill any of the company’s buckets, from a quart up to five gallons. FreshCHOICE paints are available in different sheen levels from matte to gloss in more than 3,000 of MicroBlend’s colors and can match colors from any paint manufacturer in North or South America. A photospectrometer is integrated into the APM to match a color based on a dried paint chip or fabric swatch.

Countertops and other horizontal surfaces are used in everything from residential kitchen counters to hospital desks. They have to stand up to damage caused by pens, accumulated dirt, hot pans, liquids that penetrate and stain, cleaning chemicals, nail-polish remover, and disinfectants—and we want them to look good, too. There is no perfect surface material for every use and budget, but we can learn a lot about the healthiest and most sustainable options by looking at the raw materials and how each type of surface is glued or melded together.

Laminates

High-pressure laminates (HPLs), such as those from Formica or Wilsonart, are some of the most common—and cheapest—surface materials. They are made from kraft paper impregnated with melamine (MF) or phenol formaldehyde (PF) binders with a decorative layer placed on top; the entire sandwich is pressed under heat until it crosslinks and fuses together into a thin thermoset plastic. The HPL is then adhered to particleboard or MDF panels.

The paper and panels used in HPLs are usually high in recycled content and may have content certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), but formaldehyde, which is also found in some panel substrates, is a known carcinogen. The melamine and phenol formaldehyde, which offgas much less than urea formaldehyde, are purportedly transformed by the manufacturing process into an inert material, resulting in extremely low emissions from the final product—many HPLs meet CDPH Standard Method emissions requirements, and Wilsonart meets California’s more rigid residential standard—but some building projects are seeking to avoid
any use of formaldehyde in interior products.

Baltix’s BioSurf is an alternative to formaldehyde-based laminates. It uses a biobased polymer made from 100% soybean and corn adhered to no-added-formaldehyde MDF. The graphics, including faux wood designs, are printed onto the back of a thick, clear wear layer using a large-format printer. The wear layer provides more wear, scratch, impact, and stain resistance than standard HPLs, based on third-party testing, and the graphics can be custom designed to include logos or specific colors.

EBN Oct. 2011). With about 22% of low-slope commercial roofing projects using metal systems, according to Scott Kriner, technical director of the Metal Construction Association, we wanted to see how metal compares. As with single-ply membranes, there are toxicity concerns around some of the materials involved, particularly coatings. However, on most measures, metal roofing holds its own.

While standing-seam metal roofs installed on steep slopes snap together and allow any water that gets under the metal to be shed by an underlayer, low-slope standing-seam roofs (also referred to as low-slope SSR) use hydrostatic joinery, mechanically crimping the edges into interlocking seams filled with waterproofing sealant.

Smart irrigation controllers are like thermostats that manage water consumption instead of heat, but rather than using just rainfall or soil moisture data, they use complicated evapotranspiration (ET) algorithms based on temperature, humidity, sunshine, wind, and other factors to calculate the amount of water transpired by vegetation and evaporated from the soil. The controllers use ET data to adjust irrigation schedules and provide just the right amount of water to maintain the health of different plant species and avoid overwatering.

ET calculations used by WaterSense-labeled irrigation controllers incorporate data on specific soil types, slope percentages, sun exposures, vegetation types, water storage at plants’ root zones, sprinkler heads and irrigation system type, and precipitation rates. The weather data used to determine the irrigation schedule and prevent overwatering can be gleaned from a number of sources.

Cork is natural, it sequesters carbon, and it is produced through a sustainable silviculture process with a 2,000-year tradition. The material regenerates itself and can be harvested every nine years. It insulates well, absorbs sound, and is durable in use but ultimately biodegradable.

In building applications, cork is best known as a floor-tile product and a sound-control underlayment, but it’s a good insulator as well. Rigid cork boardstock insulation has been available in Europe for several decades and is just being introduced into the North American market (again).

A huge issue with most vinyl flooring is the use of petroleum-based phthalate plasticizers. Commonly used phthalates are endocrine disruptors and reproductive and developmental toxicants. Emerging evidence also links phthalates to respiratory problems, such as asthma. Earlier this year, Tarkett (the international parent of Johnsonite) announced that phthalates will be removed from all of Johnsonite’s vinyl flooring (see “Phthalate-Free Vinyl Flooring One Step Closer to Mainstream,”

EBN March 2012). In most of the iQ lines, the phthalate plasticizers have been replaced by a synthetic stand-in, but in iQ Natural the replacement is a plant-based plasticizer formulated by Tarkett from castor oil. As a result, 15% of iQ Natural is biobased content. Although stepping away from petroleum-based products is a good move, biobased products are not a panacea, and they come with their own issues (see “Biobased Materials: Not Always Greener,”

Could injecting carbon dioxide (CO2) directly into concrete masonry units (CMUs) during production be a tool for lowering carbon emissions from construction? The makers of the CarbonCure Block System say that their system both lowers the environmental impact of CMUs and improves their overall strength.

The production of portland cement, a key ingredient in concrete, results in approximately 5% of the world’s anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Reducing the amount of this CO2 in concrete products has long been an industry goal, but CarbonCure is the first company to bring to market a viable, mass-produced product that “sequesters” significantly more CO2 from the atmosphere than standard concrete without requiring a radical change in technology.

Dow Corning’s VIPs are composed of a fumed silica cake, with silicon carbide and polyester fibers for structural support, encased in an inner layer of polyethylene and an outer layer of polyethylene, polyester, and aluminum. The panels are vacuum-sealed, and the edges are heat-sealed.

Because of the construction, the panels have thermal bridging at the edges—much like windows—and as a result, the whole-panel R-value is lower than that of the center. The center-of-panel insulation value for Dow Corning’s VIP is R-39 per inch, but a standard 2' x 4' panel provides approximately R-30 per inch overall. R-value does increase linearly with increased thickness, according to Charlie Zimmer, global program manager for high-performance insulation at Dow Corning. So a 1" panel will have roughly double the R-value of a ½" panel, he explained, but as panel size increases, thermal bridging along the edge of the panel is reduced relative to the size of the panel, meaning total R-value (and thus cost-effectiveness) increases with panel area. Although there is no air movement through the panels, they must be sealed at the seams (with tape, for example) to prevent leakage there.