Jailbreak Your Windows Instead of Buying Replacements: Top 5 Stories This Week

Healthy purchasing in Oregon, why unfixable windows are a waste of money, when driving was a war crime, and more.

Can we bring back the days when car pooling was patriotic?Photo Credit: American Legion

Does your state make the energy-efficiency grade?

Some people look forward to the Oscars, but for us it’s green building awards season! The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) just released its annual state-by-state scorecard of energy efficiency, with Massachusetts keeping the top spot this year and Oklahoma surging up the list as the “most improved.” How did your state do? (Mine, Vermont, is #5.)

Tell us what’s in there or we’re not buying

When I was a kid, there was a really annoying series of Prego spaghetti sauce commercials where everyone kept demanding to know if their favorite ingredients were in this new-fangled “jar sauce”; the parents just kept repeating, “It’s in there!”

Getting chemical information from product manufacturers can be annoying in exactly the same way, and Portland, Oregon, is calling a halt with a new Healthy Purchasing Initiative. Just tell them what’s in there already, or there’s no sale—period.

“Transparency is one of the big meta-trends of our time,” says Clark Brockman, AIA, quoted in a Sustainable Business Oregon article by Christina Williams. We couldn’t agree more. The new Health Product Declaration framework, Declare label, and overall product transparency movement, including its inclusion in LEED v4, are a really big deal.

The air is instantly cleaner when we stop driving

Wow, this is amazingly good news—and it will be even more amazing if it’s news we actually use. When Los Angeles shut down one of its busiest highways last year (a move called “Carmageddon” in the local news because people thought it would be like the end of the world), the air was immediately much, much cleaner, reports Emily Badger at The Atlantic Cities.

“Nature doesn’t normally present … an opportunity to catch a glimpse of atmosphere that’s typically saturated with pollutants on a suddenly pristine day,” Badger writes. “Air quality near the normally busy highway improved by 83 percent that day last July, relative to comparable weekends.”

A different kind of carmageddon: the war on driving

Lloyd Alter offers a great slideshow of vintage World War II posters (and a few modern remixes), complete with colorful commentary about when “driving was almost a war crime.”

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Study Shows Homes Save More Energy from Location Than from Efficiency

My favorite: “When you drive alone, you drive with Hitler!” What’s yours?

Don’t replace windows: jailbreak the old ones!

OK, the National Trust for Historic Preservation does not actually suggest that you “jailbreak” historic windows. I only chose the wording to evoke the iPhone phenomenon that comes with newer window choices: almost all are unfixable.

Older windows are fixable, though, and a new study from the Trust shows that repairing and retrofitting the older ones provides almost the same performance at a lower price. They’ve condensed some of the study’s findings into a great slideshow.

Retrofits can be pretty extensive, but they don’t have to be. Check out WindowAttachments.org (a website we worked on in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) for practical advice about some of the easier do-it-yourself window retrofits.