For years, advocates of sustainable design have argued that interest in green building will take off when it stops being just about values and starts making good business sense. Thanks to LEED™ and the astounding success of the U.S. Green Building Council, that day seems to have arrived. The Council’s Austin conference was flooded by a wave of... Read more

Over 80% of Earth’s land surface feels direct influence from humans, according to a comprehensive report from the Wildlife Conservation Society and Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network. Only parts of the boreal forests of Canada and Russia, the deserts of Africa and Australia, the Arctic tundra, and... Read more

Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability, software from the Building and Fire Research Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Free download from www.bfrl.nist.gov/oae/bees.html or order from the U.S. EPA’s Pollution Prevention Information Clearinghouse, 202/566-0799, ppic@epamail.epa.gov. For further... Read more

EBN editors, along with longtime educator, author, and green architect Bill Bobenhausen, FAIA, attended many sessions and summarized a few highlights below. Presentation materials, including PowerPoint files, abstracts, and papers, are available online at... Read more

is proud to join the American Society for Healthcare Engineering (ASHE), the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and Kaiser Permanente in receipt of

Leadership Awards from the Healthy Building Network. Winners were selected for their “actions that have accelerated the transition to... Read more

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Big & Green: Toward Sustainable Architecture in the 21st Century,” the National Building Museum’s newest exhibition, will open in Washington, D.C. on January 17. Big & Green will explore green architecture from design, historical, and technical perspectives and profile roughly 50 green projects from around the world. The... Read more

“Evaluation of LEED™ Using Life Cycle Assessment Methods” by Chris W. Scheuer and Gregory A. Keoleian, Center for Sustainable Systems, University of Michigan. Report prepared for Barbara Lippiatt, Building and Fire Research Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology. Document #NIST GCR 02-836, 157 pages, 1.8 MB file available... Read more

The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) is seeking applicants for its 2003 National Green Building Awards, to be announced at the National Green Building Conference March 30 through April 1, 2003 in Baltimore, Maryland. Applications are due December 31. For more information, call 888-602-HOME or visit www.nahbrc.org.

When The American Institute of Architects’ Committee on the Environment first convened, it immediately identified as a top priority the need for information about the environmental impacts of building materials. With funding from the U.S. EPA and the technical expertise of Joel Ann Todd’s Scientific Consulting Group, AIA produced a series of... Read more

A single-family home near the Twin Cities in Minnesota is the first to be constructed according to the American Lung Association’s recently revised

Health House® guidelines. The home, completed in September and open for tours, was designed with special attention to ventilation, air filtration, and moisture control. A second Health House... Read more

SierraPine Ltd., a Roseville, California-based company specializing in composite panels, is reformulating and renaming its Medite FR, a Class 1, fire-retardant medium-density fiberboard (MDF) panel. It was formerly manufactured with a polyurea resin matrix adhesive (MDI) rather than conventional formaldyhyde-based resins. The new product,... Read more

Sewerage Commission-Oroville Region (SC-OR) wastewater treatment plant in Oroville, California, will begin operating on solar energy this month. A 3-acre (1.2 ha) field adjacent to the plant is home to a

520 kW solar power array, installed by Sun Power and Geothermal Energy of San Rafael, that will supply 80% of the plant’s energy... Read more

The

Santa Fe Public Utilities Committee believes it has found a way to stretch the city’s limited water supply to satisfy an ever-growing population. If the committee’s controversial “

toilet tax” is accepted by the City Council, builders will have to replace 8–12 toilets in existing Santa Fe buildings with low-flow models to... Read more

is leaving his position as research consultant for the Green Development Services division of the

Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) to work for a leading U.K. firm of green consulting engineers and landscape architects,

Battle McCarthy Ltd. After a stint in London, Shepherd will be setting up a U.S. office for that firm... Read more

The Energy Star™ Commercial Buildings program recognizes buildings that perform in the top 25% of their class in terms of energy use. As part of that program, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) set up a Web-based tool called

Portfolio Manager. Users enter information from their energy bills into Portfolio Manager, which... Read more

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and The American Institute of Architects (AIA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding in October, continuing and expanding their partnership that

promotes energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy sources in the built environment. Details are available from DOE’s Chris Kielich at 202/586-5806.... Read more

executive editor Alex Wilson testified in October before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which has jurisdiction over all U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) programs. Wilson joined Claire Barnett, founder and director of the Healthy Schools Network, and Lois Gibbs, director of the Center for... Read more

Torrance, California will soon be home to a 501 kW rooftop PV system. The array, to be installed by PowerLight Corporation, will bedeck 52,000 ft2 (4,800 m2) of the Toyota Motor Sales USA headquarters. Details are available online at

www.powerlight.com.