The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has updated its Construction Waste Management Database, housed on the Whole Building Design Guide Web site, to help reduce the amount of construction and demolition waste going to incinerators and landfills. Waste haulers, processors, and recyclers are also encouraged to advertise on the Web site.... Read more

College Publishing of Glen Allen, Virginia has announced that the inaugural edition of the

Journal of Green Building will be published in Spring 2005. The peer-reviewed, technical journal will “provide a high-quality, interdisciplinary forum for advancing the state of knowledge about green building and high performance, sustainable... Read more

Sixteen hundred new San Francisco homes will be built to save energy, lowering expenses for their low-income owners, according to a memorandum of understanding between the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and developer Lennar/BVHP, LLC. The homes will be built on a 78-acre (32 ha) plot of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, which the U.S... Read more

I wanted to tell you that my ease in passing the LEED® Accredited Professional test is in large part due to my loyal reading of your newsletter for the last several years. Thanks for your excellent coverage of green issues.

Sarah Nettleton, AIA

Sarah Nettleton Architects

Minneapolis, MN

Editors’ Response: Reading... Read more

Environmental life-cycle assessment (LCA) is often tagged as a solution to many technical shortcomings of LEED®. On September 29, 2004, with support from Wayne Trusty, President of the Athena™ Sustainable Materials Institute, USGBC convened a meeting of industry groups and LCA database and tool developers to establish a plan for incorporating... Read more

Ten years ago, when the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) opened their doors in Oaxaca, Mexico,

Environmental Building News welcomed it as an organization with “the potential to become the global watchdog of forest management through an entirely voluntary process” (see

EBN

Vol. 3, No. 5). We also pointed out controversy... Read more

Turner Construction Company has released the results of an online survey of more than 700 building owners, developers, architects, engineers, and green building consultants. Conducted by Bayer Consulting, LLC, during July 2004, the survey revealed that 93% of executives already working on green projects expect their green business to increase... Read more

Following six years of development, MechoShade Systems, Inc., the shade screen industry leader, has introduced a new product aimed directly at the green market. Their PVC-free EcoVeil™—made of a new thermoplastic olefin (TPO) yarn called EarthTex™, developed by MechoShade’s textile partner, the Twitchell™ Corporation—is the first solar shade... Read more

Virtually all of the chemicals used in pressure-treated wood—CCA (chromated copper arsenate), ACQ (ammonium copper quaternary), copper azole, and even borates—are formulated to do one thing: kill organisms that decay or eat wood. It stands to reason that chemicals selected for their toxicity might also affect humans and ecosystems. Most uses of... Read more

ozone levels in the eastern half of the U.S. exceed air quality standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), predicts a report published by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The study,

Heat Advisory: How Global Warming Causes More... Read more

The day-long seminar “Educating the Educators: A Crash Course on Eco Design™” is intended to quickly

bring design educators up-to-speed on green design. David Bergman, architect and teacher at Parsons School of Design, and Erika Doering, interior designer and teacher at Parsons and Pratt Institute, developed the program with the... Read more

U.S. Plastic Lumber (USPL) filed voluntary petitions for bankruptcy in late July 2004. The company is seeking debtor-in-possession financing, available only to companies in Chapter 11, to support its current operations and has hired Triax Capital Advisors to direct its reorganization. “Our filing provides U.S. Plastic Lumber with the... Read more

Nicola Valley Institute of Technology in Merritt, British Columbia has won a

Governor General’s Medal for Architecture, jointly administered by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts. Shared by the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology and the University College of the Cariboo, this 48,600... Read more

The Aamjiwnaang First Nation near Sarnia, Ontario is experiencing an increasingly

skewed ratio of female to male births, according to a July 31 article in the

Globe and Mail. Until recently, the community tracked normally, but in 1994, the ratio suddenly shifted and has been heavily skewed toward females ever since. In 2003, the... Read more

Formaldehyde is a human carcinogen, according to a new report from the World Health Organization (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer. The agency upgraded its evaluation of formaldehyde from a probable carcinogen to a known one after the release of new evidence that formaldehyde causes nasopharyngeal cancer in humans. Based on... Read more

The Slag Cement Association has recognized two projects for replacing energy-intensive portland cement with blast-furnace-slag cement, an industrial waste byproduct from the reduction of iron ore to iron (see EBN

Vol. 8, No. 6).

Clearview Elementary School in Hanover, Pennsylvania (see

EBN

Vol. 11, No. 11 or... Read more