The design firm Conger Fuller Architects of Aspen, Colorado has taken a unique approach to addressing resource consumption of its residential building projects. At the end of 1997 the company donated enough money to the Oregon Forest Resources Trust to replenish 6.5 acres of trees—the amount they calculated were used to build the houses they... Read more

Louisiana-Pacific Corp. has sold its Fiberbond gypsum panel product to USG, and has put a number of other divisions, including Nature Guard Roofing Shakes, on the auction block. These sales are part of a large-scale restructuring initiative intended to focus the company more strongly on building products with a national market, according to... Read more

Your July/August cover article (EBN

Vol. 6, No. 7), “Residential Siding Options,” characterizes vinyl siding as “inexpensive, easy to install, virtually maintenance-free, and generally quite durable.” My members, producers of vinyl siding and suppliers to our industry, are pleased that

EBN recognizes these important benefits of... Read more

Plans for construction of the world’s largest PV manufacturing plant—a 25 MW polycrystalline facility to be built in Gelsenkirchen, Germany—were announced on November 4, 1997. The plant will be built by Royal Dutch Shell, Pilkington Solar International, and Bayer Solar and is expected to be completed by mid-1999. This news comes on the heels of... Read more

The widely used plasticizer DEHP (di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate) might be causing asthma, according to a recent study by Norwegian and Danish scientists published in the September 1997 issue of

Environmental Health Perspectives. DEHP is used extensively as a plasticizer in PVC building products. Vinyl sheet flooring, for example, contains... Read more

Long used in computer rooms, access floors are now finding their way into office buildings and other commercial space, where they can dramatically reduce renovation costs while saving energy and improving indoor air quality—especially when providing an underfloor plenum for conditioned air distribution.... Read more

As we begin the new year, there is a sense of optimism that green building is on the upswing. There aren’t any real surveys to point to, but you could “feel” the tremendous energy at the string of green building conferences last fall. The environment is back in the mainstream press. Oil companies are admitting that there is an end in sight for... Read more

Roughly four billion pounds (1.8 billion kg) of old carpeting are landfilled each year. Comprised of different materials—nylon, polyester, latex backing, etc.—the stuff is inherently difficult to reprocess back into carpet (see EBN Vol. 6, No. 6). So how ’bout simply shredding the stuff and turning it into a fiber insulation material? That’s... Read more

New York and California have recently passed legislation allowing the use of unvented gas appliances, according to the November 1997 issue of

Energy Design Update (EDU). The legislation in both states has been signed by the governors, but will not go into effect until after review by the state health agencies. New York passed similar... Read more

Cellulose insulation should now be easier to specify in wall cavities with the release of a new “Standard Practice for the Installation of Sprayed Cellulosic Wall Cavity Insulation” from the Cellulose Industry Manufacturers Association. Until now each manufacturer had its own guidelines, varying in length and quality, according to the December... Read more

by Jane Holtz Kay. Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1997. Hardback, 418 pages, $27.50.

Asphalt Nation is a powerful book—intense, eye-opening, depressing, scary. Very simply, the book is a searing indictment of the automobile. Page after page explains how automobiles are killing and maiming us, inflicting untold damage on our... Read more

Agriboard Industries’ widely publicized R-values of its compressed-straw panels—R-14 (RSI-2.5 for 43⁄8”-thick (110 mm) panels and R-28 (RSI-4.9) for its 77⁄8”-thick (200 mm) panels—are more than 55% inflated according to unpublished information EBN has obtained. In an article on straw as a building material published in May 1995 (EBN Vol. 4, No... Read more

The U.S. Department of Energy has issued new

energy performance standards for room air conditioners, boosting minimum performance by about 10%. For the most common size model, the minimum Energy Efficiency Rating (EER)—the ratio of cooling output per unit of cooling input—will increase from 9.0 to 9.8. The new standards,... Read more

About the time you receive this, the

EBN staff will be settling into our new Brattleboro digs. We’ve outgrown the space above Alex’s garage and are moving to one of several renovated industrial buildings that once housed the world-renowned Estey Organ Company. Our corporate name has also been changed from West River... Read more

Third-party certification of forest operations and wood products is picking up steam. Large new tracts of land are being certified, including a number of publicly owned forests. A few forest

managers—as opposed to the lands themselves—now carry blanket certifications, covering any forests they manage. New products are carrying chain-of-... Read more

The Royal Dutch/Shell Group, one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, announced recently that it would invest $500 million over the next five years in renewable energy technology. The company is setting up a fifth core business,

Shell International Renewables, to broaden its involvement in renewable energy technology, including... Read more

, former editor-in-chief of

Professional Builder magazine, reportedly lost his job after writing an editorial taking issue with the National Association of Homebuilder’s (NAHB) anti-environment stance. Healthy homes builder and author John Bower, writing on the Green-building e-mail discussion group, notes that Carper was... Read more

Social awareness and recognition of efforts to reduce car-dependence are evident in the

1997 Builder’s Choice Design and Planning Awards, sponsored by Buildermagazine and the American Institute of Architects' Housing Committee. The "Project of the

Year" is a community of mixed housing types in downtown Foster City, California,... Read more