BuildingGreen Report

Just as COVID-19 has changed nearly every aspect of day-to-day life, the virus is upending deeply rooted patterns of the electric grid. Combined with initial signs of cleaner air, emboldened wildlife, and growing demand for local agriculture, some have wondered whether being confined to our homes has resulted in lower... Read more

The hole in the ozone layer is closing—but not as quickly as it should, according to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In fact, buildings with older foam insulation, HVAC systems, and refrigeration equipment could delay healing by six years. The escaping CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) are blowing... Read more

The Canada Green Building Council (CaGBC) was the first to launch a national standard for carbon neutrality in buildings. Now version 2 has been released with changes that include multiple compliance paths for energy efficiency, a requirement to offset fugitive refrigerant emissions and embodied carbon, and a higher bar for carbon offsets. The... Read more

Fifty years ago, I was the Earth Day Coordinator at Radnor Junior High School in Wayne, Pennsylvania. At age 14, I was a budding conservationist (we weren’t really using the term “environmentalist” yet), and I remember taking the train into Philadelphia to pick up mimeographed flyers about Earth Day to hand out in our school... Read more

In a time of an unrelenting onslaught of devastating news from the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s hard to imagine that we will get to the other side of this mounting humanitarian and economic catastrophe. And it’s even harder to imagine that there could be good news that will emerge from it. But there may be some silver linings in... Read more

Interest in the embodied carbon of buildings—the upfront carbon emissions associated with production of building materials—has seen a major spike in the last couple of years, which has led to increased interest in whole-building life-cycle assessment, or WBLCA. WBLCA measures the environmental impacts, including global warming impacts, of a... Read more

Making material and design choices that minimize a building’s embodied carbon upfront is vital. But a new standard from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) reminds us that we can also reduce embodied impacts by extending the useful life of what we plan to build.

ISO 20887: 2020, Sustainability in Buildings and Civil... Read more

Advocacy groups have been popping up, urging people to use more electricity, not less. It’s sometimes a confusing message for people to hear.

What Is Building Electrification?

Building electrification refers to using electric technologies instead of combustion-fueled technologies to supply the comforts of... Read more

Ten microgrid systems installed in schools in Puerto Rico were put to the test recently after a 6.4 magnitude earthquake caused massive power outages. The systems survived and successfully powered critical loads in each school, according to Rocky Mountain Institute, which championed the installations along with Save the Children and the Kinesis... Read more

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has rescinded the leak-repair provisions that were put in place in 2016 by the Obama administration as part of Section 608 of the Clean Air Act. Section 608 regulates the use of high-ozone-depletion-potential (ODP) refrigerants in HVAC and refrigeration equipment. The Obama administration amended... Read more

Remember 2013? LEED version 4 had just been released to the public. Hardly anyone was using it, though—not only because they didn’t have to, but also because there just wasn’t a pathway to achieve many of the new credits in the rating systems. Especially the product-related credits in the Materials & Resources category, along with the Low-... Read more

Acme Resilient Flooring thought it had scored a home run with the release of a LEED v4.1-compliant Health Product Declaration (HPD) v2.1.1 for its tire-derived recycled rubber floor tiles. They hoped the HPD, written entirely in Hittite cuneiform, would not only drive international sales but also revive interest in ancient... Read more

In 2017, BuildingGreen reported on the community of clowns who had settled in a tiny house cohousing complex in Portland, Oregon. They quickly became indispensable members of the community, modeling humor, tolerance, acceptance, and the ability to optimize resource and energy efficiency by cramming seemingly impossible numbers of... Read more

On the heels of the announcement that teen climate-change activist Greta Thunberg will have her own BBC television show, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) is introducing Thunberg-related merchandise that will be required for achieving certain credits in the LEED rating systems. The so-called Greta Merch includes stickers... Read more

Vinyl has a complicated history. It seems as though vinyl has been around forever, but it wasn’t until the ’60s and ’70s that its perceived warmth, quality, and affordability made it ubiquitous in U.S. homes. Vinyl often brought artistry and vibrancy to lives seemingly stuck in a 1950s black-and-white world. But like beads,... Read more

Citing an overlooked niche in the array of building certifications, actress and lifestyle guru Gwyneth Paltrow announced the Goop Building Standard. Known also as GOOP, the new standard provides a framework for healthy living.

Although GOOP stands for Gyno-Ovarian Occupant Priorities, Paltrow denies... Read more

The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has unveiled the first five projects completed under its new Classical Architecture Standards. Developed by GSA in response to an anticipated executive order from President Trump, these guidelines could eventually apply to all new federal buildings as well as major retrofits.... Read more

There is increasing consensus that getting toxic fuels out of buildings by switching to all-electric technologies is essential to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but making that change isn’t easy. Watch this webinar to hear from two leaders in the field, one a policy expert and the other an engineer and consultant creating leading-edge... Read more

To our friends and colleagues in the green building world,

We are now, in the most challenging sense, living in interesting times. As of today very few of us in North America are suffering from the illness caused by COVID-19, but we’re all experiencing its secondary effects: efforts to contain it that are shutting down gatherings,... Read more

The cognitive effects of outdoor air pollution can be devastating, particularly for schoolchildren. A new working paper suggests that there may be an inexpensive correction for this—cleaning up indoor air using air filters.

The study took advantage of the political fallout from a 2015–16 gas leak in California. Residents demanded... Read more