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The current issue of Environmental Building News reports that PV prices have been going up, reversing the declining cost trend of previous years. Seems to be due to a combination of demand exceeding supply coupled with polysilicon shortages. But PV is still part of the good answer. A few days ago, a report titled Emissions from Photovoltaic... Read more

There are a growing number of green-product retailers, both online and in storefronts. We list some of those with a specialty focus in GreenSpec, but there are so many more popping up all the time. I visited one last weekend that's quite something — Home Green Home, in Ithaca, NY. While most green retailers are either boutique shops with small... Read more

I'm in Ithaca, NY, this weekend at the third annual meeting of Natural Builders Northeast (NBNe), an association of professional natural building practitioners. Like the early days of the NESEA conference — another annual gathering of regional experts working to help the built environment move toward something more environmentally sane (and... Read more

EBN

Vol. 17, No. 1). EcoTimber is following suit, shifting the manufacture of its solid-bamboo flooring to include an emulsion polymer isocyanate (EPI) binder that contains neither urea- nor phenol-... Read more

Air Quality Sciences (AQS) in Marietta, Georgia, specializes in testing for indoor air quality and product emissions and is the main testing laboratory for the Greenguard Environmental Institute and its Greenguard certifications. The laboratory already met standards set by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for quality... Read more

In November 2007 the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) committed $1 million in funding for research on green building topics (see

EBN

Vol. 16, No. 12). Now it has doubled that commitment to $2 million and reserved $500,000 of the additional funds for research on occupant impacts in K-12 schools. Although it represents a... Read more

It’s no wonder that confusion abounds regarding light quality. We talk about

color temperature in kelvins (a temperature scale), but higher temperatures are “cooler”—how’s that? A more important property,

color rendering index, tells us how accurately a light source shows off colors, but what does that mean?

Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are persistent, bioaccumulative chemicals that can cause both acute and chronic health problems in humans and may cause cancer; their production was banned in the U.S. in the 1970s. Most studies have focused on how these chemicals enter the human body through the food chain, but a new study published in the... Read more

A group of national design associations has proposed the creation of a National Academy of Environmental Design to add to the four existing national academies (National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council). The group includes the Association of Collegiate Schools of... Read more

Fine Homebuilding, became an equity partner in BuildingGreen, LLC, joining myself, Nadav Malin, and Jerelyn Wilson as owners. The financial resources... Read more

EBN Vol. 15, No. 12), and based in Charlotte, North Carolina, now offers Ecolife pressure-treated wood products. Ecolife contains a waterborne wood preservative made from tebuconazole and imidacloprid (low-toxicity biocides commonly used in agriculture... Read more

After his 2007 term as president of The American Institute of Architects (AIA), RK Stewart, FAIA, has joined the San Francisco office of Perkins+Will as an associate partner. Before his post at AIA, Stewart was a principal at San Francisco-based Gensler, where he worked for 20 years. While at AIA, Stewart emphasized green building, leading the... Read more