One of several builders in the development, Vanguard chose to go above and beyond the... Read more

As part of its management of the Clean Water Act, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed national stormwater guidelines for construction sites. Under the proposed regulations, all construction sites would be required to implement erosion and sediment-control best practices. In addition, construction projects disturbing over... Read more

After the Economic Stimulus Act in early 2008 (which gave us shopping money) and the huge bank bailout later in the year failed to turn around a tanking economy, attention has turned to another massive stimulus bill—one that would fix the nation’s crumbling roads and bridges.

At first glance, it sounds good. Public works programs, as we... Read more

LEED 2009, a revision of the LEED Rating System first made available for comment in May 2008, has been approved by the 18,000 member organizations of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). The revision is intended to create greater consistency among the several LEED rating systems, reflect a more scientifically grounded weighting of credits,... Read more

When designers at Sasaki Associates urge clients to pursue green strategies, they can point to successes at their own building in Watertown, Massachusetts, which recently achieved a Gold rating in LEED for Existing Buildings (LEED-EB).

Until LEED-EB was released, according to Meredith Elbaum, AIA, sustainable design director for the... Read more

So confident were the developers of obtaining LEED Platinum certification for Dockside Green, a mixed-use development in Victoria, British Columbia, that the company agreed to pay the city a $1 million penalty if they didn’t achieve it. So far, so good. Last July, the initial phase, called “Synergy,” consisting of four detached residential... Read more

The ash from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) Kingston Fossil Plant that is now endangering the local community following a December 22 breach in a holding pond is most likely an 80/20 mix of fly ash (from smokestack pollution control systems) and bottom ash. To be used in concrete, fly ash must be low in residual carbon, as defined by... Read more

Three recent columns provided a brief history of lighting, an overview of fluorescent technology, and a look at the challenges of improving streetlights. Following a side trip into the issue of "passive survivability," I'm returning this week to illumination with an overview of high-intensity discharge (... Read more

The ice storm a week-and-a-half ago illustrated, all too clearly, the vulnerability of our homes. Hundreds of thousands of homes in New England lost power in the storm, which deposited up to an inch of ice on trees the night of December 11th,... Read more

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Last week we took a look at fluorescent lighting, which is dramatically reducing our energy use for illuminating indoor spaces. This week we'll cover mercury vapor lighting, which is the most common outdoor lighting in many of our towns.

... Read more

Last week, after an overview of lighting history, we examined incandescent lighting--the lamp technology invented by Thomas Edison. Until the mid-1900s incandescent... Read more

I'm not usually all that comfortable in front of a camera, but I had fun walking the Greenbuild 2008 Expo floor with a video crew from CNNMoney.com and Fortune magazine. We focused on four or five technologies in our tour, only two of which made it into the final two minute video (after a nice lead-in by Scot Horst of 7group). The CNN crew... Read more

In 1997, humorist Dave Barry wrote a newspaper piece titled "The Toilet Police," about those newly mandated 1.6-gallon low-flow toilets that honestly and truly deserved to be dumped on. The column is still floating around the internet, and clearly people are still moved by it. But, y'know, that was over a decade ago. There are still crappy... Read more

You find the darndest things on YouTube sometimes. Southwest Windpower, the maker of the Skystream 3.7 small-scale wind turbine, brought this video (and others like it) to my attention.

www.AskNature.org, maintained by the Biomimicry Institute

If biomimicry brings nature’s solutions to bear on design problems, AskNature.org brings modern internet technology—and the expanded audience it facilitates—to the biomimicry discussion. The site, created by the Biomimicry Institute, offers an encyclopedia of nature’s solutions to... Read more