BuildingGreen Report

News Brief

April 29, 2008
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, water heating is responsible for up to 17% of national residential energy use. Now, for the first time, builders and homeowners will have an Energy Star standard by which to judge water heaters for efficiency. The new criteria cover five categories of water heaters and go into effect on January 1, 2009 (... Read more

News Analysis

April 29, 2008
LED Lighting Fixtures (LLF), manufacturer of a breakthrough LED downlight that BuildingGreen recognized as a Top-10 Green Building Product for 2007 (see

EBN

Vol. 16, No. 12), was acquired in March 2008 by Cree, Inc., a North Carolina-based manufacturer of LEDs. LLF’s products, including the LR6 recessed-can LED downlight (see

... Read more

News Brief

April 29, 2008

Habitat for Humanity International has partnered with the Home Depot Foundation to create Partners in Sustainable Building, an initiative to encourage green building in affordable housing. The program will offer $30 million over five years to Habitat affiliates to offset the higher first costs of green building in up to 5,000 homes. According... Read more

Op-Ed

April 29, 2008

Congratulations on the partnership with such a class act as Taunton Press. I’ve always felt that

EBN has been one of the most effective forces in bringing about the green building transformation we’re experiencing.

EBN gives direction to the leading edge of the green building movement through its “big picture” perspective and... Read more

News Brief

April 29, 2008

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced new lead paint rules for contractors who renovate or repair housing, child-care facilities, or schools built before 1978. The Toxic Substances Control Act of 1992 required EPA to regulate renovation activities by 1996, but EPA had delayed writing the rules until pressed by a 2005... Read more

News Analysis

April 29, 2008
Boulder County, Colorado, has seen a surge in the size of its homes: the median size of a new home has risen from 2,881 ft

2 (267 m

2) in 1990 to 6,290 ft

2 (584 m

2) in 2006, while the overall median home size has risen to 3,100 ft

2 (290 m

2). But both the County and the City of Boulder have been working on... Read more

News Brief

April 29, 2008
Under the federal Clean Water Act, developers must replace the functions of any wetland lost to construction. Rules covering the practice, called

compensatory mitigation, were recently consolidated and updated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Army Corps of Engineers. The update favors use of

mitigation banks,... Read more

Explainer

April 29, 2008
Everyone knows how cool (or cold!) it feels to have wet clothing on in a breeze. As water evaporates, it absorbs heat, leaving our skin feeling cooler. Similarly, cooling towers evaporate water to reject heat from chillers or industrial equipment.

Direct evaporative coolers (also called swamp coolers or desert coolers) use the same principle to... Read more

News Analysis

April 29, 2008

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has announced that starting in January 2009 it will require its members to complete four hours per year of continuing education focused on sustainable design, constituting half of the eight hours required for topics in health, safety, and welfare. The requirement will remain in place until 2012, when... Read more

Product Review

April 29, 2008
Evaporative cooling lowers indoor-air temperatures without the high energy loads of conventional cooling (see page 20). But to get those lower temperatures, direct evaporative coolers have to pull sensible heat out of the air by adding water vapor (latent heat), or sacrifice efficiency with an indirect system mediated by a heat exchanger. A... Read more

Feature

Water efficiency should be a top priority for our buildings. At the same time, finding alternative sources of water is also important for sustainability and passive survivability. Several sources of water can be harvested at the building level as well as through municipal-scale wastewater treatment and desalination.

April 29, 2008

The severe 2007 drought throughout the southeast U.S. was a wake-up call. This drought taught us that even areas of the country we have long assumed to have plenty of water are not immune from water shortages, and it showed us how woefully inadequately prepared we were—and still are— to respond to severe drought.

Changing... Read more

News Brief

April 29, 2008

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has announced its Top Ten Green Projects for this year. Projectprofiles can be found at www.aiatopten.org and in BuildingGreen Suite.

Aldo Leopold Legacy Center (Baraboo, Wisconsin; The Kubala Washatko Architects)—The LEED Platinum headquarters for the Aldo Leopold Foundation uses 70% less... Read more

News Analysis

April 29, 2008

Bamboo has been used as a construction material since prehistoric times. Now that it has become an international commodity in the form of strip flooring and plywood-like panels, pressure on the bamboo forests of eastern Asia is greater than ever, leading environmentalists to question whether all bamboo products are still a good ecological... Read more

Blog Post

April 25, 2008
Amy Levin and friendsphoto: Heidi Glenn, NPR I was a pretty lucky guy this past week. Firstly, I got to be in Washington, DC near the peak of their spring blossom season on a picture perfect day. Secondly, I was there to talk with National Public Radio's Robert Siegel and realtor Amy Levin about her LEED for Homes Platinum (pending) gut rehab of a... Read more

Blog Post

April 23, 2008
Last year, our own Alex Wilson served as a judge for the Lifecycle Building Challenge, a competition organized by West Coast Green, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Building Materials Reuse Association, The American Institute of Architects, Collaborative for High-Performance Schools, and Southface Energy Institute. There are two main... Read more

News Brief

April 23, 2008

On April 10, 2008, the U.S. Senate passed legislation with significant provisions supporting the renewable-energy industry. The Clean Energy Tax Stimulus Act of 2008, which must be voted on in the House before being sent to the President, modifies and extends the incentives for energy-efficient technologies and renewable energy that were... Read more

Blog Post

April 23, 2008
With the addition of three new case studies from the 2008 AIA COTE Top Ten awards (Aldo Leopold Legacy Center - Platinum; Yale University Sculpture Building and Gallery - Platinum; Macallen Building Condominiums - Gold), BuildingGreen.com now features over 100 LEED certified building case studies from the High Performance Building Database (HPB... Read more

Blog Post

April 22, 2008
Rebecca Henn, AIA, was a jury member for the 2008 AIA Committee on the Environment Top Ten Green Projects awards. She is pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, studying how sustainability influences the building team, and although you won't find it in her official bio, she worked here at BuildingGreen during the summer of 2006. I called... Read more

Blog Post

April 22, 2008

Peter Yost is Vice President - Technical Serviceas for BuildingGreen, Inc. in Brattleboro, Vermont. He has been building, researching, teaching, writing, and consulting on high performance homes for more than twenty-five years. His expertise stretches from construction waste management and advanced framing to energy efficiency and building... Read more

Blog Post

April 14, 2008

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