Hi SDL'ers, as promised I am sending information about how to support getting flame retardants out of foam insulation. I am attaching a draft letter to Foam Manufacturers, an intro to that letter giving some background and a list of From manufacturers.   Thanks, please contact if you have any questions.   Larry Strain, Siegel & Strain... Read more

Hello Green Gurus,

Back at the retreat in March 2021 (does anyone remember back that far?), we formed an Air Quality Working Group with members from SDL, SMEPL, and SCL. Drawing on our collective experience, standards, research, and other resources, we began navigating the murkiness of indoor air quality considerations. We came up with a... Read more

Please see the following invite from Professor Alexandra Rempel at the University of Oregon to participate a 15-20 minute phone/Zoom interview and share your experience and/or perceptions on the problems, challenges, and barriers to incorporating into your projects.

This effort is part of an NSF research grant that I am involved in and... Read more

Hello SDL Network,

I am working with members of the Seattle AIA COTE in planning an event that we are tentatively calling "Pathways to Decarbonization" or maybe "Decarbonization Success Stories".  The idea is for the COTE to identify entitities (school districts, local governments, higher-ed institutions, corporations, etc.) that have... Read more

Our specification team is currently piloting and testing new software to replace E-specs without an easy favorite, and would really love to know what other firms are using.

First question - what software does your firm use for specifications and why?

Second question - would you/your specifier be willing to chat with ours about it... Read more

I am excited to share with you the final draft of the letter back to LP50 manufacturers.  The LP50 manufacturers sent their “Closing the Loop on Product Transparency” to design firms earlier this year.  For more background information, please check out Chris Hellstern's original August 20th post on this Green Gurus forum.  When we posted the... Read more

Is this EDI, or JEDI? (Justice, Equity...)

Notes (attached) and Guiding Questions:

Equity, Diversity, And Inclusion In Our Firms

What are the barriers and what’s working to cut through them?

The process is so super slow... how to to celebrate our small achievements?

How are we fostering inclusion and... Read more

Hello Green Gurus! We are diving deep into our carbon metrics this year and are finalizing some of our emissions factors for our Scope 1 and 2 emissions and in a few more months Scope 3. I'm hoping this brain trust has some recent knowledge to share on this topic. What we've found is there's a fairly big variance in what we've seen in published... Read more

THIS WEBINAR PURCHASE AND REGISTRATION IS CLOSED.

Live webinar approved for 1 AIA LU and 1 GBCI CE hour. Each person intending to earn CEU credits must purchase their own seat.

Why high-performance assemblies? And why now? Today we demand better thermal performance from our building assemblies than... Read more

Hi all,

Jacobs is looking to hire specifically for sustainability needs! We have a current job posting for a Senior Sustainability Specialist now up, and anticipate a similar posting soon for a mid-level person as well. Location for these would be in the Mountain or Pacific time zones, remote work is fine; other future anticipated posts... Read more

The AIA conference is coming up soon as well.  It is scheduled for June 19-23 in NYC. I have heard about a lot of great sessions and I am thinking it would be helpful if we could collect info here.  Please respond to this message with info about your session and I will compile all of this into a handy reference document.  I will start with my... Read more

Following my retirement from BuildingGreen, I’m also looking to retire from the nonprofit Resilient Design Institute, which I’ve been leading since 2012. My default plan is to sunset the organization in the fall of 2024, but I wanted to offer the idea of someone (or multiple people) taking over the organization.

RDI is incorporated as a... Read more

Welcome to the quiz portion of Reexamining Priorities in Green Building.

Learning Objectives
Upon completing this course, participants will be able to:


1. Define green building priorities from a few different angles (separating process priorities from outcome priorities).
2. Differentiate those priorities... Read more

Hi All - I wanted to share out the All For Reuse initiative below by two peers in the sustainable materials management network. I know some SDL have already done much research on this from quite a few angles, and those with LBC experience probably even moreso in practice. 

Frances Yang (Arup) and Andrew Ellsworth (Doors Unhinged) have... Read more

Hello,

We are in the very early planning phase of a k-8 public school project to be designed and built in an economically challenged urban location with very limited site options. The project is not LEEDv4 registered yet.  We are at feasibility and costing the soil remediation, needless to say that we would really hope there would be... Read more

Hi everyone,

We're hoping to do some building monitoring as part of Building Use Evaluations on our built work, starting with projects in East Africa, to ensure they are performing as intended and to keep supporting our partners. Ultimately we want to be able to log light, noise, temperature, humidity and CO2 concentration. This does not... Read more