Here at BuildingGreen, we're pretty excited about the rise of the product transparency movement (as you may have noticed from recent coverage in January's EBN and our related blog series) but... Read more

Virtually ubiquitous in our buildings, gypsum board is widely seen as an innocuous building material.... Read more

I was in Boston last week for the annual Building Energy conference, sponsored by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association. Each year this conference provides an... Read more

Wait a minute. Weren't we criticizing Eleek and its cast aluminum hardware in this blog a few weeks ago? We were--and that sparked a dialogue with one... Read more

This is part of an ongoing series. Read all the Sticky Business posts here.

In just about... Read more

A new feature article in Environmental Building News examines how a focus on resilient design could advance green building more quickly than our current focus on sustainability.

Sometimes advancing sustainability feels like pushing a boulder uphill.... Read more

PLoS Biology, “Structural and Functional Loss in Restored Wetland Ecosystems,” reveals the relative ineffectiveness of wetlands restoration over the last century. Data from 621 sites throughout the world show that even 100 years after restoration attempts, wetlands’ biological structure and... Read more

With this in mind, evolveEA, the Heinz Endowments, and the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh conducted a survey of convention centers to better understand how they are addressing the demand for greener venues. Looking at convention centers’ business models, “Event Venue Benchmarking” identifies key market drivers and industry... Read more

Dynamic glazing—coated plastic or glass that changes tint in response to light, heat, or electricity—has been around for decades as a feature of eyeglasses, mood rings, and digital watches. Similar technologies have been developed more recently to make dynamic glass at a much larger scale for architectural applications. These so-called smart... Read more

American municipalities currently discharge 32 billion gallons a day of treated wastewater back into natural sources, from which water is drawn for further treatment prior to use. A new report from the Water Science and Technology Board of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) concludes that treated wastewater could instead be safely returned... Read more

Concrete has great compressive strength but poor tensile strength. It is brittle, cracks, and doesn’t flex, which is why it is reinforced with steel—but steel corrosion is a primary source of concrete failure. Lafarge’s Ductal line of specialty ultra-high-performance concretes (UHPC) offers significant improvements in these areas, with a thin,... Read more

Updated April 8, 2025; updates by Elene Drosos

I began an eight-month sabbatical in 2011 with a bicycle trip through the Southwest. I chose the Southwest in part because I wanted to have time to think about some of the vulnerabilities we face—particularly with climate change—and what we should do about it. From what climate... Read more

By Paula MeltonThe Passive House standard, often admired for simplicity, has also been criticized for rigidity. Now that Passive House Institute U.S. (PHIUS) has achieved independence from Europe and started its own certification system, called PHIUS+ (see ”Passive House U.S. Develops Separate North American Certification,” EBN Dec. 2011), the... Read more