Steven Winter Associates, Inc., of Norwalk, Connecticut, has been awarded a grant through the U.S. Department of Energy’s 1995 Small Business Innovative Research program to design advanced modular townhouses for urban infill sites. The company has been charged with designing townhouses that employ renewable energy and energy conservation... Read more

Choosing an environmentally friendly siding material has never been easy. Often the more “natural” products, such as wood clapboards, are associated with depletion of sensitive forest resources, while materials that are highly manufactured—such as vinyl—raise questions about chlorine and petrochemicals as... Read more

I very much appreciate your recognition of the need for and efforts to identify priorities for “green building” (whatever that is). Such priorities can either be defined implicitly by the buildings a “green designer” creates or by some systematic process based on a hierarchy of environmental problems. Your... Read more

Environmental Building Consultants, 312 A Jefferson Ave., Cheltenham, PA 19012-2021; 215/663-1611, 215/663-1637 (fax), ehouse@omni.voicenet.com (e-mail); $50 for PC or Macintosh diskette containing database and software to run it.

This initial release of an IAQ products database contains about 450 listings... Read more

Building Industry Professionals for Environmental Responsibility (BIPER) is a new lobbying group founded to counter the frequently anti-environmental message governments receive from mainstream industry organizations. Annual membership is $35. Three levels of membership allow members to choose the frequency of contacts from the... Read more

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For years polystyrene has been just about the only game in town for exterior foundation insulation. The problem is that

extruded polystyrene—the type of polystyrene most commonly used on foundations—is produced with HCFCs that deplete ozone, and

all polystyrene (both extruded and... Read more

The DuPont Benedictus Awards for Innovation in Architectural Laminated Glass may have a significant environmental flavor in 1996 with the inclusion of two prominent “green” architects on the jury. Bob Berkebile of BNIM Architects in Kansas City, Missouri and Randolph Croxton, Croxton Collaborative Architects, New York City, have both been... Read more

Voluntary certification of product environmental claims is a useful option, but it does little to prevent bogus claims by other manufacturers. A 1990 California law attempts to address this problem by establishing legal definitions for the terms “ozone friendly,” “biodegradable,” “photodegradable,” “recyclable,” and “recycled.” Companies are... Read more

A four-month-old initiative within the U.S. Postal Service aims to revise design guidelines and material specifications to improve environmental performance. The Washington, D.C. office of HOK, Inc. was recently retained to help develop the proposed changes, which will be presented to senior Postal Service staff for review in late October. To... Read more

The Wild Lawn Handbook: Alternatives to the Traditional Front LawnStevie Daniels, 1995. Macmillan, 15 Columbus Circle, New York, NY 10023; 800/858-7674. Hardcover, 223 pages, $20 ($27.95 Canada).

Written for homeowners who are questioning the ecological and financial cost of maintaining a traditional lawn... Read more

NOLS had established a base for sea kayaking and other water activities on the Baja California peninsula, in... Read more

The Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) has announced a design competition for completed buildings north of 40 degrees north latitude. Judging criteria include energy and resource efficiency and bioregional appropriateness. There is no fee for submissions, which must be received by December 31, 1995. Contact NESEA at 413/774-6051,... Read more

We first learned about Icynene at the First Annual Conference on Alternatives to CFCs and Halons in November 1990. At that time it was a tiny Canadian company (founded in 1986) with a type of foam insulation that had no harmful effects on the Earth’s stratospheric ozone layer. Company founder... Read more

The U.S. Department of Energy has published proposed voluntary guidelines for rating home energy performance. The guidelines were drafted by the Home Energy Rating Systems (HERS) Council for DOE and are designed to encourage uniformity among the various methods used to rate the energy efficiency of both new and existing residential buildings.... Read more

Two project are underway that may eventually provide useful environmental and cost information on building material alternatives to architects, specifiers, and others in the construction industry. A Canadian project, called

Athena™, is the outgrowth of government-sponsored work coordinated by Forintek... Read more

A major shake-up at Louisiana-Pacific Corporation this summer was brought on, in part, by allegations of falsifying pollution emission data. The entire upper management team of L-P, including Chairman and President Harry Merlo (who led the company since its split from Georgia-Pacific in 1973 and who championed L-P’s leadership role in the move... Read more

Efforts to establish a National Institute for the Environment (NIE) are proceeding in Washington, and they may even pick up speed as a way to consolidate environmental research efforts that are being handled through many different agencies. A bill to establish the Institute is expected to be introduced in... Read more

Learning from the Past

Easter Island has long mystified archaeologists. When the tiny, remote island, 2,000 miles (3,200 km) from the nearest continent, was “discovered” on Easter day in 1722, some 200 mammoth stone statues (moai) stood on the island like sentries. But there was no obvious means by which the islanders could... Read more

Members of the U.S. Green Building Council have organized a non-profit Green Building Fund in the hopes of providing ongoing support for research and demonstration of environmentally sound construction projects. So far six organizations have contributed to the Fund’s initial project—a feasibility study documenting funding sources for green... Read more