Arlington County in Virginia has become (to the best of our knowledge) the first local government to reference the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system in official policy. The county, which is itself a member of the USGBC, voted on October 2 to allow developers favorable treatment in their requests for bonus density if their... Read more

by Ross Spiegel and Dru Meadows. James Wiley & Sons, New York, 1999. Hardcover, 300 pages, $64.95.

Green Building Materials covers a... Read more

the wrong photo accompanied our Newsbrief on page 5 of

Vol. 8, No. 9 (September 1999 issue) about the Letterman Digital Arts project at San Francisco’s Presidio National Park. The picture we intended to publish, a model of the proposed campus, appears below.

Also, the Wal-Mart... Read more

As the three major U.S. building code organizations move towards a single unified code, many changes are being considered. A couple of decisions from September’s Joint Annual Conference of Building Officials in St. Louis are very welcome, according to David Eisenberg, co-director of the Development Center for... Read more

Is this good news or bad? The Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy (EIA), the agency that tracks energy consumption statistics and comes up with official projections, is revising its energy demand estimates downward to account for global warming. For the 12-month period from the fourth quarter of 1999... Read more

The incentives from San Diego Gas &... Read more

From landmines to saplings. According to the electronic environmental news service from the Earth Day Network, Inc. (The Daily Gist, 9/3/99), Lockheed Martin has plans of converting military jets designed to drop landmines to the purpose of replanting forests. Saplings would be dropped in biodegradable metal cones, which explode on landing and... Read more

Sound like science fiction? It’s not. One such product, the Himawari®, has been... Read more

A Call for Papers has been issued for the 8th National Conference on Building Commissioning, to be held May 3-5, 2000 in Kansas City, Missouri. Ideas and abstracts are due by November 12 to Carolyn Dasher, 503/248-4636 x204; cdasher@peci.org. For details, visit

www.peci.org/ncbc.

The design calls for over 90% of the 390-acre (160 ha) site to be protected by permanent... Read more

Our brand-new

GreenSpec™ should be shipping by about the time you receive this issue!

GreenSpec replaces the widely acclaimed

EBN Product Catalog, which was published in conjunction with What’s Working of Boulder, Colorado and is now sold out. The

GreenSpec title is provided courtesy of... Read more

by John Perlin. Aatec Publications, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1999. Hardcover, 240 pages, $32.

From a co-author of

A Golden Thread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology, this book follows in the same vein with a fascinating, fun-to-read, historical account of the unfolding of the photovoltaics (PV)... Read more

I read with great interest your excellent article on daylighting in buildings (

EBN

Vol. 8, No. 9, September 1999). I would offer two clarifications. First, you state that south orientation is the best for daylighting, and north second best. It is true that the south offers the most daylighting... Read more

Developed with assistance from the Southface Energy Institute and the NAHB Research Center, this program is... Read more

On October 12, the world population is projected to top 6 billion, according to the United Nations. This reflects a doubling of the population since 1960, with current growth of 77 million per year. UN projections show the population growing to between 7 billion and 10.5 billion by 2050. The vast majority of population growth is now occurring... Read more

The first major update since 1989 to Standard 90.1, “Energy Standard for Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings,” from the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) and the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA) was approved at ASHRAE’s Annual Meeting in Seattle in June. The... Read more

No Excavation Required

The Passive Solar Industries Council is now the

Sustainable Buildings Industry Council. On August 15 the organization formally adopted the change, following a balloting of members. PSIC was formed in 1981, and its mission was refined in January 1997 as follows: “to advance the design, affordability, energy performance, and environmental... Read more

Master specification systems, such as The American Institute of Architects’ Masterspec™, are widely used throughout the building design professions. They provide generic specifications that can be customized for particular projects, along with additional guidance on each section. The generic specification language is enormously influential in... Read more