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

Has anyone here performed circadian lighting studies for WELL using rhino/grasshopper (Lark Spectral Lighting)? 

It seems that Lark can only simulate circadian metrics for daylighting, and NOT electric lighting.  Can anyone shed some light on this?  pun intended :)

Are there any other tools out there that would enable us to... Read more

Sometimes referred to as “the dark side”, the construction industry isn’t actually so bad.  We are mostly good people.  And, we need good people. 

Consigli is hiring a Sustainability Manager to work in Massachusetts, and we could use your help to fill the role.  If you or someone you know is brimming with the sustainability force, please... Read more

We've gotten some requests recently, so it must be time to update our salary survey. For those didn't participate in the past, we last did one in 2015, and collected some really interesting data about compensation for SDLeaders.

Our first step in getting this started is to recruit a few volunteers who are interested enough in the data we... Read more

Hi all --

We have a national restaurant client who is looking to source furniture (indoor and outdoor) with a minimum of 40% recycled/salvaged content from a woman- and/or minority-owned company.  They have a strong preference for a company that partners with/participates in community outreach and/or mentoring programs.  They also have ... Read more

Hi Green Gurus: check out this new series from AIAU that delves into the design and planning application of the 4th National Climate Assessment Report by region with some more recent updates. Free to members...looks like some great speakers and highly relevant. 

https://aiau.aia.org/regional-tour-climate-risk-planning-and-design

... Read more

Welcome to the quiz portion of "The Potential of Prefab: How Modular Construction Can Be Green"!

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


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

Hello all,

This month's SCDL call was full of great discussion! We decided this month that we are feeling good about where we are for the Task Force Agreement on defining social sustainabiltiy in our work. The aim is to work with this agreement for a while and see if it holds up as a process framework. There was also interest to invite... Read more

On a large sports project, we worked with the structural engineer to spec low carbon / high SCM concrete mixes. Much of the floor area will be sealed and polished concrete, and a concrete sub is pushing back on the SCMs saying they should not be above 20% (with a preference for 0%) for the polish to finish properly, per the manufacturer. Anyone... Read more

Greetings Gurus!! I'm super excited to invite you all to help each other :)

As many of you know, BuildingEase (a completely free tool!) has been born this year, the newest function we just launched is the Crowdsourcing function.

Crowdsourcing lets anyone contribute products to a public Material List (similar to an Outline Spec)... Read more

Hi Everyone - I'm posting this on behalf of Jeff Frost whom many of you know from his days as an SD Leader with SmithGroup and SERA and in his new role as head of Brightworks Sustainability's materials group.  I am excited to be working with Jeff on this concept of multi-attribute product scoring.  Cheers, Lona

Dear SDL’ers,

We’ve... Read more

Hello SDL!

Has anyone set "Ecosystem Benefits/Service" targets for an individual project or for all their projects? I was previously against the idea of even measuring ecosystem benefits but I've had my mind changed in recent months!

Currently we want to set a target for every project to: "Improve ecosystem benefits on every site... Read more

Welcome to the quiz portion of Finding Furniture Without Toxic Flame Retardants.

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


1. Explain why avoiding toxic flame retardants is important.
2. Explain how we were swindled into dosing our buildings and our bodies with flame... Read more