Lead was discovered in Washington, D.C., drinking water in 2004 in alarming concentrations following the district’s switch from chlorine to chloramine for drinking water disinfection. Municipalities around the country took note when U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chemist Mike Schock hypothesized that the switch, made in response to new... Read more

Smart Environments Awards. Co-sponsored by

Metropolis magazine, the awards were intended to recognize the most environmentally and socially responsible, beautiful, and functional interior designs of the past five years. The winners are:... Read more

The Carpet America Recovery Effort (CARE) was created in 2002 to help the industry meet the carpet recycling and reuse goals set forth by the Memorandum of Understanding for Carpet Stewardship (MOU), a voluntary agreement signed by members of the carpet industry, government entities, and nongovernmental organizations. How successful is CARE?... Read more

The U.S. Army has announced that, beginning in 2008, all of its new buildings will achieve Silver or higher ratings in the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED® Rating System. LEED will supplant the Army’s own Sustainable Project Rating Tool (SPiRiT), which was modeled after LEED. The Army has also committed to certifying all of its housing once... Read more

Two projects under development, one in Boston, Massachusetts, and one in Cabinda, Angola, were among the projects recognized in June at the fourteenth Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) in Providence, Rhode Island. CNU’s 2006 Charter Awards recognize work that demonstrates an understanding of urbanism and the principles embodied in the CNU... Read more

In a May 2006 announcement before the New York League of Conservation Voters, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a new Division of Sustainability that will operate within the Mayor’s Office of Operations. Bloomberg’s announcement, in which he called sustainability “a philosophy of realistic optimism,” follows his 2004 creation of a... Read more

Metropolis magazine, for their Hydro Wall design. Hydro Wall is a series of flexible bladders designed to store rainwater within a building’s walls. The water could be used for irrigation, flushing toilets, and a range... Read more

If a proposed regulation from the California Air Resources Board (CARB) is adopted as planned on September 28, 2006, the U.S. market for particleboard and similar interior-grade panel products will change dramatically. The proposed regulation drastically reduces the allowable levels of urea-formaldehyde (UF) emissions from composite wood... Read more

In May 2006, the U.S. Senate confirmed Dirk Kempthorne to succeed Gale Norton as head of the Department of the Interior, which manages 20% of all land in the U.S. Kempthorne, who has served in the U.S. Senate and as governor of Idaho, has worked to open national lands to logging, mining, and drilling; the League of Conservation Voters (LCV)... Read more

Charles Kibert, Ph.D., of the University of Florida’s Rinker School of Construction, has assembled an impressive collection of speakers from around the world for a sequel to the seminal Sustainable Construction conference he hosted in November 1994. Based on its draft agenda, the four-day affair looks to be a hybrid of Greenbuild’s practice-... Read more

Outside the window a phoebe was bringing food to her nest under the eaves. I had positioned myself next to the window in the small lecture room as I always try to do at meetings—when I am fortunate enough to be in a meeting facility with windows. Being able to glance out the window from time to time helps me relax and, I think, even focus on... Read more

Detective James Zadroga’s January 5, 2006, death of respiratory failure is the first to be officially blamed on exposure to dust from the September 11, 2001, collapse of the World Trade Center. “It is felt with a reasonable degree of medical certainty that the cause of death in this case was directly related to the 9/11 incident,” according to... Read more

We are thrilled to announce that Tristan Roberts has joined our staff as associate editor of

Environmental Building News. Tristan grew up on a small dairy farm in upstate New York; attended high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts; graduated from Marlboro College in Marlboro, Vermont, with a degree in philosophy and... Read more

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has called for heavy industries in the state, such as power plants, refineries, and factories, to report emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are contributing to global warming. Making the announcement at a San Francisco global warming summit in April 2006, the governor pledged to... Read more