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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AHRI filed suit in 2008, claiming that while states may establish building codes, the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA) gave federal law supremacy over local law when it comes to appliance efficiency. The City argued that the code’s performance-based compliance paths allowed builders to use products not exceeding federal... Read more

Flooring manufacturer Tarkett North America has unveiled improvements to many of its vinyl flooring products, from reduced emissions to phthalate-free materials. Much of its Johnsonite flooring line now has total VOC emissions of 100 mcg/m3 or less, with some products below 10 mcg/m3.

Beginning this year, Tarkett manufacturing in North... 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