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

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

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

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

An upscale Tahoe Vista, California, restaurant, Wild Goose, recently became the first restaurant to receive certification from the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED® rating system for commercial interiors (LEED-CI). CCS Architecture, of San Francisco, remodeled the 10,000 ft2 (930 m2) restaurant for East West Partners. Among Wild Goose’s... Read more

ED+C) magazine has announced the winners of its annual Excellence in Design Awards. This year’s jury included

ED+C staff members as well as Rick Fedrizzi, president and CEO of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC); Jim Nicolow, AIA, head of the sustainability initiative at Lord, Aeck &... 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

Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and fluorinated ethylene propylene (FEP) dominate the plenum-rated electrical and data cable market (see

EBN

Vol. 13, No. 3), but a newcomer from GE Plastics could offer an intriguing alternative. In December 2005, Underwriters Laboratories, Inc. (UL) listed GE’s Flexible Noryl® resin for wire coating... Read more

Innovative Design, Inc., of Raleigh, North Carolina, was recognized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for “Excellence in Energy Efficiency.” The company was honored in March 2006 as the first architecture firm to receive recognition for energy-efficient design. The recognition was based on Innovative Design’s participation in... Read more

At its May 2006 board meeting in New Orleans, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) board of directors endorsed a series of recommendations for modifying the two credits in the LEED® Rating System that relate to biobased materials. (Full disclosure: I was asked by USGBC to lead this effort, and I wrote the recommendations.) As described... Read more

Arizona Public Service Company (APS) has announced the opening of the state’s first solar-thermal power plant, and the first built in the nation in 17 years. Built by Solargenix Energy, LLC, of Raleigh, North Carolina, the plant features over 100,000 ft2 (9,000 m2) of parabolic-trough mirrors—looking like several rows of mirrored half-pipe—that... Read more

A water conservation bill currently moving through the California Legislature would set the maximum water consumption for toilets at 1.3 gallons per flush (gpf; 4.9 lpf). The legislation, Assembly Bill 2496, was authored by John Laird (D–Santa Cruz) and passed the State Assembly on May 15, 2006. If approved by the Senate and signed into law,... Read more