Both houses of the Connecticut legislature and Governor M. Jodi Rell have approved a bill expanding the state’s ban on pesticide use on school grounds and playing fields. A similar bill, passed in 2005, prohibited the use of pesticides on public and private elementary school grounds starting in 2006, but gave schools until July 2008 to... Read more

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The International Code Council (ICC) and the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) have agreed to create a green building educational manual for code... Read more

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Buildings with large expanses of glazing can suffer dramatic cooling energy requirements and create glare problems for occupants. Façade shading systems... Read more

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Underfloor air distribution (UFAD) is an approach to ventilation in commercial and institutional buildings in which conditioned air is distributed... Read more

In passing the 1996 Food Quality Protection Act, Congress required the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to test pesticides for disruption of the human endocrine system, which produces and regulates hormones. After years of delays, EPA announced in June 2007 that it would test 73 pesticides that people commonly encounter in homes and... Read more

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Recycling old carpet into new is a major focus of the carpet industry, but most post-consumer recycled carpet currently enters new carpet through carpet... Read more

On May 4, 2007, the U.S. Green Building Council expanded a previous ruling regarding Cradle to Cradle (C2C) certification (see

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Vol. 16, No. 5) by endorsing a LEED innovation point proposal from two related certification programs: the SMART Building Product Standard and the California Gold Carpet Standard. As with C2C, these... Read more

The term "volatile organic compound" (VOC) means different things to different people. In high school or college chemistry class we learned that VOCs are a class of carbon-based compounds that readily become volatile (gaseous) under ordinary (atmospheric) conditions. Thus, we learned that VOCs are any of those carbon-based compounds that smell... Read more

One can hardly pick up a magazine or turn on the television today without hearing something about climate change. The issue finally appears to be gaining traction in our nation’s collective consciousness. Much of the focus of reducing greenhouse gas emissions rightly centers on how we design and construct buildings. Indeed, the 2030... Read more

The California Energy Commission (CEC) filed suit against the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in April 2007 to require DOE to uphold California’s washing machine efficiency standards. In December 2006, DOE denied the State’s 2005 request for a waiver from federal washing machine standards; the waiver would have allowed California to enact... Read more

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The American Institute of Architects, American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers, Architecture 2030, Illuminating Engineering Society of North America, and U.S. Green Building Council have reached an agreement setting a baseline for the goals of the 2030 Challenge, which calls for an immediate 50% reduction in... Read more

Despite the increasing popularity of green building, research on high-performance building practices and technologies represents a tiny percentage of federally funded research. According to a report released in March 2007 by the Research Committee of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), only 0.2% of federally funded research, an average of... Read more

The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) has released the first public comment draft of its “Proposed Standard 189, Standard for the Design of High-Performance Green Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings.” This standard, being developed in conjunction with the Illuminating Engineering... Read more

New European Union (EU) regulations of harmful chemicals have been toned down and made law. The final version of the Registration, Evaluation, and Authorization of Chemicals (REACH) bill requires that persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic (PBT), and very persistent, very bioaccumulative (vPvB) chemicals manufactured in or imported into the EU... Read more

Following a successful nine-month pilot program, a mercury-thermostat recycling program is being rolled out nationwide. Created by the independent nonprofit Product Stewardship Institute and the industry-owned nonprofit Thermostat Recycling Corporation, the program works with municipal hazardous waste collection programs to collect thermostats... Read more