Leonardo Academy, Inc., has announced its intention to develop standards for quantifying and documenting emission inventories, offsets, and reduction credits. A nonprofit, the Leonardo Academy helps companies and organizations quantify their emissions footprints, calculate emission reductions from energy-efficiency projects, determine how to... Read more

The Building Research Establishment’s (BRE) EcoHomes environmental rating system for homes in Great Britain recently gave equal weight in its procurement guidelines to wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and by the Sustainable Forests Initiative (SFI). The move is making waves across the Atlantic because FSC, an international... Read more

Building owners or leaseholders can deduct the cost of energy-efficient property installed in commercial buildings, and recent guidance issued by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) describes what taxpayers need to do to qualify. Qualifying for the deduction, enacted in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, and currently set to expire at the end of... Read more

Exposure to air pollution before birth can cause developmental delay in children, according to a study performed by Columbia University’s Center for Children’s Environmental Health and published by

Environmental Health Perspectives in April 2006. The study measured the exposure of pregnant women living in the Washington Heights, Central... Read more

EBN

Vol. 11, No. 3). The mainstream, copper-based replacements for CCA corrode fasteners more rapidly than CCA, increasing the risk of... Read more

Ten years ago,

EBN reported on the growing popularity of low-emissivity (low-e) glazing, which allows visible light to enter buildings while reducing unwanted heat gain and heat loss. Introduced in the early 1980s, with the energy crisis still fresh in America’s mind, low-e glazing gained market share quickly, and by July 1996 the... Read more

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has added the following members to its Core Research Committee: Gail Brager, Ph.D., professor and associate director of the Center for the Built Environment at the University of California, Berkeley; Drury Crawley, AIA, technology development manager at the U.S. Department of Energy; John Fernandez, AIA,... Read more

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Vol.... Read more

A panel of the National Academies of Science (NAS) has concluded that low doses of dioxin might not be as carcinogenic as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) claimed in a 2003 draft risk assessment. When EPA first published an assessment of dioxin, in 1985, it labeled the chemical a “probable human carcinogen.” EPA upgraded the... Read more

Originally designed, manufactured, and marketed 20 years ago, the Mister Miser urinal (see

EBN

Vol. 6, No. 8) has been reintroduced. According to Rocco Corbino of Mister Miser, LLC, the product’s first incarnation—designed, manufactured, and marketed by his business partner’s father—was in some ways a victim of its own success... Read more

In June 2006, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors enacted the nation’s first ban on some products containing bisphenol-A (BPA), used to make the hard plastic polycarbonate as well as most epoxies. BPA, an endocrine disrupter, has been linked to a range of health effects—most recently prostate cancer (see

EBN

Vol. 15, No. 7).... Read more

E Source, a subscription-based information provider focusing on energy efficiency and utility demand-side management, has been purchased from the McGraw-Hill Companies by a group of E Source managers, including Michael Shepard, one of the original founders. E Source Companies, LLC, with about 45 employees, remains located in Boulder, Colorado.... Read more