Awards & Competitions

Entries are due by March 15 for this year’s

Northeast Green Building Awards, a competition sponsored by the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust and organized by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA). Prizes will be awarded in four categories for built projects in the Northeast, and for built or... Read more

edited by Bonnie Harper-Lore and Maggie Wilson. Island Press, Washington, DC, 2000. Softcover, 665 pages, $25

Roadside Use of Native Plants may sound somewhat obscure, but it's a gem. Originally published by the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration, this book is targeted toward people involved with... Read more

Product Briefs

Glass manufacturer

Pilkington was awarded the 2000 Crystal Achievement Award for the Most Innovative Glazing Component by

Window & Door Magazine for the newly launched Solar E™ sun-control low-e glass. Like the company’s Energy Advantage™ glass, introduced in 1989, Solar E has a durable hard-coat (pyrolytic)... Read more

Termi-Mesh

, reviewed in the September issue of

EBN (Vol. 9, No. 9) is now available in Austin, Texas. For information, contact Manny Martinez at Termi-Mesh, LLC, a joint venture company formed per the marriage between Termi-Mesh Australia and ABC Pest & Lawn Services of Austin (512/997-0066).

The Chicago architecture firm

Solomon Cordwell Buenz & Associates won a recent competition to design a large “sun wall” for the south-facing rear wall of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Washington headquarters. The winning design, if built, will span two-thirds of an acre (0.27 ha) (see rendering below) and generate enough electricity to... Read more

The Brookings Institute reported in August that 18 acres (7.3 ha) of open fields or woodland in North Carolina are

being developed every hour. Most of this development is occurring around the state’s seven largest metropolitan areas.

A big water controversy is bubbling up in the community of Sandy Valley, Nevada, where the La Jolla, California-based Vidler Water Company hopes to

extract 600 million gallons (2.3 million m3) of water per year. The water would be pumped 600 miles (965 km) and across a mountain range to a cluster of condominiums near the California-... Read more

Video by Jim Hamm Productions with the National Film Board of Canada, 1999 (U.S. release: 2000). Narrated by David Suzuki. Distributed by Bullfrog Films, Inc., 610/779-8226, 800/543-3764;

www.bullfrogfilms.com. 46 minutes, $75 to rent, $250 to buy

Turning Down the Heat is a super introduction to the field of renewable energy as a... Read more

Newsbriefs

An unusual collaboration among British Columbian forest products companies and environmental groups will examine

conservation-based ecosystem management of temperate rainforests. Four of the largest timber companies in BC (Canadian Forest Products, Fletcher Challenge Canada, Western Forest Products, and Weyerhaeuser) will... Read more

New York’s First Green Residential High-Rise at Battery Park City

A residential tower now being designed for the southern tip of Manhattan will be the first to implement a comprehensive set of green guidelines established for such projects by the Battery Park City Authority (BPCA). To create the building, a team led by Albanese Development... Read more

Newsbriefs

For the first time ever,

a hole in the stratospheric ozone layer opened up over a populated area. During two days in early September the South Pole ozone hole extended over the Chilean city of Punta Arenas, a city of 120,000 people. Residents were exposed to very high levels of ultraviolet radiation, significantly increasing... Read more

Certified Hardwoods from Anderson-Tully

Back in July 1993 we wrote about the commendable forest management practices of Anderson-Tully Company (ATCO), a large privately owned producer of hardwood lumber from forests in the lower Mississippi Valley (see

EBN

Vol. 2, No. 4). In October 2000 the company completed a six-month-long... Read more

The Worldwatch Institute Board of Directors has named

Christopher Flavin as the second president of the Institute. Flavin replaces Lester Brown, who wants to cut back on his level of activity but will remain Chairman of the environmental research and policy institute he founded in 1974. Flavin has been with Worldwatch since 1978 and is... Read more

Using a computer program that simulates North American weather on an hour-by-hour basis plus detailed information on

dioxin releases from 40,000 sources, scientists at Queens University in New York City have pinpointed specific sources of dioxin reaching the Arctic. They found that just 35 municipal waste incinerators, cement kilns, and... Read more

Imagine a building product coming from a raw material that is naturally occurring, abundant, healthy, noncombustible, and that can readily be dehydrated and rehydrated to become a hard, durable, paintable surface. Then imagine that after four thousand years of use worldwide with little change—and with plenty of examples of applications still in... Read more

Capstone Turbine

(see

EBN

Vol. 9, No. 10) announced in September that it had received two orders for a total of 350 microturbines. One order will provide 250 microturbines to Hazra Energy LLC, a new energy services company that will focus on power systems and distributed generation. The other order, from the Hanover Company, is... Read more

by Rick Karg and John Krigger, 2000. Limited number of hard copies available through the Consortium for Energy Efficiency, Boston, Massachusetts.

Free download at

www.CEEforMT.org. Spiral-bound soft-cover, 62 pages plus supplement

As more efficient HVAC equipment has been developed, quality installation and maintenance have... Read more

In early August, the Rockville City Council in Maryland voted to

ban “big-box” retail stores. Two existing stores are grandfathered, but a proposed 128,000-square-foot (11,900 m2) Costco store has been rejected.

by J. William Thompson and Kim Sorvig. Island Press, Washington, DC, 2000. Paperback, 350 pages, $45.

Those of us who have been promoting a stronger “sustainability agenda” within the landscape architecture profession have been anxiously awaiting this book.

Sustainable Landscape Construction provides, in one place, a thorough reference... Read more

The

Collins Pine Company, based in Chester, California, has just harvested the two billionth board foot (4.7 million m3) of timber from its 94,000-acre (38,000 ha) Collins Almanor Forest. Harvesting activities in their northern Sierra forest began in 1941 when the company had approximately 1.5 billion board feet (3.5 million m3) of standing... Read more