Products & Materials Specialist Brent Ehrlich excels at deep, unbiased, and nuanced technical research on the health and environmental impacts of green building products and materials. Some areas of focus include:

product and material constituents, including their risks

product certifications

third-party product... Read more

Reaching out to the collective knowledge here.  With interest in circular economy and building reuse growing, is anyone leading the charge for the concept of building reuse as a tool for maintaining community identity?  Has anyone seen successful projects with this concept in mind?  I was just in a discussion with a bunch of SDLers, and while... Read more

What sorts of boilerplate and legalese will we need on the BIT User site? For example:

I'm not saying you need any or all of those, but I'm just giving a heads-up in case you need to check with your legal advisor.

I can link to those documents from the site footer.

Our Green Team is holding a Biophilic Design workshop on Earth Day with our own staff for biophilic interventions within our office space. We are referencing the Biophilic Design Guidebook from LBC but it will be a shorter time frame, about 1.5 hours total. Last summer we introduced biophilia to the office through the exercise where each person... Read more

Happy Friday Everyone!

Hoping to add a bit of excitement to the end of your week: 

Here is the Sustainable Design Leaders 2020 Summer Summit Report. 

Enjoy!

RoseAnn for Nadav, Candace, and the BuildingGreen team

Hi gang,

Following up on the recent Air Quality Design Jam at the summit, I’d like to round up the folks interested in supporting an Air Quality Working Group.

Didn’t attend the summit? No worries – everyone is welcome! We had a good group the other week and several of us want to continue the conversation.

The design jam... Read more

Sustainability leadership has requested that you take this quiz to help assess sustainability literacy across the firm. Your own results will be presented to you at the end of the quiz but will not be shared with anyone else. Only aggregated, anonymized results will be available to others.

Please don’t do research to inform your answers... Read more

Hello All,

A group of us (three architects and a builder- sounds like there should be a joke here) were debating this and we  are stumped.

Application: Residential exterior trim.

50 year warrantied composite product of agricultural byproduct with PVC (EPD not published yet) vs 100 year (if primed on all sides and painted or... Read more

BITuser Meeting:  5/23/18

Participants:  Shane, Andrea, Angela

Notes:

Southface to provide "style tiles" before 6/15 
Greg to send to Andrea, couple dozen images for Best Practice pages
Southface will send, in week to 10 days, "full content" for BP03 - Energy Audit 
(BP03 "full content" will address... Read more

Hey there hive mind,

Anyone have any CxAs in the Bay Area that they'd particularly recommend? I have a project in need.

Aley

I'm looking to draft some one-page briefs for my consulting engineers to outline what we would like to see in their specs regarding certain materials and systems. For example, letting the plumbing and civil engineers know that we prefer to eliminate PVC pipe and want them to specify alternatives like Polypropylene, cast iron, ABS, etc. The idea... Read more

This might be going down a rabbit hole, but in moving to California this year I noticed that "zero net energy" (ZNE) is the standard term, whereas "net zero energy" (NZE) was more common back east. The DOE's 2015 definition (below) uses "zero energy building" (ZEB), which to me implies a building uses no energy at all.

Regional... Read more

Welcome to the quiz portion of Can Concrete Save Us? Locking Up Carbon in Building Materials

Learning Objectives
Upon completing this course, participants will be able to:


1. Explain current strategies of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).
2. Detail how concrete offers another possible pathway to... Read more

Hi all,

We are about to start a affordable housing passive house project in Boston and in a few presentations I've seen great signs that builders use to try to get the point across to subs as to how important air sealing is. Some are even quite funny! The builder we are working with does not have a sign like this, but is open to ideas.... Read more

Hey there, SMEPLs:

Just a reminder that we are on the menu for the next in the Green Gurus Coffee Talk series. 

Please use this link to register

All the SMEPLs are invited to join in the conversation where we talk about things that rumble, squeal, gurgle and spark to our peers in the Design, Construction and Advisory peer... Read more

Hi All,

The National Architectural Accrediting Board is currently undergoing review and revision of its “Conditions for Accreditation and Procedures for Accreditation.”

I recently attended the 2019 Reynolds Symposium: Education by Design, hosted by the University of Oregon in Portland. At the Symposium, a group of 100... Read more

Hi SCL, 

Just thought I would share an interesting piece from Construction Dive about a lack of guidance on when to halt work due to bad air quality--from wildfires or otherwise. A few SCL companies are mentioned here as having their own policies, but I was pretty shocked to learn that this isn't required by OSHA. 

https://www.... Read more

It’s here! By popular demand we’re re-running the SDL Salary Survey that we last ran in 2015. 

This is for people who are currently in an SD Leader role at a firm. We’re sending this invitation out on both the Green Gurus and the SD Leaders forums, because some of you are still in transition and haven’t moved into the SD Leader forum yet... Read more