Championing the
Changemakers

As promised at the SDL Summer Summet: Hennepin County Energy & Environment's new Project Manager’s Guide to Material Reuse in Commercial Buildings, with specification language, guidance for procurement, and case studies of successful reuse projects around the country. This resource is meant to help owners, architects, and contractors... Read more

Hello Sustainable Design Leaders!

Here are the details for an upcoming SDL Peer Network web call, this webinar will be a call to share research and resources around mass timber. Hope to see you there!
REGISTER HERE!

Embodied Carbon and Mass Timber – a shared learning conversation
March 31st, 2020
3pm - 4pm ET (... Read more

Dear SD Leaders: The comment period closes January 31st on  NCA Volume II Climate Change Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States.

It's important to have the design communities perspective on these critical issues. I hope you can take a look and submit your comments before the deadline.

Details here: https://www.... Read more

Description: The places we live in can be enough to offer refuge to native plants and animals. We just have to be able to reintegrate the right native plant species, hosts to many declining insect and animal species, to an area once filled with them. This feature explores how we can build native gardens at various scales to protect and help... Read more

Hello all,

This month's SCDL call was full of great discussion! We decided this month that we are feeling good about where we are for the Task Force Agreement on defining social sustainabiltiy in our work. The aim is to work with this agreement for a while and see if it holds up as a process framework. There was also interest to invite... Read more

All,

I recently met Sahil Tadwalkar who is a Stanford MS Candidate in Civil Engineering. He and his group are interviewing design and construction industry professionals to understand issues and challenges around specifying and using low carbon solutions on projects. Interesting stuff! I encourage you to contribute by setting up an... Read more

Hi, folks! 

I was recently asked if BuildingGreen could connect prospective speakers to an event organizer in Chicago. Beyond the leaders in the BuildingGreen networks relayed, I wanted to share that the exercise led me to the Women and Climate speaker database: https://www.womenandclimate.co/speaker-database 

When filtering by... Read more

The Sages network is specifically for industry veterans and long-time Peer Network members, including those who are still active with one of the other networks and those who have moved on from that role. This group can help set priorities, drive advocacy, and... Read more

We have an MEP engineer that is calculating peak loads at about 6 times passive house levels on a large commercial building that is at or near passive house levels of insulation and air infiltration. We suspect one reason is that he is figuring a 50% efficiency level for the ERV. We are showing him ERV systems with 80-90% efficiency, but they... Read more

Hi Everyone - I hope this isn't a repeat topic. We are starting to get familiar with TallyCAT at SAR+ and have a few people testing our projects in it. Is anyone willing to help us troubleshoot or share lessons learned? We're running into a few errors and wonder if our Revit models and workflow are the issue, or if we need to be doing something... Read more

Jason F. McLennan

Hi Everyone - I'm posting this on behalf of Jeff Frost whom many of you know from his days as an SD Leader with SmithGroup and SERA and in his new role as head of Brightworks Sustainability's materials group.  I am excited to be working with Jeff on this concept of multi-attribute product scoring.  Cheers, Lona

Dear SDL’ers,

We’ve... Read more

Friends,

As some of you know, I joined Perkins Eastman last year and it has been amazing. After years of being the Sustainable Design Leader at my last firm, this move has meant I can concentrate on project work because we have such an AMAZING team, led by Heather Jaurequi and Tanya Eagle. Unfortunately, that also means I'm not in the... Read more

All,

I've probably spoken to a few of you over the phone, but I wanted to make sure all of you know that we are hosting a 4 part webinar series on our Tally LCA software, kicking off tomorrow 10/10. We just released the new of Tally version and ended up doing far more development work than initially anticipated, in no small part due to... Read more

I received this email from Cathy Higgins at NBI, and thought some of you may know the right folks who might be interested:
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Hi colleagues,

You are exactly the folks that might know a high-caliber person to join NBI’s team. We are looking for someone ideally based in California but could be elsewhere with... Read more

Hi Carbon Working Group,

It’s been a while since our last online meeting on 3/31 –- admittedly, a bit too long -- so I wanted to share some updates.  You might have seen Candice Pearson’s 5/13 post about the structure of the Contractor’s Commitment and how it’s evolving into a set of guidelines available not only to our SCL Group but to... Read more

Welcome to the quiz portion of The BuildingGreen Guide to Insulation!

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


1. Discuss how insulation works to increase the energy efficiency and environmental sustainability of buildings; 
2. Explain why certain materials make more sense than... Read more