Championing the
Changemakers

Last week I wrote about sunspaces and how they can be used to deliver passive solar heat to our homes. Another... Read more

All right, it's not a product. But the 2030 Challenge for Products, announced today by Ed Mazria's organization, Architecture 2030, BuildingGreen, and others, promises to make a lot of... Read more

The 2030 Challenge for Products aims to reduce the embodied carbon (meaning the carbon emissions equivalent) of building products 50% by 2030. According to the organization, 5%–8% of total energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. result from the manufacture and transport of building products and the construction of buildings... Read more

Way back in the late 1970s, I worked for the New Mexico Solar Energy Association in Santa Fe. I ran the Workshop Program, leading a crew of three or four like-mined idealists teaching mostly low-income New Mexicans about solar energy through hands-... Read more

A federal lawsuit filed in October 2010 against the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and other defendants, focusing on allegedly fraudulent claims of the LEED rating system, has been amended. Filed February 7th, 2011, the amended complaint has been boiled down to a claim of false advertising, and is no longer a class-action suit.... Read more

The USGBC recently hosted an “Introduction to LEED Rating System Weightings Process” webcast detailing... Read more

President Obama yesterday put forward a Better Buildings Initiative, an incentive program designed to stimulate spending on energy-efficient retrofits for commercial buildings. The initiative not only promotes efficiency but also aims to create jobs in the building and manufacturing industries hit hardest by the crash of the construction sector... Read more

Each year, Builder Magazine teams up with a homebuilder to roll out a cutting-edge "concept home" at the International Builders' Show. While last year's strictly virtual concept home was advertised as "the most innovative home never built," some critics think the 2011 "GreenHouse" might as well not have been built either.

The GreenHouse... Read more

Owens Corning, whose pink fiberglass insulation has been around for more than 70 years, whose shade of pink is trademarked, and whose Pink Panther has become almost synonymous with insulation... Read more

For the second time in five months, UL Environment, a division of Underwriters Laboratories (UL), has acquired a major brand in the green building products certification field. Today it announced its purchase of the Greenguard indoor air quality certifications and the two organizations behind them. The announcement follows UL Environment’s... Read more

I think it's safe to say that nobody likes to burn oil. Maybe it's the people I hang around with, but we go straight from talking about the cold weather we've been having to how much oil we've been... Read more

By Paula Melton

A new Biobased Product label could begin appearing in 2011 on certain building products formulated with plant or animal ingredients, such as carpeting containing corn-derived fiber and foam insulation integrating soy content.

The Biobased Product labeling program, developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture... Read more

3 photolysis)—a form of nitrogen oxide only present in darkness—normally breaks down damaging chemicals that create smog. Recent... Read more

The fight in the December 2010 lame-duck Congress over a massive tax bill got a lot of press coverage, almost all of it focused on tax cuts passed under President George W. Bush. But the bill, now signed into law, also included the Treasury Grant or “1603” program, which provides subsidies for building large and small wind projects, biomass... Read more

New data from Portland, Oregon, shows that cycling may improve traffic safety overall, not just for cyclists, and it suggests that drivers exercise more caution with more cyclists on the road. A New York City trend reinforces this finding, pointing to a correlation between increased bicycle use and a decline in bicycle accidents. Data from... Read more

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has released two preliminary reports, “Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) of Highway Pavements” and “Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) of Buildings.” Setting a new life-cycle assessment standard for buildings and pavements, the reports establish extended lifetimes for both: 50 years for pavements and 75 years... Read more

GE Capital Real Estate Survey, conducted during 2010, included more than 2,220 participants—office tenants from the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Sweden, the U.K., Spain, and Japan. Fifty percent of all... Read more

Nature Nanotechnology, found that nanoparticles introduced into a microbial food chain can biomagnify. The latest research, sparked by a previous study showing that nanoparticles can accumulate in certain bacteria, demonstrates how predators of those bacteria are affected by... Read more

EBN June 2005), so it has been a long wait for an affordable, widely available line of cabinetry built with formaldehyde-free plywood. With Armstrong’s rollout of its... Read more

The more activities that are accessible on foot, the happier a community’s residents are, according to the findings from a collection of 700 interviews from 20 New Hampshire neighborhoods. The study, recently published in the journal

Applied Research in Quality of Life, suggests that people living in walkable neighborhoods are often... Read more