Championing the
Changemakers

Posted live from Greenbuild. I mentioned Armstrong Ceiling Systems' booth earlier, and the fact that they don't use any wood that's not FSC, and that they don't have any added formaldehyde in any of their products. I didn't mention that all their ceiling tiles are Class A fire rated, because it started to feel I was cheerleading. There's one... Read more

Posted live from Greenbuild. This morning we had our annual breakfast at Greenbuild with invited participants from the top green firms in the industry — taking their pulse, getting their take. Architects were in force, but engineers and builders were also represented. Much of the discussion revolved around the 2030 Challenge — who has signed... Read more

Posted from Greenbuild '08. A month ago, EBN was the first to report the news that the ASHRAE Standard 189-P committee, which has been developing the nation's first code-level national green building standard for commercial buildings, had been unexpectedly disbanded by ASHRAE. At a special Greenbuild update today, Mark MacCracken, a USGBC... Read more

Posted live from Greenbuild. This has been long in coming, and judging by the response of the audience this afternoon, I'm not the only one who thinks so. Yes, I work for the guy, but I'm no sycophant. He's one of the most focused, dedicated, knowledgeable people I've ever known. A press release sent out from the USGBC today said this: Executive... Read more

7/1/09 Update: If you're looking to keep up to date on LEED 2009, I recommend checking out our own LEEDuser.com, which was recently launched Posted from Greenbuild '08. Update posted 11/24/08, below: Do existing LEED APs need to retake the exam? If you thought the proliferation of various different types of LEED rating systems was confusing,... Read more

Posted live from Greenbuild. Here's another little scoop for you. The press conference announcing this doesn't start for another 15 minutes... but since I'm the co-editor of GreenSpec, I'm going to take this liberty. BOSTON, MA, November 20, 2008 — BuildingGreen, LLC, publisher of the GreenSpec® Directory and Environmental Building News™, today... Read more

Posted live from Greenbuild. There are a couple booths that warrant special mention. This year, the Armstrong Ceiling Systems booth is a metal greenhouse frame (below banners reading "Come see what's growing") that, after the show, will be donated to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Nice. Most of the companies at these trade shows,... Read more

Posted live from Greenbuild. Rock-filled channels between parking rows drain to a large detention area beside the lot.

In the background, rental cranes dance in the sky.

Posted live from Greenbuild. At the Selux booth, I'm told that these will be introduced to the market shortly, intended for grid intertie. Their standalone PV area lighting has been on the market for some time.

Posted live from Greenbuild. Stream it if you aren't here. (You'll have to set up a username and password.) About ten minutes before show time, the room (seriously, they tell me there's seating for 10,000) was about a quarter full, but people were pouring in. Ten minutes after start time, they still are. No biggie — if history is an indication,... Read more

Posted live from Greenbuild. Vortex Fine Filters by Wisy, offered in the U.S. by Rainwater Management Solutions, passively filter debris in rainwater collected from drains and downspouts. An offset input on the top of the unit spins draining water around a self-cleaning stainless steel mesh filter; 90-something percent of the water is filtered... Read more

Posted live from Greenbuild. Yesterday, the president of Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES), Don McLean, stopped by our booth at Greenbuild to run through the features of his company's Virtual Environment energy and carbon footprint simulation tool for SketchUp and Revit. The new version of the software already works with the new features... Read more

Posted live from Greenbuild. A shot of the trade show floor. Click for bigger. Scuttlebutt is that total registrations are expected to be on the order of 30,000.

We humans number about 6.5 billion. How many trees are there? NASA has been taking satellite pictures of the Earth's forests for years and sharing them with ecologists who have figured out an algorithm for calculating worldwide tree totals based on patterns of sunlight. The result of that research is a worldwide tree census, as of 2005, of 400,... Read more

Posted live from Greenbuild. Our BuildingGreen after-party starts in about a half-hour, and I'm the designated greeter/bouncer; about 300 people are expected. (It was decided to have our after-party on the first night, which I think was a darned good idea.) So probably no more posts from here tonight (from me anyway) unless I find some active... Read more

Posted live from Greenbuild. We're fans of TimberSIL. We're such big fans that we named it a Top-10 product in 2004. And now, despite efforts by the chemically treated wood industry to have it classified as a pesticide (as well as a nearly disastrous situation with a licensee a while ago), they've received some news that should turn the tide. It... Read more

Last Friday a few of us gathered around a phone behind the closed doors of one of the conference rooms here at BuildingGreen and had a chat with John Bacus from Google's team of SketchUp developers, and Aaron Stein, one of their PR folks. The supersecret talk was about the next release of that program — SketchUp 7 — which within the last couple... Read more

In honor of itself (hmm... was really the best way for me to kick off this post?), the USGBC has done a kind of a cool thing. A letter released to its membership says, ... when we reflected on how best we could mark our anniversary as a community of leaders called the U.S. Green Building Council, we decided that the story was best told in your... Read more

Hey, you Twitterers (there must be a few of you out there)... in addition to posting here, we'll be microblogging from Greenbuild. You don't need an account to follow along. Additionally, there's a #greenbuild hash that people are already using — you can follow everyone's Greenbuild Tweets here.