Championing the
Changemakers

Many new buildings—including, presumably, many LEED buildings—contain illegally harvested wood. LEED has no requirement for project teams to vet non-certified timber sources when specifying wood products.

A new alternative compliance path (ACP), now available throughout the LEED rating systems as a... Read more

The Steel Recycling Institute has released the first industry-wide environmental product declaration (EPD) for U.S and Canadian structural steel building products. The EPD is for Cold-Formed Steel Studs and Track, also known as light steel framing or light-gauge steel framing. This EPD will allow individual companies to compare... Read more

Reducing carbon emissions has become an overarching motivation for us on the home front. My wife, Jerelyn, and I have now been through almost two complete winters in our largely rebuilt, early 1800s home in Dummerston, Vermont. There are some things we would have done differently with the house, but we are totally happy with... Read more

Behind every tightfisted developer is a frugal investor—and this show-me-the-money crowd wants hard evidence that measures like improving indoor air quality and adding biophilic design elements add value to real estate investments. Luckily, there’s now a new tool to capture information about steps that property companies have... Read more

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) Committee on the Environment (COTE) has been issuing Top Ten Awards for nearly 20 years now, and its winners now number 189. The award is meant to shine a light on each project individually as a model and case study for sustainable design. COTE has discovered, however, that grouped and... Read more

When we first started writing about insulation products here at BuildingGreen, the big environmental concern was the ozone-depletion potential of the chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) blowing agents in polyisocyanurate, spray polyurethane foam, and extruded polystyrene. Those products were pretty bad, and we can celebrate dramatic... Read more

The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) Innovation Center is going to be one for the record books.

Naturally ventilated and with a minimal mechanical system, this 15,600 ft2 commercial office in Basalt, Colorado, was tracking a miniscule energy use intensity (EUI) of 17.2 kBtu/ft2 during the harsh winter months after its... Read more

Most building professionals are painfully aware of how devastating climate change already is, and how catastrophic it will rapidly become if we fail to zero out our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the next two decades. But possibly irreversible changes are also occurring in the world’s oceans as a result of acidification—a... Read more

You can hardly open a browser or newspaper without reading a horrific headline about climate change today. Many of us are despondent about that, but also sick and tired of hearing that buildings are independently responsible for 40% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally. Not including transportation to and from buildings.... Read more

“There’s no magic formula.”

The words seem to come easily to Carl Spector, commissioner of the environment for the City of Boston. “Everyone understands what we need to do,” he elaborates. “We need to make buildings—both new and existing—more efficient. And we need to start changing our sources of energy.”

TimberSIL is the nontoxic future of treated wood. We can’t get TimberSIL. We’re getting TimberSIL! TimberSIL doesn’t work. TimberSIL is bankrupt. TimberSIL is coming back?

TimberSIL, introduced in 2004, uses sodium silicate to protect wood fibers from... Read more

Ed Mazria, FAIA, issued his 2030 Challenge in 2006 through his organization, Architecture 2030. The goal: design all new construction and major renovation projects for net-zero energy by the year 2030.

Ten years later, we’re making progress, but that goal is far from assured. In fact, just a small fraction of committed... Read more

“Existing” buildings? As opposed to what?

The design and construction industry has a funny way of drawing a thick, dark line between new and existing buildings. By definition, though, every building starts existing as soon as it’s built. That thick, dark line is more often a fuzzy gray area where all sorts of vital... Read more

The Paris climate accord set a new target for global temperature rise: to keep global temperatures from rising above 2°C and thus avoid catastrophic, irreversible climate change. The countries of the world came together and set a more aggressive goal of 1.5°C temperature rise. To meet that goal, emissions need to peak by... Read more

Whether it’s The Motorcycle Diaries to The Muppet Movie, everyone knows that when you’re on a road trip, arriving at your destination is secondary. Road trips are mostly about building relationships and radically rethinking how you live your life.

Replace “road trips” with “climate change goals,” and you’ll get a sense... Read more

April 1, 2016

BuildingGreen has announced a line of Rhino and Revit plug-ins to encourage sustainable design. The software tools are available for download after the conclusion of beta testing on April 1, 2016.

Want to add resilience to your... Read more

April 1, 2016

Building on the pioneering work of Perkins+Will’s Precautionary List, Cradle to Cradle’s Banned List, and the Living Building Challenge’s Red List, BuildingGreen has finally released its definitive Full Circle Fuchsia List to help assess potentially hazardous... Read more

April 1, 2016

With project teams paying more attention to the ingredients of building materials through the use of Health Product Declarations (HPDs), some have reported surprise and even shock at the contents—like the presence of carcinogens, reproductive toxicants, and... Read more

First it delayed mandatory registration under LEED version 4 (LEED v4). Now the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has announced a new program that should further appease concerns about what some have called the “excessive rigor” of the new rating system. The program, which effectively adds a fifth level of certification below... Read more

When I first heard about resilient design, I thought, “Now here’s something I can get behind.” I can’t go into a building anymore without noticing about a hundred different vulnerabilities, so I was glad to hear people were finally talking about this stuff.

But then I started reading their standards and... Read more