Championing the
Changemakers

April 1, 2016

Presidential hopeful Senator Bernie Sanders (I–Vermont) is amping up his message on energy and climate change in what may be a last-ditch effort to win over voters in remaining primary states, including Wisconsin, New York, and Pennsylvania.

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

You and your boss don’t really collaborate. Neither do you and your employee, or you and your supplier.

You might work collaboratively, but ultimately one of you has power and authority over the other. Real, substantive collaboration—getting people to cooperate without power and authority—takes a lot of work, and so you only want to... Read more

Why live in Phoenix over Miami, even if it’s a bit hotter? As any retiree will tell you, it could be 90°F in Florida and 99°F in Arizona, and Phoenix with its dry air would still feel more comfortable.

The metric standard effective temperature (SET) has long been used in ASHRAE Standard 55 for Thermal... Read more

The possible health risks associated with playing on artificial turf with crumb-rubber infill are getting a lot of media attention. Just last month, three federal agencies in the U.S. agreed to identify and fill research gaps about the controversial material, which is made primarily from used car tires. Their work could be... Read more

Updated May 27, 2025; updates by Elene Drosos

Hurricanes, tsunamis, wildfires, and other disasters have drawn attention to resilient design mostly by showing us what not to do in the built environment. We’ve come a long way in a short time, and today we’re on the cusp of having metrics and rating... Read more

In our series of articles beginning with A Guide to Selecting Sustainable Textiles, we detailed some of the obstacles to finding an environmentally responsible contract textile. For one thing, upholstery, draperies, panel fabrics, and other textiles can be made from many different natural and synthetic fiber types, and... Read more

It’s becoming clearer that we need to address energy, water, land use, environmental justice, and other green building issues within whole communities. Meanwhile, most of the work still happens one building at a time. We need to jump scales—at scale—but how?

The EcoDistricts Protocol, currently in draft... Read more

Kirsten Childs, ASID, died on January 13, 2016, outside Philadelphia following a three-year battle with cancer. In her role as an interior designer, Childs was an early leader in the green building movement and one of the first to advocate for the idea that green also means healthy. She was a pioneer in the development of... Read more

Teflon flu: that’s the name workers at a DuPont plant in West Virginia gave to the vomiting, fevers, and other symptoms they had when exposed to high levels of PFOA, a variety of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS) made at the factory. As explained in January 2016 by Nathaniel Rich in the New York Times, public discovery... Read more

Rubber flooring has attractive sustainability features, yet the chemistry of rubber manufacturing can be problematic. We took a hard look at the rubber flooring industry and found two manufacturers whose products stand out as the greenest in this tricky category.

... Read more

The global textile industry has a poor environmental record.

For years we advocated for alternatives to formaldehyde-based binders in fiberglass insulation. Then in 2008, Knauf made a huge breakthrough, unveiling its EcoBatt fiberglass insulation with Ecose biobased binder. This was clearly the beginning of the end for formaldehyde binders.

But we couldn’t fully... Read more

The media exploded last year with panic about the use of crumb rubber as infill in artificial turf fields, which are coming under renewed scrutiny due to hints of a link (as yet anecdotal) between these fields and incidents of cancer among young soccer goalies. Few reports have mentioned, though, that this very same material is... Read more

With all the different fibers, chemicals, dyes, and coatings used for textiles coming from all over the world, assessing the sustainability of a textile is nearly impossible for most designers.

Many turn to certifications to simplify the decision process, but which ones should you trust? There are standards that look at... Read more

A textile is only sustainable if it lasts, and designers looking to prolong the life of their furniture or drapery—whether to save the environment or simply to prevent callbacks—typically turn to surface treatments. This alchemy of chemical coatings promises to repel stains, stop fire, and prevent the spread of disease. It sounds too good to be... Read more

Textiles can make a space what it is. Through a carefully chosen combination of texture, color, and pattern, they create a feel of opulence, coziness, or no-nonsense practicality. They can encourage a spirit of play and creativity or one of contemplative silence. Found as woven or non-woven fabrics,... Read more

Conventional wisdom has had us focusing on volatile organic compounds (VOCs) as a top priority for indoor air quality. Designers who know about them at all probably consider semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs) and non-volatile compounds as lower priorities.

That’s because VOCs can instantly vaporize... Read more

Green building and green chemistry sound like a natural fit, but until recently the two concepts didn’t have much interaction, at least explicitly. That’s changed with the introduction of green chemistry into the LEED v4 rating systems (see USGBC, Chemical Industry Reach Historic Compromise on Product Optimization). But how... Read more