News

Older buildings—especially those from the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s—need our help. Many leave something to be desired in terms of aesthetics and comfort. But the truth is that they are part of the urban and suburban fabric now, and they aren’t going anywhere. As tempting as it might seem to tear them all down and replace them with... Read more

Ground glass can be a low-global-warming-potential replacement for Portland cement, but using it on a project has been difficult because there has been no standard way to specify the material. ASTM has published ASTM C1866, Standard Specification for Recycled Ground-Glass Pozzolan for Use in Concrete. ASTM C1866 will make it... Read more

As planet temperatures continue to rise, reducing carbon emissions from fossil fuel consumption is now our biggest challenge. Photovoltaic (PV) energy is often held up as our future.

Though PV already has a long history of solid performance, articles claiming PV is actually a net producer of carbon have been circulating for years. Other... Read more

Lactation rooms, circadian lighting, nutritious food, and inviting stairways: through Fitwel and WELL, these have become more common ways to promote wellness through building design and operations. But what do these certifications have to say about illness? And specifically, about stopping the spread of COVID-19?

What weather data are you using to inform design? Learn where to access high-resolution climate projection data for your projects, and how to use it. Be an early adopter as the AEC industry moves from considering weather as static to using information about our changing climate to inform design.

The American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment (COTE) has announced its Top Ten projects for 2020. If one theme shows through, it’s the almost universal embrace of natural daylight and plantings, along with commonalities like exposed wood and indoor/outdoor spaces.

Two awards went... Read more

COVID-19 self-isolation has drastically changed our behavior. We don masks and rubber gloves if we have to go outside and then wash hands incessantly when we get back … behaviors that would have seemed absurd just a few months ago. The precautions are well founded as we look for ways to “flatten the curve” and get a handle on... Read more

The hole in the ozone layer is closing—but not as quickly as it should, according to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In fact, buildings with older foam insulation, HVAC systems, and refrigeration equipment could delay healing by six years. The escaping CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) are blowing... Read more

The Canada Green Building Council (CaGBC) was the first to launch a national standard for carbon neutrality in buildings. Now version 2 has been released with changes that include multiple compliance paths for energy efficiency, a requirement to offset fugitive refrigerant emissions and embodied carbon, and a higher bar for carbon offsets. The... Read more

Just as COVID-19 has changed nearly every aspect of day-to-day life, the virus is upending deeply rooted patterns of the electric grid. Combined with initial signs of cleaner air, emboldened wildlife, and growing demand for local agriculture, some have wondered whether being confined to our homes has resulted in lower... Read more

Want to lower the carbon footprint of a mass-timber structural system? Consider the species of the lumber and where it’s coming from.

That’s one of the central conclusions of a life-cycle assessment (LCA) recently published in the journal Sustainability and summarized in a report by Katerra.... Read more

In a recent report, The United Church of Christ, a denomination of Protestant Christianity, shames 100 U.S. manufacturing facilities with highly toxic air pollution records, calling it a “moral crisis” that more than 112,500 children under the age of five live within three miles of the facilities’ perimeters. 

The Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) has released the white paper “Germicidal Ultraviolet (GUV)–Frequently Asked Questions.” The report is aimed at healthcare applications, addressing the fundamentals of GUV light, its effectiveness, its safety, and more in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic.

... Read more

Fifty years ago, I was the Earth Day Coordinator at Radnor Junior High School in Wayne, Pennsylvania. At age 14, I was a budding conservationist (we weren’t really using the term “environmentalist” yet), and I remember taking the train into Philadelphia to pick up mimeographed flyers about Earth Day to hand out in our school... Read more

In a time of an unrelenting onslaught of devastating news from the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s hard to imagine that we will get to the other side of this mounting humanitarian and economic catastrophe. And it’s even harder to imagine that there could be good news that will emerge from it. But there may be some silver linings in... Read more

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has rescinded the leak-repair provisions that were put in place in 2016 by the Obama administration as part of Section 608 of the Clean Air Act. Section 608 regulates the use of high-ozone-depletion-potential (ODP) refrigerants in HVAC and refrigeration equipment. The Obama administration amended... Read more

Ten microgrid systems installed in schools in Puerto Rico were put to the test recently after a 6.4 magnitude earthquake caused massive power outages. The systems survived and successfully powered critical loads in each school, according to Rocky Mountain Institute, which championed the installations along with Save the Children and the Kinesis... Read more

Making material and design choices that minimize a building’s embodied carbon upfront is vital. But a new standard from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) reminds us that we can also reduce embodied impacts by extending the useful life of what we plan to build.

ISO 20887: 2020, Sustainability in Buildings and Civil... Read more

Interest in the embodied carbon of buildings—the upfront carbon emissions associated with production of building materials—has seen a major spike in the last couple of years, which has led to increased interest in whole-building life-cycle assessment, or WBLCA. WBLCA measures the environmental impacts, including global warming impacts, of a... Read more

Remember 2013? LEED version 4 had just been released to the public. Hardly anyone was using it, though—not only because they didn’t have to, but also because there just wasn’t a pathway to achieve many of the new credits in the rating systems. Especially the product-related credits in the Materials & Resources category, along with the Low-... Read more