News

By Dave Atkins and Sarah Larsen

Paula Melton’s article on The Urgency of Embodied Carbon and What You Can Do About It couldn’t be more timely given the recent Fourth National Climate Assessment and the latest from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Embodied carbon is spent immediately, while operational carbon is spread out... Read more

By Alissa Kingsley

User control may seem antithetical to high-performance buildings: imagine the amount of energy that might be wasted when building occupants are able to adjust the thermostat or open and close windows at will.

Occupants who have perceived control of temperature, however, tend to be more comfortable in their... Read more

We’ve got two years to change. If we don’t make major strides toward protecting biodiversity by 2020, we may go extinct ourselves, the United Nations recently warned. The Atlas for the End of the World documents how we’re doing. The maps are pretty. The findings are not.

The focus of the project, according to its website, is “the... Read more

Are building professionals legally obligated to design with climate change in mind? An article by Judy Mendoza from Victor O. Schinnerer & Company suggests that the answer may be yes.

In “How Climate Change Is Changing the Standard of Care,” Mendoza, a risk management specialist, says that professionals could be held liable for... Read more

For the past 17 years, BuildingGreen has selected ten green building products that significantly improve upon standard “business-as-usual” practices. These products reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions, improve product life cycles, and can even have a net-positive impact on society and the environment.

This video was recorded... Read more

The creators of the Health Product Declaration (HPD) have teamed up with the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) with the goal of scaling product and material ingredient transparency in the building industry. The partnership has four major objectives, according to a Health Product Declaration Collaborative (HPDC) press release... Read more

The 2018 version of the International Green Construction Code (IgCC) is designed to align seamlessly with LEED.

The code is developed by a coalition of partners, including the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), The American Institute of Architects (AIA), and ASHRAE.

Health and wellness are trending worldwide in green building, a new report confirms. “When it comes to benefits, most participants cite occupant health and well-being in addition to lower operating costs,” says a press release from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), a contributing partner to the Dodge Data & Analytics... Read more

For the past 17 years, BuildingGreen has selected ten green building products that significantly improve upon standard “business-as-usual” practices. These products reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions, improve product life cycles, and can even have a net-positive impact on society and the environment.
This year’s BuildingGreen... Read more

Editor’s note: Guest blogger Anne Hicks Harney, of Long Green Specs, is our partner in providing product vetting services. Harney offers guidance on writing green specs and on finding products for LEED v4, WELL, and beyond.

All of us in the design professions need to do a better job of prioritizing... Read more

A vacuum is a near-perfect insulator, making vacuum-insulated glass (VIG) a tantalizing option, and a commercially available R-10 replacement for single-pane windows is finally within reach. In the meantime, Guardian Glass already has a substantial market for this miracle glass—in supermarket display cases.

Anthony’s Vista Elite series... Read more

Getting a solar array on your project might seem like a huge triumph, but there could be a downside. Too much “distributed generation” (grid-connected power generation coming from individual buildings) can disrupt how the electrical grid works, causing problems for utilities. A new initiative called Grid Optimal from the New Buildings Institute... Read more

Eleven years after its original publication, we have refreshed this groundbreaking report on the transportation energy of buildings and how that energy consumption can be reduced. We have updated all data and statistics, and have conducted new interviews with leaders in the field. (Quotes from 2018 interviews are marked as such.) We have also... Read more

To make renewable energy viable on a large scale, we need a way to store energy for when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. While there are various ways to store electrical energy, batteries offer the greatest applicability. Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, such as those found in Tesla’s Powerwall system (a BuildingGreen Top 10... Read more

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has announced a new certification called LEED Zero that rewards net-zero carbon, energy, water, or waste.

To achieve the designation, buildings must first be certified under either LEED for Building Design and Construction (BD+C) or LEED for Existing Buildings: Operations and Maintenance (EBOM).... Read more

It’s a familiar story: a toxic substance gets phased out, only to be replaced with a chemically similar one that has the same toxic properties. An amendment to existing California law aims to stop this pattern of “regrettable substitution” by effectively banning whole classes of flame retardants in upholstered furniture, mattresses,... Read more

For twenty years or so, companies like Pilkington (Spacia) have been cranking out R-5ish (center-of-glass) vacuum-insulated glazing (VIG). The attraction of glazing units with a very thin profile, relatively low weight, and a high level of performance is strong, particularly for retrofit applications.

But it sure seems as though we have... Read more

Three newly revived pilot credits offer project teams the option of using resilient design to gain LEED points. Pilot credits are a way for users to test out new concepts and achieve points under the Innovation category of the LEED rating systems.

The basic structure of the suite of credits has not changed: the first credit involves an... Read more

Shortly after the release of Paula Melton’s Spotlight Report on Embodied Carbon, which has been getting amazing reviews and kudos, I sat in on an update by Ryan Zizzo, Chair of the Embodied Carbon Network’s Buildings Taskforce. I was so inspired by the breadth of activities suddenly going on in this space, that I decided to lay them out in a... Read more

The International Living Future Institute’s (ILFI) Declare label is supposed to be an easy-to-read “nutrition” label for products, showing the product’s ingredients and whether or not it contains any of ILFI’s banned Red List chemicals. This simple document belies the underlying complexity required for manufacturers to track chemicals used to... Read more