Hi Folks:
Well, my plan for this week’s post was to talk about ‘green roofs’, but this week decided to unfold as it wanted… “The best laid schemes of mice and men go often askew…” Of course, Burns’ poem was about disturbing a mouse house, so it sort of fits into a post about ‘green building’.
Having said all that, here are the links for green building I came across this week, and we’ll get to green roofs next week. I’ll start with a green roof story, though. Continue Reading →
Hi Folks:
Well, Friday is upon us and that means I’m turning my attention to ‘being green’ once again. I labeled this post ‘Seeing the Light’ for two reasons. On one hand, with the plethora of information that’s coming online today in all aspects of being ‘green’, sustainability, corporate responsibility, etc. it seems that more and more people are indeed ‘seeing the light’. Further to that, as I type this I’m listening to the TEDxSOMA live and the focus of this series of talks is on interconnection/ interactivity, sharing ideas and communication. We all share this little blue marble, and we all need to work together to find a better way to live on it. In the book ‘The Sacred Balance‘, David Suzuki used this analogy (allowing for my memory here): take a basketball, and overlay a sheet of tissue paper onto this ball. The basketball represents the earth (yes, the earth is an oblate spheroid, but stay with it). All life on earth exists in a layer comparatively similar to that layer of tissue paper. Visualizing that changes how one sees the world.
Seeing the light also means something completely different because artificial light has revolutionized how we exist in the world. Whereas we once operated largely from sunrise to sunset, artificial light changed that forever. We shifted from torches to candles to oil lamps, and in about 1809 Humphry Davy invented the first electric light. This idea was latched onto by others, and Thomas Edison finally perfected the idea for the vacuum bulb that we know today as the incandescent light bulb. They come in a variety of sizes, shapes, some have gases inside the bulb, but by and large the idea hasn’t changed. I’m not going to try to guess the impact of the electric light on the industrial revolution, but it was nothing short of revolutionary. The biggest problem with the incandescent bulb however, is that it’s horribly inefficient. Any child who ever used an ‘Easy Bake Oven‘ could tell you that an incandescent bulb is primarily a heat source that also gives off some light. Somewhere around 80% of the energy used by an incandescent bulb is lost in giving off heat. Halogen lamps are a type of incandecent that were first used in the movie projection industry in the 1960s. They’re now used in car headlamps as well as in residential and commercial use. Halogen bulbs use less energy and last longer than typical incandescent bulbs, but still generate a lot of heat. Continue Reading →
Hi Folks:
I thought that subject heading might cause a few people to scratch their heads in wonder, so permit me a moment to explain. First of all, I’ve had a love affair with the earth since I was a boy living in the woods in Quebec. I’d come home from school, drop my books on the kitchen counter, yell a quick hello and I was gone until dark. To this day, the ‘woods’ is my true home. As such I’ve loved gardening for a long time too, both indoors and out. The first apartment Marcia and I had together was above the double garage, attached to the main house. We had a large picture window in the living room and we had so many plants that several visitors to our landlady asked her if she had a greenhouse!
Marcia’s often said that all of my plants want to be trees. In one home we had a 15-foot cathedral ceiling and we had 4 plants over 10-feet tall, including FRED, our Christmas tree. In our guest bedroom we had a hibiscus plant that was basically an 8-foot diameter ball that took up half the room. We planted a Brugmansia in a pot, expecting it (as per the image that came with it) to grow about 2-feet high and have a number of white flowers. Ours grew 6 feet in a couple of months and had one flower that was nearly 2-feet long. It was a night bloomer, and every evening all four floors of the house were filled with the most amazing scent. In our last place together we had two poinsettias that re-bloomed 14 months after we got them. One of them put out 24 blossoms! So, where’s the danger in all of this you ask? Ah, I was just getting to that. Continue Reading →
Hi Folks: Well, Friday has come around once again and that means it’s ‘green day’ here for us. Without question the biggest news in the world this week is the aftermath following the earthquake in Haiti. If you’re interested you can find links to disaster relief sites here. It’s events like this that bring the words ‘climate change’ into real focus. It’s wonderful that so many millions of dollars and thousands of hours of effort have been offered in assisting the people of Haiti deal with what’s happened on their island; as Marcia said to me though, where were the funds to help them upgrade their infrastructure BEFORE this happened?
Ah well. The title of this blog post is ‘Good News’ and all evidence to the contrary, there is good news to be found. Last week’s post focused on what I see as the somewhat bewildering plethora of green building standards and certifications, but even that is good news in a way. It wasn’t that many years ago that none of this existed. One article I came across this week is titled ‘A Very Brief History of Sustainability‘. These ideas continue to spread beyond building construction as well. On the Sustainable Sites Initiative website you can find information on “The Sustainable Sites Initiative: Guidelines and Performance Benchmarks 2009” (.pdf), which includes “all stages of the site development process from site selection to landscape maintenance”. There’s also a companion guide called “The Case for Sustainable Landscapes” (.pdf) It brings a different slant to the idea of being ‘green’. Another site I came across talks about greening up building operations and maintenance. In the US these guidelines fall under the USGBC LEED for Existing Buildings – Operations and Maintenance Guide. The article I read is titled, “LEED Cleaning – Why Not?“ Consider for a moment the wide range of chemicals used in traditional cleaning products and their effects on both the people using them and everyone else occupying the building after their use. I certainly applaud less toxic alternatives! Continue Reading →
Hi Folks: Mark Twain is purported to have said there are three kinds of lies (in increasing order of severity): white lies, damnable lies, and statistics. As anyone who’s worked with statistics can tell you, it’s important to set your parameters before beginning your analysis or statistics can tell you anything you want. If, by now, you’re wondering what this has to do with being ‘green’, it’s because I’m alternately amazed and confused on how many ‘green standards’ and ‘green certifications’ there are out there today, with more coming down the pipe all the time. We have standards for whole buildings, such as R2000/ C2000, LEED, BuiltGreen, BOMA BESt, The Living Building Challenge and others, then there are certifications for specific products, like FSC or ITTO certified wood. There are standards like the California Indoor Air Quality Program or ASHRAE Standard 62 – “Ventilation for Acceptable Indoor Air Quality”. The list also includes programs like William McDonough’s Cradle to Cradle certification, but how about Rohner Textil AG’s Climatex Lifestyle compostable upholstery fabric? Keep in mind these are all just samples of longer lists. The other issue is that some of these standards are run by governments (LEED for example), others by private companies (Cradle to Cradle), some by industry associations (like BuiltGreen or CPA’s International Testing and Certification Center (ITCC)), and then there are third-party certification companies like Scientific Certification Systems. NGOs like the Rainforest Alliance have created a Certified Xate Initiative (.pdf) in Guatemala’s Mayan Biosphere Reserve to work with the local people regarding the sutainable harvesting of the xate palm. Continue Reading →
Hi Folks:
First of all, for everyone following the Gregorian calendar, Happy New Year!! We wish you and those close to you a 2010 filled with as much health, happiness, peace and prosperity as you can handle!
Okay, I wanted to talk a bit about water this week. As the expression goes, “Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.” We tend to take water for granted; most of this little blue marble of ours is covered with water, and water makes up some 55-78% of our bodies depending on size, sex and age. We use water daily for drinking, for cooking, for cleaning, for waste removal, and for so many things that we don’t often consider that all of the water that comes out of the tap must be collected, transported, treated… and there is a similar ‘stream’ of actions must be taken for water that pours down our drains.
Hi Folks:
I usually do my ‘Being Green’ posts on Fridays, but since tomorrow I expect to be tied up with ribbon and force fed turkey or something like that, I thought I’d do it today instead.
I have a few things to share with you this week. First some news:
Largest Solar Energy Project in New York State Approved
“Uniondale, N .Y. — Long Island Power Authority President and CEO, Kevin S. Law announced that the LIPA Board of Trustees approved power purchase agreements (PPAs) with BP Solar and enXco Development Corp. thereby creating the state’s largest source of solar power on Long Island. LIPA’s Solar Energy Project will introduce approximately 50MW of renewable energy generated on Long Island onto LIPA’s electric grid, enough to power 6,500 households and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 20,000 tons per year as well as reducing other greenhouse gases…”
SMUD Gets 60 Percent Energy Savings from an Older House
“The Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) hopes a new demonstration program will save owners of existing homes money and also spur a new spike in home remodels that really make a difference. The SMUD Energy Efficient Remodel Demonstration (EERD) program is a comprehensive, whole-house approach to retrofitting a home with energy-saving and energy-generating equipment and measures…” Also: http://www.smud.org/en/Pages/index.aspx
Greener Gadgets
While not directly related to ‘green building’ per se, “The Greener Gadgets Conference tackles all of the issues surrounding energy efficiency and sustainable design, from innovative advances in packaging and product manufacturing to end-of-life recycling solutions. It also highlights ways in which electronics make a major impact by utilizing renewable energy in developing nations…”
EPEAT
Somewhat related to the ‘Greener Gadgets’ above, EPEAT is a new certification system for electronics. One might think of it as a ‘LEED’ rating system for computers and similar devices. “EPEAT is a system that helps purchasers evaluate, compare and select electronic products based on their environmental attributes. The system currently covers desktop and laptop computers, thin clients, workstations and computer monitors…”
Haworth Achieves 0% Landfill Status
This is really good news: “Holland, Mich. – Haworth, Inc. announced that all U.S., Shanghai and Pune manufacturing facilities, as well as the company’s global headquarters, have achieved zero waste to landfill status. Preliminary results show that Haworth’s U.S. manufacturing facilities have gone from 4.6 million pounds of landfill waste in 2008 to zero in 2009…”
and
LED Traffic Lights Reduce Electricity Costs, But They Can’t Melt Snow
One of those unexpected consequences. LED traffic lights are replacing standard traffic lights in some municipalities. The new lights greatly reduce energy consumption, and they also produce no heat to speak of.   “But it turns out, as snowbound municipalities are just now discovering, that that excess heat was very useful for melting accumulated snow. Now that everyone’s switched over to cooler-running LEDs, snow tends to pile up and obscure the lights, leading to a situation that’s annoying at best and dangerous at worst.
For now, local governments are coping by sending crews out in snowstorms to clean the lights off with compressed air and brushes, as no one’s yet stepped forth with a design-related fix…”
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Newsletters, etc. this week include:
Sustainable Facility’s Targeted e-News on Energy: Efficient Lighting
ED+C’s Targeted eNews: WaterSense
GBI Insight newsletter from The Green Building Initiative
Jones Lang Lasalle Global Sustainability Perspective – December 2009
FP Innovations – Forintek’s ‘The Straight Woods’ newsletter includes this article:
Selling Wood Products to the Green Building Market – A Guide for Wood Product Manufacturers: Understanding Green Programs (LEED and Green Globes)
Sundance Channel Eco-mmunity Greenzine
Finally (for now), the latest edition of BC Homes Magazine showed up in my (postal) mailbox this week. This magazine is put out by the Canadian Home Builders Association, and subscription is free. There are some good articles in every issue. Now I just need to find time to read it! Maybe tonight while I’m waiting for St. Nick to show up. We always knock back some milk and a few cookies together, talk about the logistics of landing on green roofs, the access challenges provided by direct vent fireplaces, things like that…
Well folks, it’s Christmas Eve, and my wife is waiting patiently for me to finish my typing here. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hannukah, the Winter Solstice, Kwanzaa, Saturnalia or something uniquely your own, we offer our best wishes for a safe and happy holiday season and a 2010 with as much health, joy and prosperity as you can handle!
Mike.
Hi Folks:
I haven’t told any stories on this blog for a while, and if I let them build up too long, well, it might not be pretty. Actually, that reminds me of a technician I had working for me once. Great technician, but every once in a while she’d just burst out giggling. I asked her about it and she replied, “I don’t know.. they just build up!” I’m the same way, except instead of giggling I start babbling. Like now for instance.
Okay, on with show. I’ve had the privilege of working over more than half of Canada (so far), and I’ve been involved with some really interesting projects and some wonderful people. Sometime late in the last millenium I had two separate opportunities to work with black bears. I’ve accumulated a number of bear stories that I carry around with me, and I thought I’d take a moment or two to share one of them. In the first bear project on which I worked there were three main aspects to the work. One aspect was to create a map of the habitat of the area, and another was to create a map of bear movements by using radio collars on certain bears. In this way we could overlay the bears’ movements onto the map that we’d created so that we could try to interpret where the bears were going at different times of the year, and possibly why. The third aspect of the work was the most ‘adventurous’, and that was dealing with the bears themselves. In a nutshell we set out traps for the bears, and when a bear stepped into our trap s/he was anaesthetized, weighed, measured, and samples were taken to determine both the age and the health of the animal. Yes this was potentially dangerous work, especially on occasions when we had a cub in the trap and his or her mother was less that 10 or 12 yards away and watching intently. I must say up front that every precaution was taken to respect the health and integrity of both the bears and the staff, and every step was taken to minimize the stress caused by our interactions. We did have some bears that seemed to find their way into our traps regularly, and there was some suspicion that maybe they liked the drugs… Yes, that’s a joke, and no, the anaesthetics are neither narcotic nor addictive (just in case that one swept past you).
Hi Folks! Friday has come around once again., so that makes it ‘Green Day’ here on our blog. I took in two webinars this week, both kindly provided by the Building Technologies Program at the US Department of Energy, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy division.
The first was the second part of a series on the ongoing efforts in Greensburg, KS. In the spring of 2007 the town of Greensburg was nearly obliterated by a class 5 tornado, and when they decided to rebuild the town, the decision was made to rebuild it as a model of green building and green technologies. Many different people, departments, governments and private industries have been and continue to be involved in this process. I think it’s inspirational, and a good model to use for future rebuilding efforts when and if they should arrive. The presentation slides from the second webinar as well as the slides from the first in the series and a video recording of the first presentation are available at the DOE, EERE website. The next webinar in this series is expected in January, but I don’t have a firm date for that yet.
The second webinar I had a chance to see was titled ‘Activities and Programs Relating to Energy Efficiency Retrofits in Residential Buildings’. While it may be true that the average homeowner is more aware of ‘green’ products today (i.e. solar panels, solar hot water, wind turbines, ground source heat pumps, etc.) it has been said over and over again that for most buildings in existence today the first steps should be to make those buildings more efficient. This can be achieved in many ways – better windows, increased insulation, better weathersealing, etc. This webinar addressed these issues and also the challenges faced by homeowners who have expressed an interest in pursuing these options, in three areas. From the slides of this presentation:
The slides from this webinar are also available at the EERE website; more information will be provided when it is available.
From the e-mails I received this week:
That’s about it for now, but before I sign out I want to add one more link to promote some folks I know at the Okanagan Science and Technology Council (OSTEC), specifically the ‘Clean Tech‘ group.
Have a great week, and if you have any links to share, leave a comment here!
Mike.
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Hi Folks:
Last Friday I decided to dedicate one day a week to information related to green building on the basis that I subscribe to (and hence receive) several different e-newsletters every week. This week has been quiet in that department, but that doesn’t mean I’ve run out of things to share. Not by a long shot…
First though, the November 2009 issue of Environmental Building News is now available, here. And GreenBuildingAdvisor.com has a white paper available titled, ‘Stand Out from the Pack: How to Position Yourself as an Expert Eco-Builder’. It’s available for free download, here. Also, recently announced are the final specifications for the US EPA’s ‘Water Sense’ program. More on that here.
Last week I wrote a little bit about Greensburg, KS, and I wanted to insert a reminder that part 2 of a webinar on Greensburg is coming up next Tuesday, December 15, 12:00–1:30 PM EST.  ‘Admission’ is free, but you do need to register in advance, here.
There are a number of places where one can learn more about green building online. The Canadian Home Building Association (CHBA) has developed the Canadian Home Building Institute (CHBI), and they have a series of courses one can take on a number of aspects of construction, some of them online and some ‘in person’. This includes ‘Built Greenâ„¢ BC Builder Training‘. For more information, check out http://www.learnyourliving.ca. Both the Canada Green Building Council (CAGBC) and the US Green Building Council (USGBC) offer on-site and online courses as well, including information on becoming LEED certified. Two sites where one can take free online courses and earn AIA-certified credits are http://www.aecdaily.com and http://www.architectces.com. There are webinars concerning a wide variety of products and systems, and a test at the end of each session. That’ll get you started…
One aspect of green building that I hadn’t thought about until I heard of it is green-certified real estate professionals. Ecobroker.com was the first that I heard about, but since then I’ve come across some others. GreenRealEstate.com offers courses to certify real estate people, and the National Association of Realtors has developed the Green REsource Council to offer their own certification programs and courses.
Finally for today, according to Environmental Design and Construction magazine, 29000 people visited this year’s GreenBuild conference. There’s a series of short videos on the ED+C website, including this one, entitled, ‘Why Green?’ The others are here.
Have a great week, and if you have a link to share, post a comment here!
Mike.
P.S. If you have people asking you why this is important, I highly recommend the TED talk by William McDonough on ‘Cradle to Cradle’ design.
P.S. II, the sequel:Â Came across this short article today: “Perspectives on Sustainable Design – Sustainability is More Than a Scorecard“, by Dan Heinfeld FAIA, LEED AP
