Greenversations

My family and I just sold our first house. If you’ve ever been through this, you know how many details are involved in sprucing up a home to put on the market – painting, landscaping, cleaning, and on and on. Just like the roof, the furnace and the plumbing – healthy indoor air requires maintenance, and maybe even some elbow grease.

Working at EPA means I’m pretty up to speed on the importance of healthy air. Being a dad, the message is clear to me. When my younger daughter showed signs of developing asthma, in addition to following the pediatrician’s orders, we took extra effort to keep the house in tiptop shape. Since we bought a fixer-upper there was plenty to do. The basics for maintaining clean indoor air go like this – eliminate or remove pollutants, ventilate with fresh air, control moisture, test for radon, and regularly service appliances like heating and air conditioning, and cooking appliances. For more tips than I have room for, check out http://www.epa.gov/iaq/pubs/careforyourair.html.

Selling and buying a home has made me realize that taking steps to protect indoor air quality actually added value to our sale and helped us spot value when we were looking for a new home. Certainly folks can take a “do-it-yourself” approach like my family did by following EPA’s tips. But wouldn’t it be nice if “indoor air quality” were built in? The good news is EPA has launched a program called Indoor airPLUS. To earn the Indoor airPLUS label, a new home must include a comprehensive set of indoor air quality requirements and a third-party verifies it.

As a dad, having good indoor air means living healthy as well as having peace of mind.

About the author: John Millet started at EPA in 2002 and is the Director of Communications for the Office of Air and Radiation covering climate change, emissions, and acid rain. He is the proud dad of two girls and a new home.

I’ve been to a lot of “environmental” conferences over the years, and I’ve seen a lot of not-so-environmental practices. Some convention centers even throw away the floor coverings they use after every trade show. SMG’s giant Moscone Center, in San Francisco, is just one block away from my office, and this bright green convention center was recognized at EPA’s recent Pacific Southwest Environmental Awards Ceremony.

The two million square foot Moscone Center has one of the nation’s largest municipally-owned solar installations. Their 60,000 sq. ft. solar system generates enough energy to power nearly 400 homes and displaces more than 300 tons of carbon dioxide annually! They also did a major lighting retrofit. You can follow their lead by looking for ENERGY STAR lighting fixtures at home and at work.

SMG pioneered a recycling program at the Moscone Center ten years ago and recently added food composting. They now transform kitchen-based food scraps and corn-based serveware and utensils from large catered functions into compost to grow new food. The catering truck is even fueled with biodiesel. SMG also reduces waste by working with vendors to take back bread trays and pastry boxes.
The facility started using Green Seal certified cleaning products in 2008 and buys environmental products like post-consumer recycled paper, janitorial supplies and garbage bags.

SMG really focuses on improving indoor air quality. The Moscone Center takes the following step to achieve this:

• Has a full-time air quality technician who regularly monitors and tests conditions ;
• Requires forklifts to use a propane additive to reduce carbon monoxide emissions ;
• Reduces diesel emissions by requiring trucks operated by service contractors to use filters;
• Minimizes idling by drivers, and
• Strictly enforces the no smoking ordinance.

They’re also improving air quality outside. The Moscone Center is close to nearly 20,000 hotel rooms, making it easy to avoid driving. SMG also promotes the use of public transit in telephone recordings and on the website, as well as encouraging employee participation in the Commuter Check program. The center’s van runs on compressed natural gas and bike racks are installed in front of the facility.

The list of green features at Moscone Center goes on and on, but you get the idea — Moscone Center is truly a model green convention center!

Please share your green conference and convention center information with us.

To learn more about other U.S. EPA Pacific Southwest Environmental Award winners, visit http://www.epa.gov/region09/awards.

About the author: Timonie Hood has worked on EPA Region 9’s Resource Conservation Team for 10 years and is Co-Chair of EPA’s Green Building Workgroup.

About the author: Diana Bauer, Ph.D. is an environmental engineer in EPA’s National Center for Environmental Research where she serves as the Sustainability Team Leader.

I have been pleased in the past several months to see the “Green Economy” emerge as a priority for the nation. As an engineer who has been engaged in environmental research, I am particularly excited about new roles for engineering and new opportunities to avoid environmental problems through better design.

When I was in my first job as a mechanical engineer a couple of decades ago, I was dismayed when my colleagues and managers told me that I shouldn’t concern myself with where or how my work was used. My job as an engineer was to solve challenging technical problems. Others had the responsibility of worrying about the broader context, including what technology we should be investing in and how the technology would interact with people and the environment.

Later on, working at EPA and elsewhere, I have met many environmental professionals who were skeptical that engineers could have much impact for preventing or avoiding environmental problems, precisely because of engineers’ narrow focus.

In the years since that first job, I have enjoyed watching and contributing to fields such as Green Engineering, Green Chemistry, and Sustainable Engineering as they emerged and began to mature. These fields will be required as the nation addresses climate change through green energy and invests in transportation, and water infrastructure.

To contribute fully to the new green economy, engineers need to understand the environmental and social implications of their work.

National investments present an opportunity for EPA to collaborate with other departments and agencies across the government to ensure that holistic, multimedia environmental considerations are integrated into the development of green energy technologies, transportation, water infrastructure, and green building. Efforts such as these may reduce the future environmental issues that EPA will have to address with regulation.

One area where cross-government collaboration is already occurring is in Green Building. Commercial and residential buildings currently account for about 40% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from electricity and heating. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is coordinating across the federal government the Net-Zero Energy, High Performance Green Buildings Research and Development Plan to dramatically reduce energy consumption in buildings. The plan holistically addresses the challenge by focusing on water efficiency, storm water management, sustainable materials management, and indoor environmental quality.

Cross-cutting agendas such as this one can help engineers of my generation and those following to broaden our perspective and learn how to build a green economy while protecting the air, water, and land.

About the author: Kelly Chick has worked for EPA for many years. She currently works in the Office of Public Affairs at EPA Headquarters, and manages the EPA blog, Greenversations.

I’ve certainly learned a lot managing the Greenversations blog. I’ve worked here at EPA for longer than I’d care to admit, but it seems I learn something new everyday reading the blog posts and moderating each and every comment submitted. We have had several posts about green building in all of its forms, but not too long ago we posted a blog post from someone who had recently purchased a home, and was in the process of renovating it in the greenest way possible. About this time, I heard about Habitat for Humanity ReStores, and lo and behold there was a sign for one put up in my community in Southern Maryland.

I decided to stop in one Saturday morning and WOW were my eyes opened. It is just getting going and is currently operated out of a barn, but what a treasure trove of goodies. As I walked through, I saw lots of appliances, cabinets, fixtures, windows, shelving, sinks and toilets, tile, carpet remnants, 3,000 gallons of paint and so much more. Most were new, although some were gently used. I decided I needed to know more. I found the store manager and asked him about the ReStore. I found out that all of the items for sale are donated by either local home improvement stores, builders, or regular people like you and me, and are sold at 50-70% off of the retail value (the paint was just $3.00 per gallon). Some of the items (for example, five matching 3’ x 5’ windows) were ordered the wrong size and couldn’t be returned. Donating the items to a charity is a great way to recoup some of the lost expense (as a tax donation), helps others keep their renovating expenses down, and a worthy charity reaps the benefits (in the form of sales). This is a win-win situation if I ever saw one. Not to mention the fact that all of these materials are being spared from going into landfills.

There are many stores that use this model of accepting donations and keeping stuff from being thrown away. Do a search on the web for “recycled building materials” and check out what’s available in your area. By the way, during my conversation I also found out that a store in Virginia helped someone build his house entirely from ReStore purchases. Can you just imagine how much he was able to save. Have you used a source like this for renovations or repairs on your home? Share with us your experience and thoughts about this way of saving “green” while renovating “green”.

About the author: Ken Sandler is Co-Chair of EPA’s Green Building Workgroup. He has worked for EPA since 1991 on sustainability issues including green building, recycling and indoor air quality.

Lots of people complain about government, and often for good reason. But few really dig deep to find the core problems with bureaucracies, and how to fix them.

Bureaucratic systems aim to solve problems by dividing these problems into steadily smaller pieces. This works, up to a point. The problem is that somebody has to make sure that all those individual instruments, while they’re playing their own pieces, also fit well into a broader symphony.

Here at EPA, we divide up problems at the broadest level into the issues of air, water, land & materials, and toxics & prevention. We then break them down into even finer levels of detail. This allows us to devote greater scrutiny to a whole host of issues, but the challenge is to ensure that, in the process, we don’t lose the big picture.

EPA’s Green Building Workgroup is one of our efforts to ensure that we’re all playing from the same sheet of music. Our agency has a lot of strong programs to deal with specific buildings issues, like Energy Star, WaterSense, Indoor Environments and Industrial Material Recycling. But a building is a whole system and if you only focus on one aspect of it, you may lose other opportunities or cause more problems. In the 1970s, when we started tightening buildings for energy efficiency, some of them starting having indoor air quality problems due to inadequate ventilation. We’ve since learned how to build and operate buildings that are both energy efficient and healthy.

Similarly, when we’re looking at buildings’ energy profiles, we need to take into account not only the energy used to power them, but also the energy used to manufacture building products, bring water to buildings, and convey and treat wastewater from them. Not to mention the energy we use to commute to and from buildings – which gets to an even larger issue, that buildings themselves are part of our development patterns – neighborhoods, towns, metropolitan areas. Here we get into the purview of another EPA program, Smart Growth, which focuses on how to design and manage communities that enhance the quality of life, health and nature.

These are all important programs, and the Green Building Workgroup works to coordinate them so that they all make great green music together. Please help us stay in tune by letting us know what EPA green building resources you would find most helpful.

Each week we ask a question related to the environment. Please let us know your thoughts as comments. Feel free to respond to earlier comments or post new ideas. Previous questions.

Communities grow to meet demand for homes, schools, shopping, offices, roads, and everything else. But community growth can affect the environment due to increases in traffic, energy and utilities, waste, and more.

How has your community used smart growth for environment-friendly development?

About the author: Saskia van Gendt works on green building and resource conservation for EPA’s Region 9 office in San Francisco, CA. She has helped run the Lifecycle Building Challenge since its first launch in 2006.

Rejecting dolls as a child, I preferred building blocks. I favored blocks that locked together, allowing endless reconfigurations and providing the durability that a rambunctious child requires. My childhood hobbies provided a foundation for my work on deconstruction, or taking buildings apart to preserve the materials for reuse.

The competition I help run, the Lifecycle Building Challenge, seeks to move deconstruction into mainstream practice. Each year, the United States landfills over 100 million tons of construction-related materials. In its second year, the Challenge continues to reverse that trend by developing buildings that facilitate recovery and reuse of construction materials.

I will highlight a few of the judges’ top entries, but the ideas speak for themselves. You can check out all of the submittals from the past two years at http://www.lifecyclebuilding.org/index.php.

Winning designs allow for adaptability, creating plans where occupants can convert single-family dwellings into offices or retail. Schemata Workshop’s The Workshop employs a flexible live/work space with plumbing and electrical systems delivered separately in prefabricated pods, allowing future owners to reconfigure the existing layout to suits their needs.

Lifecycle building entries provide innovative alternatives within conventional patterns of use. Carnegie Mellon University’s TriPod is a residence that adapts to a growing family by enabling residents to add or swap rooms with a neighbor.

As a new focus to this year’s competition, the Challenge asked the contestants to quantify the embodied energy related to materials reuse. Embodied energy is the total energy from a material’s lifecycle including extraction, manufacturing, and disposal. To combat climate change, green builders must reduce not only operational energy, but also embodied energy. KieranTimberlake Associates’ Loblolly House calculated that through the easy disassembly and reassembly of the building core, the House conserves 93.4 metric tons of greenhouse gases.

Lifecycle buildings also serve as educational tools. Bolts and connector systems remain exposed, demonstrating how a building could be deconstructed. HOK Intern Program’s Trans/Spot Awareness Center serves as a mobile tool for educating the City of Chicago.

In the Innovation category, contestants strived to close the loop on reusing building materials by designing processes, tools, or policies to facilitate deconstruction. The winning entry PlanetReuse.com provides an on-line platform for connecting reclaimed building materials with buyers.

Drawing from contestants’ innovative and creative entries, the permanent library on http://www.lifecyclebuilding.org/index.php will inspire. I am even inspired to revisit my childhood building blocks to test out some of the ideas myself.

About the author: Builder Fuad Reveiz* is a former professional football placekicker and a current
Member of the National Association of Home Builders. He has his own building and development company in Knoxville, Tennessee. He includes radon-resistant features when building new homes.

Recently the headlines have been pretty dire – crises in the financial and housing markets, a poor holiday season for retailers. Reflecting on this state of affairs a friend recently said to me, “at least I’ve got my health.” How right he was! I cherish my health and that of my family. As a builder, homeowner, and parent, I know that having a healthy and green home is extremely important in protecting the health of my family.

In my experience as a builder, homes built for health and safety sell faster. More and more of my customers know the importance of indoor air quality to their families’ health. They also know one of the most dangerous indoor air pollutants is radon. Some years ago, I learned about the health risks of breathing radon from the American Lung Association, and I learned about ways to build new homes so radon can be prevented from entering them.

Radon is a deadly radioactive gas that rises up from underground and can seep into any home. Breathing in radon can cause lung cancer. In fact, radon is the leading cause of lung cancer after smoking – and among non-smokers it’s the leading cause of lung cancer.

The good news is that homes can be built safer, healthier, and radon-resistant. The techniques to prevent radon from entering a home are practical and straightforward for any builder. It’s an inexpensive way to offer families a benefit that could reduce their risk of lung cancer. And it’s a smart way to build trust between builders and their customers. If you are looking to buy a new home, ask your builder about radon-resistant features or seek out a builder that builds radon-resistant to make your home healthier and greener at the same time.

I hope you’ll resolve to protect your loved ones by learning about radon, testing for it and kicking it out of your home. The winter season is a great time to get informed about radon, as January is National Radon Action Month, a time dedicated to increasing radon awareness. As someone who knows quite a lot about kicking, I suggest you kick off this New Year right because living in a healthier home starts from the ground up.
 
For detailed information about radon-resistant new construction, radon testing, and National Radon Action Month visit www.epa.gov/radon/.

*EPA does not endorse this particular builder or any other commercial service or enterprise.

About the author: Ken Sandler is Co-Chair of EPA’s Green Building Workgroup.  He has worked for EPA since 1991 on sustainability issues including green building, recycling and indoor air quality. 

Downturn. Recession. Even putting aside the practical implications of these terms, the very words are depressing.

So it was uplifting for me to spend a recent week in Boston at the largest green building conference, Greenbuild. Large as in 30,000 people in attendance. As Michelle Moore, the US Green Building Council’s Senior Vice President for Policy and Public Affairs pointed out, it was more than the population of the entire county where she grew up.

And an especially surprising number when you consider that the building sector is among the hardest hit industries in our current economic crisis. Yet as a developer that I spoke with at the conference noted, financiers are now actually beginning to favor green building projects as a better bet – as opposed to just an extravagant cost center. It makes sense, since as conference speaker Van Jones of the organization Green for All noted, green is what your grandma used to call “Don’t be a fool!” It’s about common sense – don’t foul your own nest, don’t waste water or materials or energy (including free energy, like sunlight and wind) – or money, to which all these other resources ultimately equate.

Green as the favored approach to building is new, and it was also the theme of the conference – green building not as a boutique trend anymore, but as a solution. Green building creating jobs, as a stimulus that can create value not only for the economy but also for the long term health of both people and the planet. It’s the kind of solution that allows us to explore the hard-to-define concept of sustainability. Sustainability requires looking beyond the bounds of categories like economics, environment and society, to find the largest long-term context that makes sense across all these categories.

And it’s a ray of hope to keep your eye on amidst all the current economic gloom. Which in itself is worth a lot.

For more information about Green Jobs, see the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ report, “Current and Potential Green Jobs in the U.S. Economy” at http://www.usmayors.org/pressreleases/uploads/GreenJobsReport.pdf

About the author: Ken Sandler is Co-Chair of EPA’s Green Building Workgroup. He has worked for EPA since 1991 on sustainability issues including green building, recycling and indoor air quality.

This past summer, the world’s eyes turned to Beijing to watch the Olympics. With that attention came more scrutiny to the many environmental issues resulting from China’s long economic boom.

Two facts demonstrate the mix of hope and challenge that China represents for our future. First, carbon dioxide emissions (the greatest contributor to climate change) are growing rapidly in China, to the point that some estimate China has already surpassed the U.S. as the world’s leading emitter. Yet China also is projected to have surpassed the rest of the world as the leading producer of clean, renewable energy – including wind, solar and hydropower (according to the Renewables 2007 report sponsored by Germany).

I had the privilege of visiting this remarkable country this past April, as part of an EPA delegation meeting the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) in Beijing. On this trip, I got to meet people who are working to make green building a reality in China, from the government, major universities (Tsinghua, Shanghai Research Institute of Building Sciences, Huazhong University of Science and Technology) and even a government-supported non-profit (Administrative Center for China’s Agenda 21).

While there are vast differences between the situations of our two countries – chief among them the major environmental crises facing China and the disparity between our governmental systems – I was struck by a few of the similarities. There, as here, the status quo too often prevails against the wisdom of making our buildings more efficient in their use of energy, water and materials, and healthier to live in and around. There, as here, progress often hinges on the initiative of a few heroic individuals willing to stick their necks out to try something new and innovative.

I got to meet several such individuals on my trip, working on such projects as the Eco-House that will be showcased at the Shanghai World Expo in 2010. They were eager to learn more about EPA programs like Brownfields and ENERGY STAR, and about the progress Americans have made in establishing green building as a major trend in the U.S.

In the Olympic spirit, I’d like to see the US engage in strenuous but healthy competition with China, to see which of our countries can move faster toward discovering and applying the greenest technologies – in our buildings, vehicles, factories and more. Call it the race for the Green Medal – and let the games begin!