Greenversations

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: 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.

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!

About the author: Lina Younes has been working for EPA since 2002 and chairs EPA’s Multilingual Communications Task Force. Prior to joining EPA, she was the Washington bureau chief for two Puerto Rican newspapers and she has worked for several government agencies.

Lea la versión en español a continuación de esta entrada en inglés.
Some links exit EPA or have Spanish content.

We are fast approaching the end of hurricane season 2008. With the exception of hurricane Ike, the US territories and mainland have been largely spared the ravages of storms past. However, hurricane season got me to thinking, how can we develop construction materials that are sustainable while, at the same time, they will withstand hurricane force winds and rains of the likes of Ike, Katrina, Georges, and Andrew, to name a few?

I think the Agency has made great strides in supporting technological advances in green building, enhancing energy and water efficiency. However, I wonder how we can take those green benefits to areas that are more susceptible to nature’s onslaught during hurricane season?

For example, in Jeffrey’s blog from Hawaii, he noted how little air conditioning was used in many of the homes. However, the Hawaiian Islands are not in the paths of the storms that come from Africa to the Americas like the Caribbean Islands. We’ve seen Brenda’s efforts to reduce the carbon footprint in Puerto Rico, but I still haven’t seen any green substitute for good old concrete when it comes to withstanding hurricane force winds.

So, I would like to use the Web to start a greenversation. I want to consult with experts in this area. Are there green materials stronger than hay and sticks yet greener than bricks? Let’s find materials that will not allow the bad hurricane wolves to blow our houses down. Looking forward to your comments.

¿Resistiría la embestida?

Sobre la autor: Lina M. F. Younes ha trabajado en la EPA desde el 2002 y está a cargo del Grupo de Trabajo sobre Comunicaciones Multilingües. Como periodista, dirigió la oficina en Washington de dos periódicos puertorriqueños y ha laborado en varias agencias gubernamentales.

Nos estamos acercando rápidamente al final de la temporada de huracanes del 2008. Salvo el huracán Ike, los territorios y continente estadounidenses se libraron de los azotes de tormentas pasadas. Sin embargo, durante esta temporada de huracanes me he puesto a pensar sobre cómo podemos desarrollar materiales de construcción que sean sostenibles y que a la misma vez puedan resistir el impacto de vientos huracanados y lluvias torrenciales como los Ike, Katrina, Georges, y Andrew, del mundo?

Pienso que la Agencia ha logrado grandes avances al apoyar tecnologías en edificios verdes, la eficiencia energética y la conservación de agua. Sin embargo, me pregunto si podemos llevar esos beneficios ambientalistas a las áreas que sean más susceptibles a los ataques de la naturaleza durante la temporada de huracanes?

Por ejemplo, en el blog de Jeffrey desde Hawai, destacó cómo limitaban el uso del aire acondicionado en muchos hogares. Sin embargo, las Islas Hawaianas no se encuentran en el paso de las tormentas que salen de África camino a las Américas como están las islas del Caribe. Vimos los esfuerzos de Brenda por reducir la huella de carbono en Puerto Rico, pero todavía no he visto un buen sustituto verde al consabido concreto cuando se trata de resistir un vendaval huracanado.

Por lo tanto, quisiera usar esta página para comenzar una conversación verde, Greenversation. Quisiera consultar con expertos en esta área. Como en el cuento de los tres cerditos, ¿acaso hay materiales verdes que sean más fuertes que la paja y la leña, pero más verdes que los ladrillos? Encontremos materiales que no permitan que los malos lobos huracanados derriben nuestros hogares. Me encantaría leer sus comentarios.

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. Find out more about EPA’s green building programs at www.epa.gov/greenbuilding.

So what does it really mean to be green?

That may sound like one of those dreaded philosophical questions you have to ask of a white-bearded guru sitting cross-legged and barefoot on a mountaintop.

But as green becomes the hottest marketing term around, you do have to ask what it means. As everyone from your dry-cleaner to your gas station tries to convince you that they’re the greenest, how do you know who is and who isn’t?

The Federal Trade Commission, which monitors marketing claims, is looking into this issue as it updates its “Green Guides” . But the answers are not always as straightforward as we might like.

In my area of expertise, green building, EPA is considering how we can help this field better define itself. Here are a few of the questions we’re grappling with:

1) Essential components: The popular green building rating systems in the marketplace provide great flexibility to trade off among many strategies, from low-flow toilets to low-emitting paints. But are there any elements so essential that they shouldn’t be traded off – like energy efficiency?
2) Levels of green: A related question is how far you need to go to be called green – for instance, if a company changes its light bulbs to more efficient compact fluorescents, but does nothing to improve its inefficient heating and cooling system – how green can it really claim to be?
3) Lifecycle impacts: One of the most complicated exercises in the sustainability field is life cycle analysis (LCA). An LCA is the Herculean task of comparing the environmental and health impacts of a product throughout its “life” – say, from when trees are cut down or metals mined, through manufacturing and use, to ultimate disposal. An incredible challenge – and yet how can we know what’s truly greenest until we figure out how to do this type of analysis effectively?
4) Maintaining green: Finally, how long will the building or product remain green, and what maintenance will it need to keep that nice green glow from fading?

Maybe some day all of the answers will be easy to find. In the meantime, when you hear green claims, make sure to ask a lot of questions, compare and contrast products, and request as much background information as possible.

But please don’t attempt to climb any treacherous mountains looking for green gurus. No need, actually – these days, most gurus have email.

About the author: An aspiring amateur plumber, Aaron Ferster is the science writer-editor for EPA’s Office of Research and Development.

A few weeks ago my wife and I met with one of Johns Hopkins’ top surgeons to discuss a second cochlear implant (CI) for our youngest daughter, who is deaf. She had CI surgery for one ear six years ago, and there are significant potential benefits in getting one for her other ear. The doctor talked about improvements to surgical techniques, new sound processing strategies, and advances to the latest generation of CIs, which truly represent the height of bio-technology.

After the appointment we drove home and I spent the afternoon on something with a decidedly lower gee-whiz factor: draining and removing the bathroom toilet so I could turn it sideways, then upside down so a small scissors that had accidently dropped in would wind its way through the traps and twists and drop out. It worked. But perhaps more importantly, it gave me something to do while waiting for the doctor’s office to call with a surgery date. All in all, not a bad day.

I had another good day thinking about the astounding diversity of technology that surrounds us while attending a session entitled “Green Building Research Needs and the Promise of New Technology” at this year’s EPA Science Forum. The session was chaired by Ken Sandler, who wrote about his efforts to establish a new EPA strategy for green buildings on Greenversations. The panel discussion included exemplary case studies of the latest research and design in lowering a building’s environmental footprint when energy savings and sustainability are priorities.

The talk was inspiring, and like anyone with energy bills to pay, I’m eager to see the advent of low-impact, carbon-neutral homes and office buildings complete with the latest real time information technology guiding energy consumption choices. But like turning the toilet upside down while waiting for the phone to ring, I’d like something I can do today while the green building revolution continues to gathers steam. Luckily, a quick web search reveals a bunch (including a few excellent ones that have already been covered on this blog), including: installing compact florescent light bulbs, greenscaping the yard, biking to work, making a rain barrel, buying energy star appliances, and planting shade trees.

Now if only someone would invent scissors that dissolve in water. Oh well.

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.

At EPA, we strive to help people make the environment part of their everyday decisions. But how can we tell when we’re succeeding?

In truth, we often can’t. But sometimes the evidence of change is hard to miss.

Take green building (Web site or video) – making buildings and their sites better for the environment and health. It’s an issue on which I’ve worked for a decade, and I’m now leading efforts to establish a new EPA strategy on the subject.

Yet for years, I would draw blank stares when mentioning “green building” in conversation. Some people would even ask if it meant painting buildings green.

And then, suddenly, nearly everyone had heard of it. My Dad was sending me articles on green building from Newsweek. I would mention it at a barbecue and people would come up to me and say, yes, we’re looking to green our homes, tell us how!

Green building seems to have reached its tipping point. But how do such things happen? If there’s a formula to make sustainable practices bloom, we’d like to get our hands on it.

In fact, we’ve seen such phenomena before. Take recycling. In 1988, only 1,000 communities in America had curbside recycling. Just 8 years later, that number had leaped to 9,000. Why? One reason was that in 1989, responding to public concern, EPA set a goal for the US to recycle 25% of its municipal waste.

This helped set off a competition among states to set their own recycling goals. In response, systems were established to recycle a variety of materials. The engine of recycling got going – and keeps on humming.

With green building, the story is different. Since the early 1990s, EPA has successfully pushed voluntary programs covering many aspects of the built environment – energy, water, indoor air quality, products, waste, smart growth and more. Other groups began to put these pieces together in holistic, market-based programs.

The U.S. Green Building Council, a leading non-profit, has its own eye-popping numbers on the transformation they helped bring about. From 2000 to the present, their member organizations went from 570 to over 15,000, the number of buildings registering to use their LEED green building rating system from 45 to 21,000.

So does this mean our work is done? Hardly. The green building field has needs that range from research to stronger standards to more public education and partnerships. We plan to work with a wide variety of groups to help tackle all of these challenges.

But there are many advantages to reaching a tipping point. Those years of struggling in obscurity have given way to lots of new doors opening up. And it’s nice to get fewer blank stares at parties.

About the author: Jeff Maurer manages Web content and does communications work for the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response. He has been with EPA since 2005.

Before I moved to DC, I lived next to Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs. I love Wrigley Field – it’s like stepping back in time. The scoreboard is still manually operated. There are no billboards for advertising. They don’t play rock music over the PA system, though they do play polka music on the pipe organ during rain delays. You can still buy standing-room tickets at Wrigley, which is good because the seats were apparently installed when the average American was three feet tall and suffered from tapeworms.

Compare that to recently-completed Nationals Park here in DC. Nationals Park boasts 41,888 American-sized seats (my description, not theirs), a 4,500 square foot high-definition scoreboard, and every other amenity you could possibly imagine. The fan experience is great, though their music choices tend to favor Fergie and Fall Out Boy, with surprisingly little polka.

It just goes to show how much attitudes and planning have changed. Fans in 2008 expect a lot when they come to a ballpark. They expect quality food. They expect not to sit behind a post. They expect to do the chicken dance (why?). As a result, the designers of Nationals Park had to consider a lot more than did the designers of Wrigley Field.

And finally – finally! – it seems that environmental impact is becoming a major consideration. Nationals Park is the first LEED-certified ballpark in Major League Baseball. It has several “green” features, including a plant-covered roof that reduces water runoff, an elaborate water filtration system, high-efficiency lighting, and low-flow plumbing fixtures. Compare that to Wrigley Field, which barely features plumbing.

I’m glad that ballpark designers – and designers in general – are starting to figure this out. People in 1914 – the year Wrigley was built – didn’t care too much about the environment, but people in 2008 do. For example, people at public events expect to be able to recycle their empty bottles. I know this because EPA’s Recycle on the Go initiative – which encourages recycling at public events – has held several well-received events in public spaces, including at the 2006 Major League Baseball All-Star Game.

Attitudes and expectations change over time, sometimes for better (e.g., ballparks should have more than one bathroom), sometimes for worse (e.g., Lady Lumps is acceptable music during a pitching change). I think the message is clear: in 2008, the public expects environmentally-friendly buildings and spaces.