Visioning Green Buildings

By Tom Halford, Whirlpool Corporation The push for consumers to make their homes more energy efficient has created a “green-home” movement and with good reason.  The benefits of green homes are plentiful; they improve the air quality both inside and outside homes, they save homeowners money on utility bills, and reduce the overall carbon footprint [...]

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by Trish Holder Sometimes market research can be a real downer.  Take a manufacturer of residential construction products that has spent millions of dollars developing “greener” products and the marketing campaigns to go with them.  These manufacturers know they have to get consumer buy-in, but research tells them that only about 20 percent of people [...]

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Schneider Electric is another one of those very big companies you’ve probably never heard of, though they do make the APC Uninterruptible Power Supplies that many of us have our PCs plugged into. They are involved in all aspects of electrical generation, distribution and control both in manufacturing and energy management services with 2010 revenues [...]

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Remember when space was the final frontier? Perhaps it still is, but in the years that have passed since we started saying that, a new, more immediate frontier has emerged: sustainability. The folks at NASA agree, which is why their latest mission on Earth, located at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, is something [...]

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by Susan Brautovich, LEED AP While you can argue that a house doesn’t have to be small to be green, it certainly doesn’t hurt. And it may be a trend that’s poised to take off.  In terms of greener building, resource consumption and the amount of conditioned space involved in smaller houses are just the [...]

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When the Charlotte, NC ImaginOn opened in 2005, it was the city’s first green building. The combination library and children’s theater used a number of innovative features in its construction including compressed wheat fiberboard, recycled rubber parts and plastic bottles. The builders recycled all of the waste material and incorporated numerous energy savings elements into [...]

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by Susan Brautovich, LEED AP Dubai may be whipped by recession and racked with debt, but Abu Dhabi is humming along just fine. A go-slow policy and fat oil reserves helped insulate Abu Dhabi from the worst effects of the credit crunch and the Gulf building frenzy that almost sank Dubai. Despite some slowing, plans [...]

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Last week, guest author Susan Brautovich raised the question of whether green mega-homes are truly green or if small and beautiful is the greenest of them all. She pointed out that larger homes will have more embedded energy than comparably constructed smaller homes and will also require more resources to maintain. On the other hand, [...]

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Have you ever checked the ingredients of your office furniture? Perhaps you’ve been afraid to look. Chances are you wouldn’t find out very much if you tried. Not unless you bought your furniture from a company like Taylor Furniture that takes seriously its commitment to transparency. This legacy company was started in 1816, and by [...]

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With the holidays over, its time to take down the stockings from the fireplace hearth, that is if you have a fireplace and chimney to begin with.  It is fairly common in buildings today to forgo the fireplace and chimney all together.  Modern heating and air conditioning technology fill the void of heating a room. [...]

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While the “Small Is Beautiful” home designed for maximum efficiency on a minimum footprint may be PC these days, peruse any shelter magazine and it’s clear that not everyone buys in. Homes of 5,000, 7,000, even 10,000 square feet – some rated LEED Gold or Platinum – are praised for their greenness because they incorporate the latest green products, materials, and systems. But even at the highest levels of sustainability and efficiency, is it reasonable to label such a huge home “green?”

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The next version of LEED will be an update and expansion of the technical content from LEED 2009. Your comments help to ensure that LEED continues to be at the vanguard of innovative design construction and operation of buildings and communities. It is expected to be released in late 2012. The USGBC strongly encourages all stakeholders to participate. Comments are welcome for all LEED systems.

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“It seemed like a good idea at the time.” Is that what they will be saying about the LEED standard for green buildings, a few years from now? Was it perhaps a bit ahead of its time when it was first developed back in 1998? Has our collective understanding of what it takes to make a building truly sustainable evolved over the past few years to the point where a different standard is needed? As more and more people are moving into the green space, new requirements are emerging. Questions are being raised that a LEED certification doesn’t necessarily answer.

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