We need to create buildings and communities that are more resilient to natural disasters and other shocks. These building products can help.

Damaged by Hurricane Ike in 2008, this 19th-century house in Galveston, Texas, was moved, elevated, and renovated to LEED Platinum standards. In addition to insulation, solar panels, and rainwater cisterns, the house features natural ventilation via operable transom windows and a restored breezeway. Photos: Galveston Historical Foundation

As climate change becomes an ever greater reality, the need to create resilient buildings and communities becomes more important. Resilience is partly about adaptation to climate change and partly about common sense health and safety issues in an age of increasing resource constraints, growing economic swings, the greater vulnerability to uncertainties that lie ahead.

[Editor's note: Today's guest post is authored by Bill Walsh, Executive Director of the Healthy Building Network.]

When building products carry different green certifications, how do you know which product is best? Maybe there is a way to compare apples and oranges.

As green certifications and labels have proliferated, so has greenwash. Even among legitimate certifications, conflicts and inconsistency have made them hard to understand.

How do you cut through the cacophony and get the information you want? The Pharos Project has independently organized information on about 48 major product certifications and products that carry those labels.

Start by finding products

If you want products certified to a specific standard, you can find the certification standard you are looking for on Pharos's certifications page or, alternatively, simply type the name of the standard into Pharos's search function. Once on the page for the standard you want, click on the tab labeled "Products with this certification in Pharos" and voila.

The incandescent ban is here, but LEDs have improved rapidly in the last couple of years and there are now several bulbs that meet Energy Star criteria.

Toshiba's A19 450-lumen LED bulb is the equivalent of a 40-watt incandescent bulb yet only consumes 8.4 watts.

Thanks to LEED and other standards, everyone's doing daylighting now--but not everyone is getting it right. Here's how it goes wrong--and how to do it right.

The Seattle Central Library has been lauded for its daylighting features, but many library patrons and staff have trouble with overheating and glare at workstations like these. Photo: Nadav Malin

You can't turn around these days without seeing a case study that mentions the use of natural daylight to help save energy and enhance the well-being and productivity of occupants--especially students and employees.

Unfortunately, almost as common are horror stories of fabulous green buildings that make their occupants miserable. Here at BuildingGreen, we've heard a tale or three about librarians wearing sun visors on the job, office workers using open umbrellas as parasols in their cubicles, and schoolteachers in award-winning buildings who keep the blinds closed constantly.

Even water is toxic if you have too much. How do we keep a potentially harmful but necessary nutrient like boric acid at safe levels in our buildings and our bodies?

We've been using boric acid and borate compounds in products for generations, and then praised it's green virtues as in the blog post linked to above (click image). The full story is a bit more complex.

What do you do about a substance that is a biologically necessary trace nutrient, long considered nontoxic, and in a multitude of products--but that is also now listed on a major European Union chemical hazard list due to evidence that it is toxic for reproduction?

It's one of those riddles that I can imagine toxicologists love to play with but that drives everyone else crazy. Here's the story, and our approach to answering the riddle--for now.

It's not necessarily greener to source products made in the USA. But it sure does create jobs.

Let's get one thing clear: the issue of energy spent importing stuff from China is a red herring. The distance from ports in California to China is about twice the width of the continental U.S., but ocean freighters are about 7.5 times more energy-efficient than trucks, so the energy expenditure of any given product has a lot more to do with the transportation mode than with the distance it travels.

By sourcing just 5% of their products from U.S. manufacturers, builders could create hundreds of thousands of jobs. Below are a few products to start you off.

Nonetheless, reducing miles traveled by our products is probably good. Rail is about 9.5 times more efficient than trucking, so there are efficient ways to get goods across the continental U.S. Why not use them?

We also have strong environmental and workers' rights regulations in this country, and by keeping things local we are more likely to care about impacts.

It's natural that we should gravitate toward biobased materials. But many of them are energy-intensive and toxic, so how do we judge what's best?

O Ecotextiles is an example of the kind of leadership company that has worked diligently to address environmental impacts at every step of their product's production--including careful attention to responsible sourcing of biobased materials. We discussed Ecotextiles in EBN and had them on our top-10 list of 2008.

It still seems like biobased materials should be better for the environment. Even after the LEED Wood Wars, even after all the stories of pollution and waste from industrial agriculture, it just seems logical that resources we grow as part of a natural cycle are greener than the ones we mine or extract.

Life-cycle assessment, environmental product declarations, and corporate social responsibility reporting are a great start. But can we talk about health?

This sneak preview of the HPD for the imaginary "TuffStuff X42" should give you a sense of what the document will include. Click the image to enlarge this first page.

By any name--drywall, wallboard, or plasterboard--gypsum products may not be as innocent as we once thought.

Drywall, which makes up 15% of demolition and construction waste, leaches toxins and releases hydrogen sulfide gas in landfills.

Virtually ubiquitous in our buildings, gypsum board is widely seen as an innocuous building material. However, in the last decade, Chinese drywall has been linked with indoor air quality problems, while concerns have cropped up around waste from coal power plants and its links to drywall.

Domestic manufacturers are quick to point out that gypsum board manufactured in the U.S. has not been linked to indoor air quality problems, but potential leaching of heavy metals and biocides included for mold resistance are among the issues that need to be addressed more thoroughly by the gypsum board industry.