Eleek strips miles out of its supply chain and carbon-intensive steps out of its manufacturing. That's good for the embodied energy of its cast aluminum luminaires and other hardware.

Wait a minute. Weren't we criticizing Eleek and its cast aluminum hardware in this blog a few weeks ago? We were--and that sparked a dialogue with one of our readers that led to more discussion with the company, in turn leading us to change our minds, and apologize to them for the rough treatment.

Lots of building products offer some help in keeping air, water, and heat in our buildings, but without attention to the joints, you lose critical continuity in your barriers.

NOTE: Read this whole series here.

To keep out the weather, don't head for the stickum first. Take a page from the lobsterman's book and use weatherlapping, overhangs, and mechanical fasteners. Photo: KGBKitchen on Flickr.

In just about every climate in which we live and build, the number one job of any building envelope or enclosure is environmental separation. Keeping water, air and heat in or out of buildings can make them more resource-efficient, durable, and safer for occupants.

The number-one difficulty or challenge in environmental separation is continuity of our air barriers, drainage planes, and insulation layers, particularly at penetrations, transitions and margins of building assemblies.

Not all MSDSes are created equal. Because what they are required to report is minimal, manufacturers take very different approaches to how much they disclose.

Looking for better information on chemicals of concern? An MSDS can be a good place to look. Then again, it can be a really bad place to look. Click for a PDF of the full non-information. (We took out the company name; they DID include that much!)

One of the first tools we use in product evaluations are Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDSes, or MSD Sheets). These data sheets, required by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for all products, are designed to address occupational safety and provide a bare-bones assessment of the chemical hazards in a product. The problem is that what manufacturers are required to report is minimal, so disclosure levels are all over the map.

If you're looking for useful information to distinguish the health and safety of different products, the lack of data can be so frustrating as to be almost comical.

With so many types of window treatments available, including awnings, shades, storms, and shutters, it's hard to know which one is right. GreenSpec can help.

Awnings are a traditional way to control solar heat gain in the American South. Blocking gain is more effective than dealing with the heat after it comes into the building. However, awnings aren't the best product for every window in every climate.

Most window attachments are chosen with aesthetics in mind--probably in part because picking the right awnings, shades, shutters and other attachments for their performance characteristics hasn't been simple in the past.

In collaboration with BuildingGreen, publishers of GreenSpec, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) has been doing modeling, field-testing, and lab testing to develop standards for window treatment performance. Different types have different strengths, including glare control, thermal performance, and even security, so choosing a particular window attachment depends on your priorities. While performance is likely to be the foremost concern for most people, some products use materials with environmental health and safety concerns.

There's a lot of talk about how renewable energy like solar and wind can't ramp up to meet our energy needs. What we need are creative solutions to that challenge, like distributed cogeneration.

This image is a screen shot from a LichtBlick video demonstrating how distributed cogeneration can take up the slack when wind and solar energy sources are not producing power.

I just got off the phone with Ralph Kampwirth, at LichtBlick in Germany, who told me about a system his company now has up and running to provide power to the grid exactly when it's most needed, while at the same time providing cheaper heat and hot water to German homes.

While we don't like to tease our readers too much with products you just can't get here, sometimes it's heartening to see what's possible if creative minds, engineering, and policy come together. This is the case with LichtBlick's EcoBlue CHP system.

Which flush is which? Dual-flush fixtures should be better at making it obvious.

Editor's note: Thanks to Evan Dick for this guest post. Evan is a former writer from BuildingGreen and now works at the Center for EcoTechnology in Massachusetts.

The adage "If it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down" might be an acceptable water-saving solution in some households, but certainly doesn't meet our expectations for cleanliness in more public throne rooms. Enter the dual-flush toilet, invented in 1980 by Bruce Thompson, an Australian working for bathroom products company Caroma. Dual-flush toilets have a full-flush option for solids and a partial-flush option for liquids. Each flush represents a measured and appropriate response to the waste-removal needs of the moment.

For wood siding, preparing the surface is as important as the paint itself. Here are some factors to look for, or fix, to help that next paint job last.

Premature paint failure is often caused by poor preparation.

Get the lead out

It's easy to get lost in a sea of greenwash. Our updated GreenSpec criteria provide clear direction on what makes a product green.

BuildingGreen has been defining what makes a product green since the start of the GreenSpec directory in 1998--and we're repeatedly surprised by how far and wide our list of green attributes travels. The industry is not static, though, and it is our aim to continue providing a compass that points from today's best practices to truly sustainable materials management.

This month's EBN feature article on what makes a product green lays out our "green attributes" for 2012--a set of broad criteria and definitions, knit together with life-cycle thinking, that we use to evaluate products for listing in GreenSpec. Key changes from our last update in 2006 show both how far we have come and how much further we have left to go in achieving the kind of materials management that would support a sustainable society.

There are plenty of products that simply aren't efficient, low-emitting, or sustainable. but here are some products that have a lot going for them, but also have some serious flaws.

Editor's note: Since the original posting of this blog, we have revised our opinion of Eleek, and written more about its cast aluminum hardware, leading us to remove mention of it from this post. We apologize to Eleek and its owners for misunderstanding their offerings. We'll also be taking a second look at IdeaPaint, which is now available from CRE-8 in a lower-VOC version.

At GreenSpec, we most often like to talk about our 2,200-plus listings of exemplary green products--listings from over 1,600 companies representing thousands of individual products. For ten years we have annually highlighted our Top-10 products of the year, for example.

Lighter, more fire-resistant, and a better insulator, autoclaved aerated concrete caught on in the rest of the world ages ago. It's taking a lot longer in the U.S.

The porous AAC structure comes from being "leavened" with aluminum. Photo: H+H UK

To read what manufacturers and distributors say about it, you'd think autoclaved aerated concrete (AAC) was some kind of new, space-age environmental miracle.

Although it certainly has some nifty properties, AAC isn't new and isn't miraculous--but it's certainly popular in Europe, and has been for decades; according to one source, it accounted for 60% of all new construction in Germany in 2006. It has enjoyed pretty flat market share (of near zero) here in the U.S., though, since it was first introduced in the 1990s.

Is there space for AAC in the U.S. market? Should the green building community be working to make space?