The Bullitt Center in Seattle is showing that a six-story, 52,000 square-foot building can meet the net-zero-energy, net-zero-water Living Building Challenge

The new Bullitt Center with its cantilevered cap of PV modules. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: Alex Wilson

I’m just back from a week in Seattle, where I attended the Living Future Conference, which this year had a theme of resilience and regeneration—a major focus of mine with the Resilient Design Institute. While there I visited what is almost certainly the greenest office building in America if not the world.

The Living Future Conference was created initially to provide a networking and learning venue for designers and builders involved in creating buildings that achieve the Living Building Challenge. Unlike its better known cousin, the LEED Rating System (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) of the U.S. Green Building Council, the Living Building Challenge (LBC) is not a points-based system, but rather a collection of very specific, very challenging requirements.

Poison pill pushed by illegal lobbyists, or exciting, bipartisan energy bill that could change everything? It could be up to you.

Meet the "strategic advocate" behind Green Globes. The president of this organization is also Green Buidling Initiative's vice president for federal outreach—and claims she doesn't need to register as a lobbyist. Screen capture from SAS website.We’ve been keeping an eye on the sweeping Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act (PDF), introduced by Senators Jeanne Shaheen (D–NH) and Rob Portman (R–Ohio).

The common-sense bill, likely to come to the Senate floor any day now, enjoys broad support across the political spectrum. It would boost the national model energy code for both homes and commercial buildings, support commercial retrofits with financing help, and develop training programs for green building jobs.

Roxul ComfortBoard IS has some important environmental and performance advantages over XPS and polyisocyanurate insulation

ComfortBoard IS, Roxul's exterior insulation board, is being distributed nationwide in the U.S. at thickensses up to 3".
Photo Credit: Roxul

Readers of this Energy Solutions blog may be aware that I’ve been critical of some of our foam-plastic insulation materials. I’ve come down hardest on extruded polystyrene (XPS), which is made both with a blowing agent that contributes significantly to global warming and with a brominated flame retardant, HBCD, that’s slated for international phaseout as a persistent organic pollutant.

So I’m always keeping an eye out for alternatives. I’ve written here about two of those alternatives that I’ve used in our own home: a cellular glass material called Foamglas with high compressive strength that works very well below-grade; and Thermacork, an all-natural rigid insulation material made from expanded cork.

I like both of those materials a lot, but they have two big problems: high cost and limited availability. They just won’t be able to enter the mainstream home building industry—not yet, anyway—since they cost more than twice as much as XPS and polyisocyanurate and are hard to get hold of.

Turning waste into a unique architectural product, Coldspring and Jason F. McLennan have teamed up on a new dimensional stone product.

Photo: ColdspringAs the founder and CEO of the International Living Future Institute and its influential Living Building Challenge, Declare product database, and Living Future unConference, Jason F. McLennan has been busy setting a high bar for “green.” Now the former BNIM architect has crossed over into product design, as he is set to announce tomorrow the launch of a unique line of sustainable dimension stone products called Earth Measure, in a collaboration with Coldspring, one of the nation’s largest natural stone providers.

In a world in which green products are defined by recycled content and low VOCs, natural stone has arguably gotten short shrift, as we noted recently in Environmental Building News, in Stone, The Original Green Building Material. Stone is simply cut from the earth and processed., It emits no VOCs or hazardous airborne pollutants, it is water-resistant, will outlive most buildings, and can be reused after the structure is no longer usable. How can you build on that pedigree?

How about turning the relatively small amount of quarry waste produced by stone manufacturers into a valuable product? While working with Coldspring as a consultant, McLennan recognized that the offcuts from stone processing still had value beyond landscaping and aggregate, and with Cold Spring’s corporate goal of creating zero waste from processing, a partnership was born.

Photo – Greg Habermann (Remixed under CC BY 2.0)After years of living with a nice-looking but rather uncomfortable daybed in our living room, my family and I went shopping for a new sofa. We explored a range of styles and configurations, trying to find something that looked good, would be cozy, durable, and fit in our rather small space. Oh, and we also wanted to avoid bringing toxic and ineffective flame retardant chemicals into our home.

Few others are thinking about energy audits and weatherization, but now’s a good time.

Weatherization should target the biggest air leakage sites.
Image Credit: U.S. Department of Energy

Wait a second. Spring has barely sprung, and you’re saying we need to start thinking about energy audits already? What’s up with that?

There are several reasons why now is a good time not only to focus on energy auditing and weatherization—not only for your clients, but also for your own home.

Weatherization professionals have some time

Because spring is a time when few homeowners are thinking about heating bills and how to bring them down, it’s a good time to find energy-performance contractors who can do that weatherization work.

Those energy-performance contractors who do general construction work may be gearing up for the summer building season, but for those limited to energy audits and weatherization, now is a good time.

Cool your super-efficient jets, green building world. We still have no idea what GSA is going to do about LEED.

As GSA goes, so goes the federal government? Maybe...maybe not.
Photo Credit: Shalom Baranes Associates

It’s been a long and confusing year for people who track federal green building policies.

Between the military’s LEED battle and the loooong interagency review by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA)—both of which are sure to be complicated by sequester and politics in ways we don’t yet understand—we’ve had newsroom motion sickness for months.

A Friday press release from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), republished in Building Design + Construction and covered by Lloyd Alter at Treehugger, unfortunately hasn’t brought clarity to the conversation.

Think you understand pressure-sensitive adhesives? Think. Again. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Do not try this at home.)

WTF at BuildingEnergy 13! Children, do not try this at home.
Photo Credit: Courtesy Peter Yost

My last post in this series on adhesives, sealants, and tapes ended with this line:

“We hope to follow up this baseline ideal conditions testing with more field-like conditions.”

Introducing the WTF research troupe

Well, it took a while, but we finally got a venue for some more testing of pressure-sensitive adhesive (PSA) tapes: the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association annual conference, BuildingEnergy 13.

NESEA premiered its Trade Show Demo Stages this year, calling the stage demos “Recess for building and energy professionals—Let’s play!” Sure seemed like the appropriate forum for us to premiere the Wingnut Test Facility (WTF), a new round of “benchtop” tape testing with a focus on field conditions: wet, cold, dirty, and just about all of the above.

They actually invited us to come do our tape testing on stage!

Our crack slapstick lab staff

Fellow WTF founder, Dave Gauthier (President of Vantem Panels here in Brattleboro) and I set up the testing this way (download the spreadsheet for details):

1. Cold, wet application (no primer)—We put on our jackets and adhered the various tapes to rough OSB outdoors when it was about 28°–36°F (temps rose as we worked; see comments in spreadsheet). “Wet” meant this: we sprayed water from a standard spritzer bottle, then wiped off the OSB with our bare hands—to mimic what might be considered “prepping” the surface on a typical jobsite….
2. Cold, wet application (with primer)—We used two priming materials: Pro Clima’s acrylic primer and 3M’s Super 77. We chose the Pro Clima primer because it is appropriate for acrylic tapes, and we had prior experience with it and could easily get ahold of a relatively small quantity from the supplier. We chose the multipurpose 3M Super 77 spray adhesive for the modified bitumen membrane and the butyl rubber flexible flashing product (a specialized primer would have to be specially ordered in quantity).
   After all the test samples were set up, we stuck them in a freezer, keeping them below freezing until we transported them to the NESEA demo stage in a cooler.
3. Dirty application—To reflect another common jobsite condition, we took the substrates outside, smeared mud on them, and then “prepped” the surface by wiping off the excess with the palms of our hands. We did this testing inside at room temperature.

Panelized construction, meticulous attention to energy detailing, and a sophisticated computer design system put Unity Homes at the cutting edge of home buiding.

A Unity Homes wall section at the company's Walpole, NH factory. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: Alex Wilson

In my blog last week, I provided a little background on Tedd Benson and his evolution that led him to found Unity Homes. This week, I’ll describe some of the features that set Unity Homes apart from both standard home construction and other panelized and manufactured home production.

An emphasis on energy performance

A top priority for Unity Homes is energy performance. The homes have R-35 walls and roofs that vary from R-38 to R-48—depending on the roof spans. (Longer spans require deeper rafters (made from engineered I-joists) with room for more insulation.)

Unity’s R-35 wall does better than some nominally rated R-35 walls, because thermal bridging through the framing is minimized. The wall system uses 9.5-inch-deep I-studs, so there isn’t a lot of higher-conductivity wood.

Whole-building LCA is about to get really big in LEED and elsewhere. It's a great tool, as long as you understand its limitations.

As part of its "Journey to Deep Green," international construction firm Skanska is tracking embodied carbon of the core-and-shell projects it builds for its real estate development arm. Rather than relying only on available LCA data, which are just estimates and averages, the group is tracking actual transportation miles of both materials and workers, measuring the amount of energy used for onsite equipment and lighting, and carefully calculating total waste generation and waste transport. That level of detail is not found in a typical LCA, and gathering the data is a lot of work.
Photo Credit: Skanska Commercial Development

Are you designing the world’s greenest building?

If so, have your model line up here with all the others that have laid claim to the title. That’s right: single-family homes to the left, everyone else to the right. Today we’re finally going to settle this!

As soon as the bell sounds, start entering all your building’s materials into this hand-held life-cycle assessment device. I hope you all remembered to bring your carefully tracked site-visit mileage and the spreadsheets showing carbon released from the soil during construction? Also your energy models and decommissioning plans? GO!

And the winner is…

OK, OK, this would never work: buildings are complex, and there are just too many variables and unknowns. Also, you could never fit all the “world’s greenest” building designs into one room.

Yet to hear some people talk about the hottest new sustainable design trend—life-cycle assessment, or LCA—you would think it was the one and only methodology we need to determine whether a building product or a whole building is sustainable.

That’s ridiculous, and we explore why—along with what LCA does really well—in this month’s EBN feature article, “Whole-Building Life-Cycle Assessment: Taking the Measure of a Green Building.”

Below are five things to keep in mind when using LCA in your practice.