Furniture constantly touches our skin and can emit VOCs directly into our breathing zones. These five steps will help you make safer, greener choices.

Steelcase's lightweight Think chair is one of a handful of products that have achieved level 3 certification through BIFMA.
Photo Credit: Steelcase

We already have plenty to think about when it comes to the environmental and health profile of basic materials like wood and plastics. Complex assembled products like furniture multiply all those considerations.

What’s more, new products come out all the time, and their features can be radically different. And the nuanced interplay of function, aesthetics, ergonomics, and cost already choreographs a delicate dance for designers and specifiers. That's not even mentioning compliance with LEED IEQc4.5: Low-Emitting Materials: Furniture & Furnishings in LEED-CI or LEED for Schools. How do you stay on top of it—and still manage to pull green considerations into the mix?

One way is to step back a bit and think through what are the top green priorities for furniture.

1. Put health first

Desks, chairs, cafeteria tables: these interior products are in regular, close contact with building occupants, so human health has to be the top priority among many green considerations.

My quest for a greener lawn mowing option.

Black & Deckers 36-volt battery-powered electric mower. Click on image to enlarge.
Photo Credit: Black & Decker

I’ve never liked mowing the lawn. And it’s not just because of the gasoline used in the process.

Lawns carry huge environmental burdens in this country, and we have a lot of them. I profiled some of these impacts once for an article in Environmental Building News back in the 1990s. From the information I found then, the total lawn area in the U.S. is 50,000 square miles—an area larger than the state of New York. We spend $25 billion per year on their care. We dump 3-6 million tons of fertilizer on them, and the runoff from those lawns is one of the largest pollution problems in our lakes and rivers.

We apply something like 34,000 tons of herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, and other pesticides on them, accounting for a whopping 14% of total pesticide use in the U.S.—and 34% of insecticide use. On a per-acre basis, this amounts to about two pounds per year.

And while not as big an issue in Vermont as elsewhere, we use a huge amount of water maintaining our emerald-green oases. “Kentucky” bluegrass is not from Kentucky (it’s from Europe), and it takes about 40 inches of water per year to keep it that lush green we’ve come to know and love. In much of the country, irrigating lawns is the single largest consumptive use of water (we use a lot more water in cooling thermo-electric power plants, but most of that water is only “borrowed” for power generation, then returned to the source), often accounting for 40-60% of total municipal water use.

Any sealant can perform well in the right application, but knowing which to pick for your job is another thing. Our guide to sealants and how to use them.

NOTE: Read this whole series here.

Photo Credit: DAP

When selecting a sealant, these properties are typically the most important:

• movement tolerance (rated by Class per ASTM C920, with 25 meaning joint movement of 25% of the linear width dimension of the sealant bead)
• substrate compatibility
• workability, particularly based on temperature
• paintability and its converse—substrate staining
• relative cost
• service life
• material constituency and hazardous content

There are seven basic types of liquid sealants, largely based on their chemistries and subsequent strengths and limitations. Each sealant’s suitability to an application is based primarily on its performance properties, the properties of the substrates, and cost.

Latex

Latex sealants are water-based, easy to tool, easy to clean up, paintable, and relatively less expensive than other types of sealants. Some premium latex sealants may be appropriate for exterior use (appropriate service life) and are rated for movement in classes 12½ and 25. Latex sealants may be best suited to interior finish applications.

Acrylic

Acrylic sealants are also paintable but are solvent-based and more difficult to tool. They are used more in commercial and exterior applications than latex and have very limited movement capacity (Class 7½). Acrylic sealants tend to be used in commercial construction in low-movement joints. Their cost tends to be in the low to moderate range.

Butyl

Butyl sealants are solvent-based, synthetic rubber materials demonstrating strong adhesion to a wide variety of substrates. They have excellent weathering characteristics but tend to be stringy and difficult to apply. They generally have limited movement accommodation (Class 7½ ). Butyl sealants are sometimes used in curtainwall systems where adhesion to rubber materials is required. The cost of butyl sealants tends toward the moderate range.

The next group are sometimes called “high-performance” sealants and are most often used in commercial building assemblies.

Blower-door testing of the nearly complete Brattleboro Food Co-op building shows it to be remarkably tight.

Andy Shapiro (standing) and Terry Brennan set up a two-fan blower door for air tightness testing at the Brattleboro Co-op. Click on image to enlarge.
Photo Credit: Alex Wilson

The new Brattleboro Food Co-op building with affordable housing on the top two floors is nearly completed, and we’ll be shopping there in just a week or two. So, how did the building turn out? Were the goals achieved? Are the mechanical systems going to work as intended? How effectively was the building envelope constructed?

We won’t know the answers to all of these questions for a while, but we do now know about one key measure of performance: the airtightness of the envelope. When most commercial buildings are completed (as well as houses, for that matter) there is no testing of airtightness. There should be. Through pressure-testing of a building, one learns all sorts of things about how well it was built and how tightly windows and doors keep out drafts, and how effectively various dampers on mechanical equipment perform.

How often have you heard that a client can't afford better windows? Our free webcast will look at the best windows for any budget.

Click to sign up for the free webcast.
Photo Credit: BuildingGreen, Inc.

When you choose windows for a project, you need to find the right balance among multiple decision drivers, including cost, durability, energy and comfort performance, aesthetics, and more. This webcast on Tuesday, June 19—featuring BuildingGreen's founder, Alex Wilson, and president, Nadav Malin—dives deep into these topics, giving you the framework you need to make an informed decision.

Addressing windows for both residential and commercial applications, Alex and Nadav discuss strategies that save money, like right-sizing the glazing (you probably don’t need as many windows as you think, and should avoid fully glazed facades).

The webcast also provides detail on the anatomy of a high-performance window: the ins and outs of low-e coatings, warm-edge spacers, and gas fills as well as the price, performance, and sustainability of different window frame materials.

Special features:

• how to use NFRC ratings—including U-value, VT, and SHGC—to specify windows that make sense for each climate and orientation.
• ultra-efficient windows, including the difference between European and North American window specs (hint: it’s not just the metric system).
• Links to GreenSpec's customer ratings of window manufacturers, and other window selection resources

Sign up at WebEx.

Chemical and plastics trade groups claim the federal government should stop using LEED. BuildingGreen separates the facts from the fabrications.

The FOX Architects-designed American Chemistry Council headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Photo Credit: receptiondeskworld.com

A developing focus on chemicals of concern in the LEED rating systems could make federal buildings less energy-efficient, according to the American Chemistry Council (ACC).

In recent letters to the House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight and to a number of representatives in the U.S. Congress (PDF), ACC and others also claim that LEED v4 (formerly known as LEED 2012) is not “science-based” and does not use a “true consensus approach” to development.

LEED: “a tool to punish chemical companies”?

The latter document went to a group of legislators who have echoed ACC’s position in their own letter (PDF) to the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) pointing to “arbitrary chemical restrictions” and claiming LEED is “becoming a tool to punish chemical companies.” See Lloyd Alter’s incisive coverage at Treehugger for more background on the congressional letter to GSA.

Below, we look at each of AAC’s claims and separate the truth from the lies. But first…

Why this attack matters

The federal government, including the military, is the single largest user of the LEED rating systems. According to data provided by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), 7% of LEED-certified projects and 11.5% of those pending certification are federal government buildings. The public sector as a whole (federal, state, and local governments combined) makes up a whopping 27% of LEED-certified projects, and smaller governments could follow the federal lead on LEED. Use of LEED by these entities has, over the last 12 years, helped develop green practices and products across the industry.

Recognizing that GDP has significant limitations, Vermont has become the first state to formally embrace a "genuine progress indicator" as a metric of well-being.

With the tracking of a GPI, there may be more incentive to protect beautiful places like May Pond in northern Vermont.
Photo Credit: Alex Wilson

The second annual Slow Living Summit was held in Brattleboro this past week. Featuring such presenters as David Orr of Oberlin College, Woody Tasch, the founder of the organization Slow Money, and Charles Eisenstein, author of Sacred Economics, along with Governor Peter Shumlin, and Senator Bernie Sanders, the conference advanced alternatives to fast food, fast money, and the fast pace of life—with an emphasis on local food, local economies, resilient communities, and sustainability.

According to the Slow Living Summit website, slow living expresses the fundamental paradigm shift that is underway in this age, recognizing the transformative change from faster and cheaper, to slower and better—where quality, community and the future matter. It’s about slowing down and becoming more mindful of our basic connection with land, place, and people, taking the long view that builds a healthy and fulfilling way of life for the generations to come. It is about common good taking precedence over private gain.

While there were many inspiring sessions at the Slow Living Summit, I’ll focus here on just one: a session addressing alternative metrics of success: genuine progress indicators.

Mark Kalin
 

LEED consultants are paid to lend their expertise to achieve a project’s LEED certification goals. Their decisions focus on achieving credits and their participation is absolutely vital to the project, but some can actually work against the project's sustainability goals. Here are the top six problems I see.

#1 Discouraging bidding by specifying unrealistic LEED requirements

When a specification requires a regional source, a recycled content percentage, and certain certifications for a product, the specifier has to be certain that conforming products exist. On a recent project, the only bidder for the doors couldn’t actually meet all the requirements and put in a premium price. Other bidders declined to bid citing the requirements of the specifications. The worst outcome was a project that decided to abandon certification because of unnecessary requirements in the specifications that pushed the project over budget.

Although exterior paints have moved beyond lead and the most toxic solvents, new coatings contain biocides that may pose a different set of concerns.

Biocides play an important role in a paint's durability by protecting it from mildew, but biocides cannot make up for poor application practices.
Photo: Bob Cusumano, Coatings Consultants, Inc.

Most of us are familiar with the volatile solvents found in alkyd, or “oil-based” paints. These are typically hazardous airborne pollutants with large volumes of smog-causing VOCs. Coatings containing these solvents are regulated in many areas of the country, such as the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD).

Biocides in coatings, however, have largely flown under the regulatory radar in the U.S. In the June issue of Environmental Building News, we take a look at the environmental tradeoffs of exterior coatings (member link).

Innovative energy-savings products from the AIA National Convention this month.

The energy-saving Haiku ceiling fan in bamboo. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: Big Ass Fans

Last week, I wrote about a number of innovative window and glazing products I came across at the AIA Convention in Washington, DC earlier this month. Here are a few other products I came across with energy-saving features.

Haiku fans from Big Ass Fans

Despite the over-the-top company name, Big Ass Fans has been at the forefront of ceiling fan development for some years now. The company is known for it’s large, well, big-ass fans that are used in improving comfort in large commercial spaces—overhead fans that may have diameters of up to 24 feet. Now the company has introduced a line of smaller, residential-scale fans that work in homes.

Before getting into the specifics of the Haiku fans, it needs to be pointed out that ceiling fans don’t actually cool a space (i.e., lower the temperature). What they do is make a space more comfortable by evaporating moisture from our skin. If you are normally comfortable in a space at 75°F, with a gentle breeze you can be comfortable at 80° or even 82°F. Not only do ceiling fans not lower the air temperature, they actually raise the temperature slightly—from the waste heat generated by the electric motor (so turn that fan off when you leave the room!).