Building to the Passive House standard is hard enough for the pros. We get a peek into what happens when you try to go it alone.

Zip-taped and on piers. We were lucky enough to visit while seams and interior I beams were still visible.

The last BuildingGreen field trip we wrote about was at the Syracuse Center of Excellence. This week, we stayed a bit closer to home by heading to a Passive House that's currently under construction in our own backyard.

We've written often on Passive House (subscriber link), and it was great to see the zip-taped skin and 24-inch I-beam bones of one this week. Andrea and Ted call their new Brattleboro home an "Almost Passive House" since they're utilizing Passivhaus design ideas but are not yet sure whether it will meet the standard or if they're going to try for certification.

Mem's NaturHemp insulation offers comparable R-values to other batt insulations and is made from rapidly renewable hemp. It is made in Canada, where industrial hemp can be grown legally.

More new products from Greenbuild! This week we introduce you to some water-saving fixtures, recycled content products, a residential rainscreen system, and hemp insulation.

A couple weeks after Greenbuild, and we are still looking at products from a productive show.

Major manufacturers have the budgets for large exhibits on the expo floor to show off their latest offerings. I always enjoy these "booths" because the products are usually well tested and ready for market, but if you want to glimpse some of the real innovators in the industry, it is also worth touring the outer perimeter, where the smaller vendors set up shop.

By leveraging social media, a national campus competition helps students turn small commitments into large-scale change.

Combining social media with intercollegiate competition provides two forms of motivation: it shows participants that even small individual commitments can be part of a larger whole and also gives them the extra incentive of trying to do well in a contest with peers.

Back when I was in college, I learned lots of fascinating but impractical things. The difference between phrenology and phenomenology. The anatomy of a flatworm. Three compelling examples of why Victor Frankenstein was the true monster in the novel named after him.

I couldn't have told you what a plug load was, though, let alone why it was important.

I recently caught up with where the rest of the world was in 2005 by watching the hit documentary "March of the Penguins." It's been on my list for a while but when evening arrives I'm much more prone to watching films about people--people like James Bond, for example. But my wife and I had a baby two weeks ago, and suddenly movies narrated by Morgan Freeman seem like more appropriate family fare.

My only quibble with the movie is the name: it would be more accurate to call it "Commute of the Penguins." I had understood that the movie was about this extraordinary 70-mile walk that Emperor Penguins undertake once a year to get to their Antarctic breeding ground. I learned from the movie, though, that they go back and forth several times, with the parents taking turns to get food while the other does childcare. (Tip to dads: don't let your offspring freeze while mom is out catching fish for dinner.)

Part 2 in our series, "What Type of Insulation Should You Use?"

Even our savvy readers had some trouble with the GreenSpec insulation quiz. Does it really have to be this hard to choose the best insulation for your project?

While paying yet another $3000 heating oil bill this fall, a friend of mine decided it was time to bite the bullet and insulate her 97-year-old home. She mentioned to me offhand that her husband was interested in spray polyurethane foam (SPF) due to its unique performance characteristics: this material can serve as insulation, a continuous air barrier, and a vapor retarder. No other single material does all three.

Renovate, from Berkowitz, LLC. is a retrofit glazing that fits on the interior of single-pane commercial windows, improving the center of glass U-factor from 1.03 to 0.16.

Finding the top Greenbuild products among 900 exhibitors is no easy task. This week we introduce you to our favorite windows from the show.

Greenbuild expo floors are typically chaotic and crowded and so vast that it is difficult to find the innovators among the throngs of people, glaring LED signage, and innumerable booths. This year's Greenbuild in Toronto had almost 900 exhibitors spread out over two expo floors separated by a significant walk, which made the search that much more challenging.

Fortunately, I enjoy a good challenge--and the exercise--and I was rewarded by finding some interesting products destined for GreenSpec. For this installment, let's take a look at some windows.

What do over a thousand protests around the world last weekend in support of Occupy Wall Street have to do with Green Building?

Part 1: The Basics

Click to Read Part 2: Identifying Your Priorities

Choosing the best insulation to maximize performance and minimize environmental impacts is one of the most complex decisions you can make for a building project.

Insulation is a critical component of any building--especially one designed and built to minimize environmental impacts.

Determining what type of insulation to install--and how much of it--can be complex. No other building product category offers such a diverse range of materials and impacts to consider: environmental, human health, performance, and building science.

Are there any sustainable materials? What does that even mean?

Near the end of another exciting and exhausting Greenbuild, I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with three other women deeply invested in sustainable material management: Lindsay James, InterfaceFlor; Gail Vittori, Center for Maximum Building Potential Building Systems, and Sarah Brooks, Natural Step Canada. We started the session with the question "Are there any sustainable materials?" and ended with the question " What does material stewardship look like in a sustainable society?"

In between these two questions lives a world of aspiration and complexity followed, if you're lucky--or defiant--by deeper aspiration. The thing is, this stuff is hard. It's complicated and can be messy. Simple answers can lead to different problems. The deeper answers we need to figure out together--no one can single-handedly provide the roadmap.

The increased use of no-added-urea-formaldehyde (NAUF) wood products is great, but can occasionally cause unsightly "bleaching" of gorgeous veneers. What to do?

Exotic veneers like this deliciously buttery English sycamore can be devastatingly discolored by some types of non-urea-formaldehyde boards. Woodworking experts have found some solutions to the problem: it's all in how you put it together.

Medium-density fiberboard (MDF) and particleboard are the materials providing the backbone for much of what we see in finished interiors. They are usually composed of sawmill waste and some still use urea-formaldehyde (UF) binders. They are cheap, mill cleanly (MDF more so than particleboard), are made from a waste product, and are fairly durable if installed properly. We almost never see MDF or particleboard, as they are either painted or covered by glued-on veneers that can be designed to look like a myriad of different materials. But reach under a countertop or behind a bookshelf to find an unfinished edge, and you can feel the telltale roughness of particleboard or the glassy smoothness of MDF.