Concrete and other cementitious materials have both environmental advantages and disadvantages. As builders and designers, should we be looking for alternatives or embracing concrete over competing materials?

A new report from BuildingGreen, What You Need to Know About Concrete and Green Building, takes a look at how these materials are made, presents the key environmental considerations relating to their production, use, and eventual disposal, and describes ways to reduce their environmental impacts.

LED replacement lamps look super-efficient on payback charts and utility bills, but they may be sucking more power than you realize.

LED replacement lamps like this one from Cree  have a high power factor; those intended for residential use often don't.
Photo Credit: Cree, Inc.

GreenSpec and EBN have reviewed a number of LED replacement lamps over the years and have reported on improvements in efficacy (light output in lumens per watt of electricity consumption), color, and light quality; lower costs; and its increasing acceptance.

In the EBN article LEDs: The Future is Here, we explored briefly how LEDs interact with the power supply, but we were surprised when an email from Stefan Bernath, Alberta infrastructure energy coordinator, came in describing how LEDs were affecting his building’s power supply.

His email got me wondering if power quality and LEDs are going to be a bigger problem in the future.

Understanding wood stoves and wood heat so that you can educate your clients.

Vermont Castings Encore-NC wood stove with an EPA emissions rating of 0.7 grams per hour. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: Vermont Castings

I’ve been heating primarily with wood since I bought our house 31 years ago, though there were a few years following our installation of an oil boiler when wood consumption dropped considerably.

Wood heat has a mixed record, though. It’s a renewable fuel and, assuming that new trees grow up to replace those cut for firewood, it is carbon-neutral, meaning that it doesn’t have a net contribution to global warming. But burning firewood produces a lot of air pollution; in fact, it’s usually our dirtiest fuel.

Fortunately, there’s a lot we can do to reduce the pollution generated by wood burning—and boost the efficiency.

Our friend and mentor, Malcolm Lewis, has passed away

Malcolm Lewis will be sorely missed.
Photo Credit: Harvey Mudd College

Malcolm Lewis, Ph.D., the founder of Constructive Technologies Group, a member of the EBN Advisory Board, and long a quiet leader in the green building movement, died on October 13^th of bladder cancer.

I first got to know Malcolm when I served on the U.S. Green Building Council board of directors and observed his ability to craft consensus and find agreement on often-heated issues. He was the soft-spoken trouble-shooter on whom the board came to rely to get us out of trouble.

Along with serving on the USGBC’s board, Malcolm chaired the Council’s Technical and Scientific Advisory Committee (TSAC), which was charged with defusing tense issues, such as whether LEED should include a credit for avoiding PVC and how to factor in both ozone-depletion potential and global warming potential of refrigerants.

The Third World in U.S. cities, the greenest mile ever built in Chicago, and transplanting a really big tree in Texas.

This historic oak tree is thriving in its new location after a Texas city moved it four months ago.
Photo Credit: City of League City, Texas

More imagery from the war on waste

Lloyd Alter returns this week with more WWII posters, these ones admonishing us to turn down our thermostats and wear long johns. Lamenting that the values expressed in these posters are now considered “un-American,” Alter adds, “Now we fight our wars on credit and nobody has to go without anything. But in difficult times, doing with less makes sense, saves money and reduces our carbon footprints. Still good advice.”

Get with the program, people, and put on a sweater!

Greener industries are growing faster

Despite a lackluster economy and few strong policies to support them, industries with a higher percentage of green workers have grown at a faster rate than others over the last decade, says a new Economic Policy Institute study. According to Stephen Lacey at Think Progress, there is an ongoing push to broaden the definition of green jobs beyond just those in the renewable energy sector; at the same time, he says, “the deeper the ‘greening’ goes in industries, the more jobs are created.”

How China is affecting the world’s photovoltaic industry.

Workers at a Suntech factory in China. Due to the glut in PV, Suntech has closed a quarter of it's manufacturing capacity.
Photo Credit: Peter Parks, Getty Images for the New York Times

When China dives into a technology, it does so in a big way. Nowhere is this more the case than in photovoltaic (PV) panel manufacturing, where dramatic growth has not only taken a toll on other manufacturers around the world, but also now threatens its own PV industry through rampant oversupply.

This has significant implications for us here in the U.S.—both good and bad.

What happened?

China learned how to manufacture PV modules from leading-edge manufacturers in the U.S., Germany, and elsewhere, then figured out how to do it better and much cheaper than anyone else. In just a few years China came to dominate world PV manufacturing, leaving a trail of bankrupt Western manufacturers in its wake.

Healthy purchasing in Oregon, why unfixable windows are a waste of money, when driving was a war crime, and more.

Can we bring back the days when car pooling was patriotic?
Photo Credit: American Legion

Does your state make the energy-efficiency grade?

Some people look forward to the Oscars, but for us it’s green building awards season! The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) just released its annual state-by-state scorecard of energy efficiency, with Massachusetts keeping the top spot this year and Oklahoma surging up the list as the “most improved.” How did your state do? (Mine, Vermont, is #5.)

Tell us what’s in there or we’re not buying

When I was a kid, there was a really annoying series of Prego spaghetti sauce commercials where everyone kept demanding to know if their favorite ingredients were in this new-fangled “jar sauce”; the parents just kept repeating, “It’s in there!”

Getting chemical information from product manufacturers can be annoying in exactly the same way, and Portland, Oregon, is calling a halt with a new Healthy Purchasing Initiative. Just tell them what’s in there already, or there’s no sale—period.

Did you miss the live webcast? Get it here for free—and take a quiz for continuing education credits too.

Guinea pigs everywhere want to know: do you know as much about toxic chemicals as a building professional should?

Nadav Malin and I had a great time presenting our webcast featuring BuildingGreen's new handbook, “Toxic Chemicals in Buildings: How to Find & Avoid the Worst Offenders,” to almost 500 participants in late September.

If you missed it—or if, like many audience members hoped, you wanted to see some of the slides again—now’s your chance. We've posted the video at the bottom of this page.

What it’s about

This webcast is designed to help you sort through the constant barrage of information about everything out there that “might be killing you” and help your clients build healthier buildings. Topics include:

The new Declare "nutrition label" and database will streamline the ardous task of finding Living Building Challenge-compliant products.

The Declare label lists ingredients with color coding, making it really easy to see which ingredients might be a concern. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: International Living Future Institute

After teasing the Living Building Challenge community for a couple of years with promises of an ingredient label for products, the International Living Future Institute has launched Declare.

The branding and basic premise of the program are as we described back in January, in the Environmental Building News feature article “The Product Transparency Movement: Peeking Behind the Corporate Veil.” While the original description focused on the idea of a product “label,” however, in practice most people will interact with Declare as an online list of red-list-ready products.

Wood smoke is still a guilty pleasure in the northern U.S. and Canada. But newer wood stove technologies produce less smoke—and less guilt.

This gravity-fed pellet stove from Wiseway produces few emissions and uses no electricity.
Photo Credit: Wiseway Pellet Stoves

I love fall and the start of heating season here in Vermont: the leaves are changing colors, there’s frost on the grass, and the morning fog mingles with smoke from wood stoves, its scent triggering memories of home, family, warmth, and the pending winter.

There must be some primeval connection to smoke that I find comforting, yet I know that wood smoke is also a significant source of pollution in the form of fine particulates that are lung irritants and asthmagens; sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides that cause acid rain; and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), benzene, formaldehyde, and dioxin that are carcinogenic. Fortunately, there are a number of newer wood stoves available that significantly reduce these emissions.