Green Options

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Seemingly relegated to airport and stadium bathrooms, touchless faucets are starting to make their way into homes, with plumbing manufacturers moving to offer more design options.  It’s an idea that may seem strange at first, but touchless faucets are actually quite practical, especially for a children’s bathroom.  They are clearly beneficial in that they limit the spread of bacteria, but they also save water.  Consider how much water is wasted while brushing teeth.  A touchless faucet ensures that water isn’t running the entire time someone is brushing.  Combined with a water-saving aerator, touchless faucets can save a substantial amount of water.  And, since the water is set at a specific temperature, having a touchless faucet removes the risk of a child scalding him or herself accidentally. 

Touchless faucets are also available for kitchens, though consumers will need to do some research to make sure they are getting something that fits their habits.  Kitchen touchless faucets clearly carry the same health and water conservation benefits but most are set at one temperature, which might be inconvenient.  Also, if the faucet does not have an override switch, the homeowner will have to hold his or her hand over the sensor while filling a pot or doing dishes, though perhaps running water while doing dishes is a habit we should reconsider.

As I mentioned in my KBIS Report, I was struck by the sizes of bathtubs on display at this year’s kitchen and bath trade show. Though green was king thoughout most of the convention, companies that pitch themselves as catering to a luxury market seem to be sending the message that if you have enough money to waste water in giant bathtubs, then they’d be happy to sell you some, as if money absolves you of any kind of environmental responsibility.

It’s a hard statistic to nail down, but a person uses between fifty and seventy gallons of water each time he or she takes a bath. This number includes water wasted waiting for the desired temperature as well as hot water used to return the cooling water to the desired temperature. Compare that number to a five minute shower, which uses around twenty five gallons of water, possibly half that if the shower uses a flow restrictor. Clearly, if water conservation is the main goal, a quick shower is the answer, but let’s not throw out the bathtub with the bathwater just yet.

On Tuesday, April 22, the Sundance Channel will present as part of their The Green series “The Greening of Southie,” a documentary on the construction of Boston’s first green residential building, the Macallan, which is seeking a LEED gold rating. If the idea of watching a documentary on the construction of a condo building doesn’t sound too exciting to you, I cannot recommend this film enough to anyone who is or wants to be a part of green building. It presents the challenges and excitement of building green with equal measures of idealism and cynicism, juxtaposing the suits who see the project as ideas and paper with the laborers who actually have to put the building together. As the project grows, the two come closer to understanding the other side.

Fittingly, the film begins with a group of incredulous workers in hard hats listening to a project manager describe what a green building is. It turns out he doesn’t exactly know himself. “What does it give you?,” “what’s the point?” they ask. “I can’t answer that exactly,” he responds. But the skeptical laborers make jokes, dismissing the whole idea. After the manager explains that the condos will have “double flush” toilets, one man jokes, “I use that a lot - that system. One never seems to do the job.”

As I walked around last year’s Kitchen and Bath Industry Show in Las Vegas, I asked where I could find the green products. I was encouraged to put on my walking shoes and make the trek to a minor hall where I found about twenty square feet devoted to five or six products that left little impression on me. Much has changed, it seems, in only one year. Green is the buzzword at this year’s show, helped in no small part by the host city, Chicago, showing off its green-ness through LEED building projects going up within sight of the convention center. Just about every booth displayed information on how green their products were. “Green building has become the spark that has added some life to this industry,” a representative from MasterBrand Cabinets told me.

Water saving innovators Kohler and TOTO made green the focus of their booths, proudly displaying the Watersense stickers on their high efficiency toilets. TOTO, who recycles 100% of their china, has developed a universal toilet bowl whose tank can be interchanged from a 1.6 gallon per flush to a 1.28 gpf e-tank.

Under the FAQs for LEED for Homes is a question on whether the US Green Building Council has a LEED program for remodeling. The response is that they are “in active consideration.” It seems they’ve done more than just consider. Last month at the Interiors 08 conference in New Orleans, the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) unveiled REGREEN, a joint program with the USGBC to provide guidelines for remodeling green. REGREEN will target residential designers, construction professionals, and homeowners. Though the USGBC was involved in its creation, REGREEN will be vastly different than LEED. Instead of assigning a point value to each green product or practice, REGREEN will be used more as a resource of what remodelers have done in the past to make homes more energy efficient, healthy, and sustainable.

The Meyer Company of St. Louis, Missouri, is quietly undertaking a green building experiment called Patrician Place, the results of which could have far reaching implications in the field of green building. In partnership with the St. Louis County Office of Community Development and Architect; Garen Miller, Inc., The Meyer Company is building ten homes under three different green building programs, gauging the energy efficiency of each. After a year of testing the energy efficiency of the homes of Patrician Place, an affordable housing development for lower income families, St. Louis County will have a benchmark for future housing projects.

If you attended the Greenbuild conference in Chicago last November, you would have been hard pressed to find a green cabinet manufacturer among the exhibitors - but you couldn’t turn around without bumping into a new type of green countertop. They nearly outnumbered the waterless urinals. Over the past couple of decades, countertops have evolved from tried-and-true laminate to bold new materials and colors of every taste and budget. It’s not surprising to see the creativity of new countertops go hand-in-hand with the emergence of green products. Below are several types of green countertops, from least expensive to most. Feel free to give any feedback you have on any of these products.

Laminate - Easily the least expensive green countertop, laminate countertops made with recycled wood particle board (like SkyBlend) and non-VOC (Volatile Organic Compound) adhesives are ideal for building projects that are seeking green certification at the lowest cost. It may take a while to track down a local fabricator offering green laminate countertops, but they shouldn’t cost more than a few dollars more a square foot than regular laminate tops.

In a move that had many residents bewildered, the Raleigh, North Carolina, city council voted to ban garbage disposals in all new construction and to prohibit residents from replacing broken garbage disposals. The ordinance, which took effect this week, has its roots in over 100 large sewage spillovers in the last three years within the city of Raleigh. The cost of such cleanups and the threatened fines from state agencies forced the council to implement the ban. What’s the connection between garbage disposals and sewage spillovers? Grease. The city’s sewage system builds up with grease until the pipes need to be cleaned out with a special truck - or a spillover occurs. Reduce the amount of food and grease going down kitchen sinks, so the Raleigh city council believes, and you reduce the costly cleanups.

Since its inception in 1992, the ENERGY STAR program, a joint program run by the Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of Energy, has sought to protect the environment by promoting energy efficiency. Starting with personal computers and monitors, ENERGY STAR established energy usage guidelines that set the bar for energy conservation. Over the years the ENERGY STAR program has brought just about anything that uses energy or water under its umbrella, saving an estimated $14 billion in energy costs in 1996. LEED for Homes and the NAHB’s Model Green Building Guidelines both encourage green home builders to use ENERGY STAR rated appliances. For those seeking additional credits - and energy savings - both green building programs encourage the use of very efficient clothes washers. But what exactly is a very efficient clothes washer?

A very efficient clothes washer saves both water and energy. Water Factor (WF) measures the number of gallons per cycle per cubic foot that the washer uses. In order to qualify as a very efficient clothes washer, it must have a WF of less than 5.5. To put that number into perspective, washers that have a WF of 8, the maximum for an ENERGY STAR labeled clothes washer, use up to 10,000 gallons of water a year. One of Asko’s UltraCare clothes washers boasts of a WF of 3.4, using under 3,000 gallons of water a year. Granted, at 1.9 cubic feet the Asko model is quite small, but if water efficiency is the goal, Asko sets the standard.

So you’re building or remodeling green, and you’re trying to decide what to do about the cabinets.

Scanning the requirements for various green building programs, you seem to have two choices. First, you can try to find cabinets made with Forest Stewardship Council certified wood from companies like Neil Kelly Cabinets. But if the company is not local, the packaging and shipping of these products may cut into their green-ness. Or you could try out agrifiber based cabinets, like Humabuilt Wheatcore Cabinets, which have arisen due to the demand for green cabinets.

Unfortunately, when faced with these choices, many before you have given up on the idea of green cabinets and gone for possibly cheaper, more convenient plain old wood cabinets from their nearby kitchen and bath dealer. If you find yourself in the same boat, chances are there’s a lesser known green option waiting for you there. Many large cabinet manufacturers across the country are certified as members of an extensive green program called KCMA-ESP.