Let’s get right into it. As we walked into the immense PCBC exhibit halls both GE and Whirlpool proudly exhibited some of their Green appliances. Granted Whirlpool displayed what we would consider a green kitchen but Whirlpool only offers about 30 percent of Energy Star and other Green appliances. The percentage for GE remains even lower. We won’t even discuss GE’s overall environmental philosophy.
Being in the major appliance state [...]
A few weeks ago I offered my thoughts on green kitchens on a budget. Today, I want to focus on making your new kitchen as green as possible, without regard for cost. Remember, often the greenest options is to keep your current kitchen; many choose to repaint their cabinets with non-VOC paint or to tackle DIY cabinet projects. This article is for those building a whole new kitchen or are remodeling from the ground up. It’s up to you to determine the balance between what is the most green and what is the most practical for your project.
The three categories that determine a product’s green-ness are health, sustainability, and energy. Health takes into account the product’s offgassing of VOCs, or volatile organic compounds, especially urea-formaldehyde. In order to even consider something as green, it must contain very low to no VOCs. Sustainability looks at the life cycle of the materials used not just in the final product but in the manufacturing process as well. Products that are made from recycled materials or renewable resources fall into this category, as well as products whose manufacturing process embraces sustainability. Energy includes the water and energy usage of products such as plumbing fixtures and appliances, as well as the product’s embodied energy, which takes into account the energy used to produce and deliver the product.
Editor’s note: Drywall isn’t the sexiest of subjects, but, as our friends at GreenBuildingTalk note, it’s the most used interior building material out there… and also has a substantial environmental footprint. Serious Materials new EcoRock product is attracting attention among a number of audiences… including investors. This post was originally published on Wednesday, June 4, 2008.
Serious Materials, an indoor building material manufacturer, successfully raised an impressive $50 million in late 2007 to support its efforts in bringing it’s new green dry wall product to the marketplace. The venture capital funding is in response to Serious Material’s 2006 research and development success that discovered a way to replace the energy-intensive calcine process used to make drywall. What the company came up with was a gypsum-free drywall they named EcoRock.
You may not think much about drywall, but it is the most common indoor building material in the United States. It does have a dirty secret, though. Typical drywall consist of gypsum, a calcined product which, like cement, needs to be cooked. Basically, it’s calcined (a thermal treatment process) and then dried. That energy-intensive process generates some 20 to 25 billion pounds of CO2 a year. The energy used to make a standard sheet of drywall is 100,000 BTUs or more per sheet, 4×8. When factoring in how much the drywall industry produces a year as a whole: upwards of 30 to 40 billion square feet in the U.S. alone, the CO2 emissions become staggering. In fact, the drywall manufacturing process produces 51 million tons of greenhouse gases and consumes almost 1 percent of all U.S. Energy annually.
Remodeling a kitchen is an expensive process, and those who seek environmentally friendly products but are operating under a tight budget may feel they can’t afford to go green. Fortunately, the opposite is true. While there are many excellent choices for those for whom money is no object, some lesser known and much less expensive options offer the same environmental benefits. With a little knowledge and research, remodeling green can be easy and within your budget.
When seeking green kitchen cabinets, countertops, and flooring, the three areas to consider are materials, emissions, and whether it is a regional product. Each of these can have environmental advantages, and while finding products that qualify in multiple areas is certainly possible, some seek a kitchen with all recycled products or one with the minimum of harmful emissions. It is up to you to determine which area of green is most important to you.
Relaxation!
Fashion!
Celebrity!
Botox!
Booze!
Interiors!
Green!
Yes, most of this list refers to the Brit series Ab Fab but if Eddy and Patsy turned in their smokes and cocktails for organic and sustainable munchies then they too would be excited for the opening of the Epi Center MedSpa, the first LEED certified MedSpa in the country. (Another LEED spa exists in D.C. but it isn’t a MedSpa). So, because fictional characters from a long ago Brit TV series couldn’t check out this just opened San Fran based spa, I decided that I had to do it.
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.
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.
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.
Daahling you look fab and Green. That’s what people may be saying after experiencing treatments in San Francisco’s eco-chic Epi Center MedSpa. Yes, the whole concept sounds soooo Los Angeles to me, too. Some of us don’t even get the whole mani-pedi thing so it might take a little coaxing to have some lipo or botox thing, even at this truly green spa. A facial might not be for all of us but [...]
With little fanfare, Kimball Office opened their new San Francisco FiDi showroom with a quiet, green splash. Although they haven’t achieved LEED-CI status yet, they hope to gain gold certification soon. The architectural and design team over at Huntsman Architectural Group created a green space that we noticed as we stepped in. The design team reused stair posts to create the dramatic floor and 100% of the architectural wood elements are [...]
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