Green Options

Emissions and Indoor Air Quality

While sustainability and energy efficiency often dominate the green building conversation, the issue that can have the most immediate impact on your family’s health is indoor air quality.  Green building programs seek to limit your family’s exposure to Volatile Organic Compounds, or VOCs, that exist in some building materials and furniture.  Continued exposure to these VOCs has caused health problems ranging from headaches and nausea to cancer.  Green building programs like the US Green Building Council’s LEED for Homes and LEED for New Construction encourage builders to eliminate these emissions whenever possible.

If building green comes at a slightly higher cost it is because many of these harmful chemicals are so widespread that finding products without them can be a challenge.  In fact, it is the presence of these chemicals in some products that makes them cheaper, as in wood products containing urea-formaldehyde.

Those looking to improve the indoor air quality of their current house can make several changes that will significantly reduce VOCs.

Some sources of harmful emissions in the home:

As Bugs Bunny used to say “What’s up Doc?” In the newly opened chiropractic office the reply would be “green”, as in green building. Yes, green building continues its march into the homes and offices across America and some doctors realize that sustainable interiors means healthy patients (or at least healthier). Take for instance, the new Executive Express Chiropractic designed by Martinkovic Milford Architects and built by Peacock [...]

Can your hardwood floors contribute to global warming?  Which hardwoods are certified by the Forest Stewardship Council?  Are some types of bamboo greener than others?  Eco Timber’s Eco-Friendly Flooring Guide is a valuable source for information on sustainable hardwood flooring and a must read for any green builder.  The Richmond, California based company has promoted responsible harvesting of timber and sustainable practices such as reclaiming and salvaging wood (their guide tells you the difference between reclaimed and salvaged wood) since 1992.

Topics in the guide range from legal and illegal logging and responsible forestry to the presence of formaldehyde and other volatile organic compounds in the wood and adhesives.  Eco Timber tackles every step in the process from subfloors to floor pads to the panels themselves.  Looking for a specific hardness of wood?  They’ve got a scale.  Do you already have a hardwood floor and want advice on green care and maintenance?  Eco Timber has a section on maintenance, surface scratching, and refinishing.

When mention of an “earthen floor” is made, one might imagine a dusty, drab dirt floor. Earthen floors are far from this, however; instead they are very elegant, durable, inexpensive, and ecologically sustainable solutions to a typical floor installation. They are varied in construction, but the idea and ingredients are essentially the same across the board. Earthen (or adobe) floors are poured or compacted combinations of sand, clay, straw, and sometimes crushed rock, with pleasantly smooth surfaces resistant to wear and tear, and capable of storing heat from the sun.

There is no one way to construct an earthen floor. They are a natural option for straw bale or cob buildings, but they can even be installed on concrete slabs or preexisting wood floors, as along as the framework is strong enough to support the heavy weight of many buckets full of earthen material.

A shift in locale (from San Francisco to San Jose) did nothing to change the energy and the recent West Coast Green. As we any conference we tried to see as much new buildings materials, spy as much green washing and attend as many seminars as possible without suffering from green overload.

After scoring the main trade floor, we hit the Lawrence Group designed and SG Blocks built, Harbinger [...]

This post is a follow-up to The Fight Over Radon in Granite Countertops Heats Up, which will provide some background information on the granite/radon issue.

With the legion of both deniers and alarmists out there attempting to monopolize the discussion over the safety of granite countertops, it is difficult to find unbiased information.  Peruse the comments in the above post and you can see the discussion has devolved into name calling.  The deniers, many of whom work in the granite industry, blast any insinuation that granite could be dangerous as “fear-mongering” and put down the current research as “junk science.”  The alarmists, many of whom sell competing countertops, argue that consumers shouldn’t take the risk that comes with granite.  The truth, as with most heated arguments, can be found somewhere in the middle.

Whether you are developing a new green building product or have recently discovered that the product you have been selling for years satisfies green building program requirements, there comes a point where you must state on your literature which green building (probably LEED) credits your product satisfies or contributes to. It is at this point that usually honest businesses declare their products greener than they really are, crossing the line from green to greenwashing in order to reach the widest green market. Maybe you didn’t understand the requirements for the individual credits. Maybe someone told you to declare as many credits as you possibly could and let the LEED auditors sort them out. Maybe you’re just throwing everything that could conceivably be green against the wall to see what sticks. What you have done is greenwashed your product, which may have been green enough to begin with. But once you greenwashed it, you’ve sent a message that your company a) may not be experienced with green building or b) may not be trustworthy.

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.