Innovative Products and Technology from the Greenbuild Expo Our product editors pick some winners from the expo floor at Green-build 2013 while raising questions about some materials.
By BuildingGreen’s Editors
Even if you did make it to the expo floor at Greenbuild 2013 in Philadel-phia, it’s next to impossible to cover the whole expo and ferret out the true standout products. That’s why we sent a team to do the work and brought back this overview of highlights.
Fair warning: EBN usually focuses our coverage on commercially available products, and usually on products that we would actually recommend. We’ve relieved ourselves of those standards here, including some forward-looking innovations—and some that we’ll wait and see on.
Structural and Insulation ProductsWe are continually on the lookout for products that can improve building performance while reducing the toxic burdens of our most common insula-tion materials. We saw some promis-ing innovations at Greenbuild.
Kingspan IPN-Nano Halogen-Free Foam Insulation
Kingspan Insulated Panels has intro-duced the industry’s first halogenated flame retardant (HFR)-free plastic foam insulation, IPN-Nano. Available in the company’s Benchmark Engi-neered Façade Systems, IPN-Nano has taken the chlorine out of Tris(1,3-dichloro-2-propyl)phosphate, or Tris (a common flame retardant found in most polyiso foam insulation), while still meeting fire codes.
EBN has not yet obtained details on whether the new formula has its own toxicity concerns, but removing chlo-rine is a promising step, and Kingspan has been out front in the material transparency movement, being one of the first to have completed environ-mental product declarations (EPDs) and health product declarations (HPDs). According to Paul Bertram, Kingspan’s director of environment and sustainability, working on the HPD for its panels was a key motiva-tor for removing the flame retardants.
The “nano” in IPN-Nano refers to the small cell structure of the foam, which increases its density and should also increase the R-value and overall performance of the panels, though exact R-values are not yet available. This polyiso foam also uses pentane as the blowing agent, which has zero ozone-depletion potential and a rela-tively low global warming potential of seven.
The company will be transitioning to IPN-Nano in the coming year as man-ufacturing locations switch over—and some Kingspan products will continue to contain Tris, so you’ll have to speci-fy the HFR-free foam to avoid it.
Mycelium-Based Building Products from Ecovative
On the cool quotient, Ecovative De-sign’s prototype products at Green-build were clear winners. We’ve covered Ecovative’s unique myceli-um-based packaging in the past (see our green building wish list) and have been hoping to see replacements for
petrochemical-based foam plastic products emerge from the company’s research activities.
Ecovative’s founders have figured out how to grow mycelium (the under-ground portion of mushrooms, often appearing as fine, white tendrils) quickly in rice hulls or other cellulos-ic waste material and form a strong, lightweight material. After growing for a while under optimal moisture and temperature conditions, the ma-terial is dried, which deactivates the mycelium. Their molded packaging has been a cost-effective replacement for Styrofoam for several years now.
At Greenbuild, Ecovative showed off its new Myco Foam Insulated Sheath-ing. One sample we picked up is 1-⅝” thick with a rough texture showing some biobased fibers and an off-white tofu-colored surface. Its specifications are reasonable in comparison with foam insulation, including an R-value of R-3.6/inch and a Class A fire rating with no added flame retardants.
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Photo: Ecovative
Ecovative is offering not only an insulated sheathing but also grown-in-place insulation and a particleboard alternative.
Ecovative has licensed the technology to Fortifiber Building Systems Group for further product development, test-ing, and hopefully 2014 production.
Grow-In-Place Mushroom Insulation. How about growing insulation in place? Ecovative has been testing its MycoFoam for in situ insulating, prob-ably in a pre-fab factory setting. The foam takes about a month to grow, ac-cording to the company; then it would be allowed to dry out, producing an airtight structural wall assembly. The company built a tiny house in 2013 to demonstrate this system, and builders interested in trying it out can purchase materials for it today.
Myco Board. For a denser, particle-board-like product, Ecovative can vary the crop-waste fiber content and produce a compressed particleboard product. The lightweight sample we picked up is just over a half-inch thick. Ecovative says that Myco Board can be molded into unique shapes—for producing furniture components, for example—reducing waste and dust from milling. Myco Board can be faced with veneer or even grown into ve-neers, avoiding synthetic adhesives.
Windows and DoorsInnovative companies continue to improve the performance of windows and doors, as shown by several prod-ucts shown off at Greenbuild.
Marvin Exterior Roller Shades
The Europeans long ago figured out that regulating solar heat gain is best
done outside—before sunlight and heat come indoors. Exterior roller shades and roller shutters are common on European windows, but they have been very slow to catch on in the U.S.
That might be changing. One of the leading U.S. window makers, Marvin, has introduced a new exterior roller shade. The window-integrated shade, produced through a partnership with Hunter Douglas, fits into a track in the window jambs and can be operated remotely from indoors.
The system includes semi-rigid PVC (vinyl) slats either connected by a flexible, exterior-grade, acrylic fabric backing or as separate louvers at-tached to insect-screen backing (the latter allowing some visibility through the shade). The slats or louvers are available in five colors, and in the case of the version with fabric backing, there are corresponding fabric colors.
Each blind rolls up into a hidden, integral “head box” at the top of the window, so the blind is fully concealed when not in use. Marvin has done a great job integrating the shading sys-tem into the window.
The motorized openers can be pro-grammed to operate automatically based on time of day or controlled by occupants as needed. Marvin wasn’t able to give us cost information, but the product certainly isn’t cheap. Also, with the vinyl construction, the shades will not provide much security or pro-tection from hurricanes, as some roller shutters provide.
SageGlass Simplicity
With an impressive booth setup com-plete with a bar, Sage Electrochromics chose Greenbuild to debut SageGlass Simplicity—the latest update to its electronically tintable exterior glazing, which has been around for about a de-cade now. SageGlass blocks solar heat gain using thin-film ceramic coatings that darken with a low-voltage electric current. It can adjust to variable tints on demand, from 60% visible light transmission when fully clear to 1% when fully tinted, helping to cut heat-ing and cooling loads. However, in applications like skylights or cleresto-
ry windows, installing the necessary wiring can be difficult.
The new Simplicity line addresses this problem by using solar cells and Internet connectivity to create a wireless system. A thin strip of solar PV installed on the glass pane pow-ers the electronic tinting, and a small battery provides backup power for up to two days. Tinting can be controlled automatically with light sensors or a building management system, or on demand using an iPad app. Products in this line are expected to become available mid-2014 for commercial curtainwalls, windows, and skylights. Already available is a new product called LightZone, which, like trifo-cal glasses, allows three sections of a single pane of glass to have different tints.
Wasco EcoSky3 Skylight
The residential and commercial skylight company Wasco—based in Maine, rather than Wisconsin or Minnesota, like most of the rest of the window industry—has been at the
Photo: Marvin Windows and Doors
This window-integrated shade from Marvin, produced through a partnership with Hunter Douglas, fits into a track in the window jambs and can be operated remotely.
Photo: SageGlass
If utilized together, SageGlass Simplicity and Lightzone technologies create one pane of glass that is wirelessly tinted to three different levels.
forefront of skylight energy perfor-mance for years.
At Greenbuild, Wasco showed off its new EcoSky3 skylight. This bub-ble-type unit has an acrylic outer glaz-ing and an inner glazing panel filled with 10 mm of Lumira silica aerogel. (Lumira, made by the Cabot Corpora-tion, was previously called Nanogel.) The EcoSky3 unit skylight offers a remarkable U-factor of 0.25, SHGC of 0.34, and visible transmittance (VT) of 0.43. This is the only unit skylight to meet requirements of the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) in all climate zones. According to Was-
co, thermal properties of the skylight outperform the leading competitor three-fold. It is available in both dome and pyramid styles in sizes ranging from 25-¼” x 25-¼” to 95-½” x 95-½”, including both square and rectangular designs.
Wasco also showed off its Parans fiber-optic daylighting system, which we’ve covered in the past, and tri-ple-glazed roof windows with U-fac-tor and solar heat gain coefficient (SHGC) both below 0.3 (making them great for overhead applications).
Water EfficiencyEven as many key plumbing fixtures have been bumping up against a ceil-ing in terms of their water efficiency, some companies are finding new ways to improve water conservation and resource recovery at the whole-build-ing level.
Rosie’s Natural Way
Rosie’s Natural Way distributes a urine-diverting system, called the Dubbletten, and a composting system, called the Aquatron. The Dubblet-
ten is a low-flow toilet with a split bowl that separates urine from other waste at the outset; solids go in the back and liquids in the front. A 1.0 gallon flush is used for the back, and an optional “spritz” (0.01 gallons) is provided for the urinal. Urine goes directly to a storage tank, where it can be collected for use as a nitrogen-rich fertilizer. (See “Urine Separation: The Next Wave of Ecological Wastewater Treatment.”)
The Aquatron attaches to the back bowl of the Dubbletten or can be used to retrofit a conventional toilet into a composting toilet. A non-mechanical separator installed at an angle below the toilet uses centrifugal force gener-ated by the momentum of the flushing water to separate 98% of liquids and flush water from solid waste. Solid waste is diverted to a biological cham-ber, where it eventually composts; the company recommends using compost-ing worms to speed the process and decrease the volume of waste. Liquid waste can then be directed through a UV filter and a phosphorous trap, filtering it to meet standards for use as graywater, according to the compa-
ThermaWrap from DuPontDuPont didn’t have a Greenbuild presence, but we found their concurrent announcement of a housewrap that also provides R-5 insulation worth noting. There’s a fine line between combination products that are a resounding success (can you imagine your phone not having a cam-era?) versus the many duds out there (sporks). Tyvek ThermaWrap R5.0, which essentially combines Tyvek with a polyester insulation, has the potential to make sense: building paper should be installed continuously, and a continuous layer of exterior insulation reduces thermal bridging through framing members. Other environmental features of the product are 20% pre-consumer recycled content, by weight—from Tyvek—and a Class A fire rat-ing with no added flame retardants.
However, although DuPont’s installation guidelines (PDF) state that ThermaWrap should not be compressed, which would reduce its R-value, the document lags in provid-ing details on how to install cladding over ThermaWrap without doing so. Jim Ash, marketing manager for new business development at DuPont, explained to EBN that the product is currently compatible with vinyl, brick, or stone cladding. He says that vinyl siding “hangs off the nails in a normal installation,” rather than being held tight
to the sheathing, so installing it over ThermaWrap sim-ply requires a longer fastener. Ash told EBN that brick or stone ties will compress the wrap down to 3/16”, reduc-ing its insulation value to R-1, but he argued that overall R-value is maintained, in part because the R-value of the ThermaWrap is actually R-5.4, leaving some slack for vari-ations in installation. DuPont is working on solutions to make ThermaWrap compatible with lapped siding, such as clapboards, which Ash said would likely involve some kind of furring strip.
We’d like to see more information from practitioners: does ThermaWrap hold up in real-world conditions? DuPont should also provide more installation guidelines and more information from thermal imaging and hot-box testing, showing that the insulating benefit really does hold up to fasteners.
The product comes with a cost premium: Ash said that it would cost seven to ten times the price of regular Tyvek, and about 70% more than an inch of polystyrene foam in-sulation. A better comparison, Ash says, is to the installed cost of housewrap plus an inch of extruded polystyrene, which he says works out to a 20% premium for ThermaW-rap.
Count this in the “spork” category for now.
Photo: Wasco Products, Inc.
The EcoSky3 skylight has an acrylic outer glazing and an inner glazing panel filled with Lumira silica aerogel.
ny. In testing, the number of bacteria present after exposure to the UV light was below Sweden’s National Food Administration’s limits for drinking water; however, utilizing this water for irrigation or for toilets in the U.S. might take some wrangling with health codes.
The Dubbletten has the look and feel of a conventional toilet and has the po-tential for widespread adoption (if you can wrap your mind around the split bowl), and the Aquatron can be in-stalled up to 196 feet (60m) away from the toilet, making it flexible to install in new construction or as a retrofit uti-lizing a basement or crawlspace. The system can also accommodate larger uses, such as apartment buildings or schools with composting chambers up to 3,170 gallons (12,000 liters) that are designed for 10 to 12 toilets. Accord-ing to Stubby Warmbold, founder of Rosie’s Natural Way, the system has drawn attention from those interested in the Living Building Challenge, and the system designers are currently developing a third component to natu-rally filter the “graywater” byproduct into drinking water using peat moss.
TOTO Urinal Retrofit, Zurn Om-ni-Flow Urinal, and Kohler Stew-ard Hybrid
We were so excited about the urinal offerings at Greenbuild that we have to mention three. TOTO is offering a high-efficiency urinal with a 0.125 gallon per flush (gpf) that can easily replace standard full-size units. The Commercial Washout High-Efficiency UT105U model has top or back spud inlets of ¾”, making it a simple retrofit option. In fact, we installed this model at our BuildingGreen office and have been very satisfied with operation so far. TOTO recommends also purchas-ing its 1/8 GPF EcoPower Flush Valve for best performance.
Zurn’s Z5755 Omni Flow urinal pro-vides the unique feature of accommo-dating multiple flow rates from 0.125 gpf to 1.0 gpf. This allows plumbers to install multiple low-flow urinals and set one or two to high flow to help move water down the line, preventing uric salt build-up and pipe corrosion. The urinal comes in a standard size for retrofitting, and the flush valve has a 10-year life on the battery.
Finally, Kohler, manufacturer of the Steward Waterless Urinal, has released a new hybrid model that looks like the waterless but is plumbed so that it flushes. At 0.125 gpf, it is still efficient but could be used like the Zurn to clear the pipes for waterless urinals installed down the line. Kohler is also promoting its Hybrid Energy System, a hybrid energy cell for flushometers, with approxi-mately a 30-year lifespan, accord-ing to the compa-
ny. This technology uses a layered capacitor to power the flushometer by collecting the small electrical discharg-es of the battery, leaving the cell with nearly full storage.
Graywater Harvesting from Wa-haso
The arrival of an NSF standard for on-site residential and commercial gray-water systems (NSF/ANSI 350) in late 2011 signified the potential, at least, for a new era in water reuse: packaged systems that can be reliably installed and operated—hopefully with min-imal routine maintenance. There haven’t been many NSF-350 certified systems yet, but a commercial-grade system from Wahaso Water Harvest-ing Solutions is pending certification.
Wahaso’s systems, including pumps, storage, filtration, and controls are custom-designed by the company and pre-built on skids, delivered ready for installation. They include two-stage filtration for particulates, sanitation with chlorine or UV light (despite the downside of the added chemicals, the company recommends chlorine for its greater effectiveness), and automated controls and reporting compatible with building automation systems running BACnet.
Ecodrain Shower Heat Exchanger
Ecodrain is a simple, passive heat-re-covery device to transfer heat from outgoing shower wastewater to the cold-water line going into the water heater or going to the shower directly (or both). We are big fans of captur-ing waste heat from showers, and we have covered the even-simpler GFX (gravity-film exchange) prod-ucts that are available from at least four manufacturers. Water heating is representing a larger fraction of total energy consumption as our buildings get more efficient, making reduction of water-heating energy a higher priority.
Ecodrain has been under development since 2008, but the current version we saw at Greenbuild has evolved considerably. It is designed for rela-tively flat (horizontal) installations, though steeply angled and vertical
Image: Rosie’s Natural Way
The Aquatron uses gravity and centrifugal force to separate liquids from solid waste. The solids drop down into the biological chamber, gradually turning into compost, and the liquids are diverted through filters and used for irrigation.
installations (like DFX systems) are also possible.
The heat exchange occurs across the bottom of the Ecodrain unit. Graywa-ter from the shower flows through a specialized section of drain line, and cold water flows through small-di-ameter, squared copper tubing at the bottom of the unit. The cold-water tubing, connected by a manifold, slows the water flow, improving heat exchange. Testing by the Food Service Technology Center showed heat-re-covery efficiencies to be between 33% and 45%.
Our concern with early versions of the Ecodrain drain-water heat exchanger was the formation of biofilms and clogging. The new design seems to have addressed this fairly effectively with much less impeded drain-water flow, but we will still be anxious to hear about long-term testing of this heat exchanger. The company claims that an “environmentally friendly” nonstick surface will minimize deposi-tion on the walls of the heat exchanger, which should keep the heat-exchange efficiency high. The company also rec-ommends using a screen in the shower drain to capture hair.
Like the GFX systems, the Ecodrain only works when the graywater flow is coincident with incoming water flowing to the water heater or shower. Draining a bathtub or clothes washer, for example, typically does not allow for heat recovery.
In addition to the residential systems, Ecodrain showed off a commercial product at Greenbuild that mounts on the underside of a larger-diameter, low-slope commercial wastewater pipe. A copper squared-tubing wa-ter-to-water heat exchanger, molded to the pipe radius, is secured to the wastewater pipe. This B1000 system is available for pipe diameters ranging from 3” to 12” in lengths of 48” and 96”.
The Nexus eWater System
The Nexus eWater system more active-ly utilizes a home’s graywater heat for water heating and also filters it to be nearly potable. Graywater is directed to a collector that has an embedded heat exchanger, which uses refrigera-tion coils to transfer the heat to a wa-ter heater. The result is an amazingly efficient water heater with a coefficient of performance (COP) of 4.0 and a typical daily energy use of 15 kWh.
Once the heat is extracted, the gray-water is pumped through the Nexus reCycler. Bubbles are circulated to ad-here to soap, dirt, and oils, eventually hardening into a foam that is returned to the sewer. After passing through a UV and carbon filter, the water is nearly potable and can be used for irrigation or for toilets (code allowing).
The system requires separate blackwa-ter and graywater plumbing, which is rare and an expensive retrofit in the U.S. but may become more popular in new construction, according to Ralph Petroff, chairman of Nexus eWater. However, the system itself is quite affordable, at under $5,000. Petroff claims that in a new home, this system can reduce potable water consump-tion by 45%, cut sewage production 60%–70%, and reduce the energy used to heat water 75%–80% compared to a conventional system.
Evolve ShowerStart
We first saw the ShowerStart valve in 2008, shortly after the product had been introduced. This quirky water saver has not only survived but has also really taken off, with more than 500,000 units installed to date (thanks
to strong support from the State of California).
The ShowerStart solves a huge prob-lem with shower operation: people turning on the shower and leaving the bathroom while they wait for hot water to get to the shower. There are other solutions to this problem—like the Metlund D’Mand on-demand circulator that brings hot water to the point of use quickly while returning water that’s been sitting in the pipes back to the water heater—but the ShowerStart valve is a simple, quick, affordable retrofit solution.
Here’s how it works: After installing the Evolve Ladybug Showerhead Adaptor or the Roadrunner II 1.5 gallon per minute (gpm) showerhead with integral ShowerStart valve, the user turns on the shower. When water at 95°F (35°C) reaches the valve, the flow is reduced to a trickle by a valve that is activated by paraffin melting against a rubber membrane. Full flow is then restored by pulling the at-tached lanyard or twisting the bypass lever.
Effectiveness of the ShowerStart valve has been verified through field studies by several California utilities. But it’s worth noting that savings are highly dependent on behavioral patterns; formerly wasteful practices (leaving the hot water running a long time before stepping into the shower) result in the greatest savings from this product. To test performance through
Photo: George Smid
Drain water from the shower flows along a copper plate with copper tubing beneath it, through which incoming water flows for pre-heating.
Photo: ShowerStart
When water at 95°F (35°C) reaches the valve of the RoadRunner II showerhead, the flow is reduced to a trickle. Full flow is restored by pulling the attached lanyard.
the Uniform Plumbing Code, a new standard was created: IAPMO IGC 244-2007a. ShowerStart showerheads and a hand-shower version are Wa-terSense labeled—greatly exceeding water conservation requirements for the program.
Hand Dryers from TOTO and Sloan
TOTO and Sloan each had hand dry-ers on display at Greenbuild touting drying times in the 10-to-12-second range. TOTO’s sensor-activated Clean Dry hand dryer is a new style in the company’s hand dryer line. You insert your hands into the unit, as with hand dryers from Mitsubishi and Dyson, and any water that blows off is col-lected in a tray in the base. The Clean Dry uses only 690 watts and is sur-prisingly quiet at 59 decibels. It can be mounted on a wall, but mounting it in the counter, as shown at Greenbuild, should lower noise even further.
You might not have even noticed Sloan’s hand dryer since it looked like a standard faucet. The company is partnering with Excel Dryer, manu-facturer of the first high-performance hand dryer, to develop a unit that is installed in the sink; it is paired with a soap dispenser and faucet for an inte-grated look. You use the soap dispens-er on the left, the faucet in the middle, and the dryer on the right. Water blown off the hands simply goes down the sink—solving a problem that no other hand dryer has adequately addressed. We had a chance to try the dryer; it seemed to work well and, like the TOTO, was surprisingly quiet (the first XLerator wall-mounted models were quite loud). Unfortunately, the Sloan/Excel product is a prototype and is not currently available.
HVACTechnical innovations in heating, cool-ing and ventilation systems continue to expand what we can expect from these systems.
Internorm windows with built-in ERV
Need fresh air? Don’t open a window: open the window’s ventilation system.
Manufactured in Austria, Internorm products have just joined the “Europe-an Invasion” we’ve seen of windows and doors suitable for Passive House projects and other high-performance buildings. The company manufac-tures PVC and aluminum-clad wood windows with the impressive U-val-ues we’ve come to expect from Central Europe—but at a lower price point because they are mass-produced rath-er than custom-built.
Unique from Internorm is a new win-dow technology that integrates a small energy-recovery ventilator (ERV) right into the vinyl frame of its triple-glazed KF 400 model. The company claims I-tec Ventilation permits air exchange without compromising security or air quality, and it boasts 86% heat recov-ery.
Many building science experts worry that ductless ventilation pulls “fresh” outdoor air through cracks and leaks in the building envelope, bringing who-knows-what contaminants with it, but this ductless system—if it lives up to Internorm’s claims—can filter out pollen and other pollutants while drawing outdoor air into the house.
We’d like to see more empirical data supporting claims about energy recov-
ery and air quality—as well as more information about how the system works and how much energy it uses—but this new technology is fascinating and deserves a chance to show its stuff in North America.
BioMacht Waste-Heat-Recovery Systems
BioMacht provides medium-size (50kW–2MW) electricity generators fueled by waste heat from biogas, diesel, or other types of engines often used for combined heat and power at the district scale. Importing technolo-gy developed by BioMacht’s European partner, GMK, the modular systems offer a plug-and-play design. By using a proprietary organic compound as a heat-exchange medium (in a process known as the organic Rankine cycle, or ORC) rather than generating steam to turn turbines, the BioMacht systems can make use of relatively low-tem-perature heat that would normally be rejected.
The system can also provide combined heat and power from geothermal sources or from industrial waste heat. Two current projects include work with the government of Canada to aid isolated communities in Northern Canada that rely exclusively on diesel
Photo: BioMacht
This 500 kW ORC unit is being shipped to a U.S. sawmill, where it will power the facility using wood waste.
generators for power (their technology will generate more electricity from the waste heat) as well as a deal with Google to use waste heat from a data center to produce more electricity for the servers.
ORC systems have been in use throughout Europe for many years in combination with biomass systems. BioMacht has brought GMK’s technol-ogy to North America and is distribut-ing in Canada and the U.S.
Air Pohoda Ultima 240E iERV
The Ultima 240E iERV (intelligent energy-recovery ventilator)—from the Czech manufacturer of Passive House-compliant products, Air Poho-da—was one of the coolest products at the show. Though all ERVs pro-vide fresh air, minimize energy loss from the interior, and help manage a building’s humidity levels, the Ultima 240E is the first ERV to offer adjustable humidity control.
The 240E’s enthalpy core is the key to this control—and a host of other performance improvements. ERVs typically use flat plates that transfer heat, with small perforations in the membrane that allow moisture to cross from one airstream to the next. The Ultima 240E uses a triangular core with channels that capture the condensate so moisture can either be drained away or directed back into the living space, depending on how the air movement is controlled within the unit. The homeowner sets the desired humidity level using Internet-enabled controls, and the unit automatically makes the adjustments. The unit’s molded design minimizes any poten-tial cross-contamination.
The technology has several advantag-es over other ERVs: the 240E can op-erate in any climate; the core does not contain perforations, so dust will not clog the unit over time; and the unit does not freeze and does not require a pre-heater (it requires only minimal maintenance in temperatures below -15°F, according to the company). It also uses an EBM Pabst electronically commutated motor (ECM), so it is very efficient, and has six-inch ducts to deliver good airflow. The company is
so confident in its core design that it offers a 25-year warranty.
Air Pohoda just intro-duced the 240E and is pursuing Passivhaus Institut product certifi-cation, but as yet there is no third-party data to verify performance. The company claims, however, that the unit is more than 90% effi-cient and even outper-forms models offered by Zehnder. The 240E is not cheap, at $3,500, but it doesn’t require an added pre-heater, it can provide humidifi-cation and dehumidification, and with an optional $900 “Cool-Breeze” add-on, it can even provide cooling.
Comfy from Building Robotics
Are you hot, cool, or “comfy”? De-signed to work with building auto-mation systems (BAS), using BACnet, Comfy is a new tool that allows oc-cupants to ask for a change in tem-perature via an app on a smart phone or desktop. The ventilation system responds by immediately sending a 10-minute burst of cool or warm air, depending on what’s needed. If the ventilation zone is a large office or multi-occupant area, the Comfy app can be set to ask whether anoth-er person feels the same way before adjusting the temperature. Over time, Comfy uses all of this data to provide the right temperature when and where it’s needed—and to reduce unneces-sary conditioning when it’s not.
According to Lindsay Baker, vice pres-ident of research and marketing for Building Robotics, the start-up compa-ny behind Comfy, the system requires central DDC (direct digital control) and, although it can work with VRF (variable refrigerant flow) or radiant systems, it works best with VAV (vari-able air volume) ventilation systems because of the immediate feedback they can provide.
The company is currently testing the tool in a variety of building types to
see just how much energy it can save. It will then offer Comfy as a service to buildings, priced with the expectation that it will be cost-neutral or better in terms of energy while also improving occupant comfort. While that research is ongoing, Baker says that one thing is clear: “It’s this cool app. [Occupants] love it.”
Coatings and FinishesWith low-VOC paints standard, com-panies are looking for other ways to stand out—with mixed success.
KNOxOUT “smog-eating” paint
We’ve been down this road before—and the emissions were terrible.
Billed by Philippines-based paint man-ufacturer Boysen as an “earth-friendly coating,” and finally available in the U.S., KNOxOUT paint is another in a long line of products designed to clean the air while also promoting self-cleaning of surfaces.
We’ve turned a skeptical eye to the claims made by makers of the many titanium dioxide-based products on the market. We’ve reluctantly rec-ommended only products that bake the TiO2 into a cementitious coating that’s unlikely to flake or wash away. Thin coatings and paints, in contrast, will constantly be adding more of this powerful nano-scale antimicrobial to stormwater, where it can wreak havoc
Photo: Stian Rasmussen
Comfy is an app for smart phones or desktops that allows occupants to let the building automation system (BAS) know whether they’re comfortable or if they need their space to be warmed or cooled. As the system learns occupant preferences over time, it can save energy while improving comfort.
So what makes KNOxOUT special? The manufacturers recommend it for helping clean the air in small, localized areas that really need it—like inside parking garages and highway tunnels, and on buildings and walls surround-ing bus stations. And unlike most companies, Boysen has some empirical data to back its smog-eating claims for these confined areas.
We’re still concerned about overuse of TiO2, but this manufacturer seems to have the right idea about using the material judiciously in places where it makes the most sense. So apply under the right conditions, and prepare the surface first with a thick layer of skep-ticism and caution.
Fellert Acoustical Plaster
Acoustical plaster is an architect’s dream, providing gleaming, seamless interiors that also absorb sound and reduce noise even in a large, open space like an atrium, museum gallery, or dramatic staircase. That seamless look often doesn’t last, though: most plasters crack with normal settling and other loads.
The makers of Fellert Acoustical Plaster claim their product solves this
problem while also providing unprec-edented acoustical performance. With a backing made of acoustical fiberglass board and spray-ap-plied plaster incorpo-rating perlite, benton-ite, and post-consumer recycled cotton, the product can flex—with the ASTM internal stress rating, as well as almost 30 years of performance in Swe-den, to prove it. Fellert also claims that dents and dings are easy to patch.
As far as we can tell, the main drawback of the product is the antiquated binder (which contains both phenol and urea formaldehyde) in the Knauf acoustical board used in the system—but Fellert told EBN it is considering a switch to the insulation maker’s formaldehyde-free acoustical boards, processed with the corn-sugar-based Ecose binder. These upgraded boards are a darker color, says Fellert, so more testing is needed to ensure the boards don’t compromise the plaster’s color or light reflectance.
Installations requiring C-channels may also face problems if the project team is seeking to eliminate PVC for the Living Building Challenge or other reasons.
FurnishingsThe furnishings that we took note of at Greenbuild stand out for how they are pushing conversations about resource and energy use.
KI Chairs with AirCarbon Plastic
KI, manufacturer of commercial fur-niture, had an unassuming booth at Greenbuild showing its Strive chair, which looked like any other plastic-and-steel stacking chair. But this sim-ple chair held one of the hidden gems of the show: its plastic is made using a new petroleum-free, carbon-negative technology from Newlight Technolo-
gies, called AirCarbon, which could revolutionize the plastic industry.
Most plastics use raw materials (car-bon especially) taken from fossil fuels as their building blocks, but Newlight is using methane for the KI plastic, pri-marily from farms, as its source. Using methane is critical because it has such powerful global warming potential. Over a 20-year span, methane traps 72 times as much heat in the atmosphere as an equal mass of carbon dioxide.
According to Newlight cofounder and CEO Mark Herrema, the process of converting the raw materials in methane to plastic is not new, but in the past, it has not been cost-effective. Herrema and his team worked for more than ten years to refine their cat-alyst—so that AirCarbon is now less expensive to produce than convention-al petroleum-based plastics.
AirCarbon is a polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA), a biodegradable plastic, and can be engineered to have a variety of performance characteristics, such as being rigid or flexible. The plastic used in the KI chairs is similar to rigid ABS or polypropylene and is recyclable but not biodegradable.
The KI Strive and Grazie chair lines will be the first products to use Air-Carbon when they become available in early 2014. Cost information is not yet available, and KI is in the process
Photo: Timothy Hursley/Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
The Steven Holl-designed expansion to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, was the first U.S. project to use Fellert Acoustical Plaster, which is integral to the award-winning design.
Photo: KI
KI’s Strive (shown here) and Grazie lines of chairs will be the first products to use AirCarbon plastic, whose raw materials come from farm-sourced methane rather than petroleum; the company claims these chairs are carbon negative.
of third-party verification of its car-bon-negative claims.
Draper Solar Control Solutions
Draper showed off several new solar shading offerings, including its interi-or Bottom-Up FlexShades, which can provide shading and privacy on lower window portions while allowing light through on top. These could be paired with the new FlexWave Light Shelf that reflects light deeper into the room, reducing the need for electric lighting. These light shelves can be rotated down for easy cleaning.
Draper introduced its first exterior shading systems at Greenbuild as well, introducing several lines of shades and louvers.
Omega Venetian Blinds are commer-cial blinds that can be used for inte-riors or exteriors. Available in widths up to 16’ 1” and drops of 32’ 1”, these blinds are available in manual (for interiors) or motorized versions.
FlexLouver Rack Arm System can also be used on interior or exterior win-dows; these louvers open and close either by hand crank or motor, but they do not retract. They are available in widths up to 20’ and drops of 20’.
FlexShade Zip System is an interior/exterior roller shade system. They insert into inside side rails and can withstand winds up to 90 mph. These are available in widths and drops up to 16.5’.
s_enn Shading System (no, that’s not a typo) is an exterior shade panel con-sisting of stainless steel rods, though it can also be rolled up like a roller shade; the s_onro Daylight Shutter System is a roller shade that uses aluminum fins and can open from the bottom up to provide privacy and daylighting.
Share Your InnovationsWhat did you notice at Greenbuild, or elsewhere? Post your observations below, or if you’re a manufacturer with a cool innovation to share, let us know about it through our GreenSpec website, where the products discussed in this article may appear after going through additional screening.
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LEED Buildings Above Av-erage in Latest Energy Data Release The largest release of ener-gy data from LEED-certified buildings shows good energy results but leaves room for improvement in data collection and sharing.By Tristan Roberts
The latest—and largest to date—re-lease of data from LEED-certified buildings shows that LEED build-ings are strong energy performers. However, lack of granularity in the data release by the U.S. Green Build-ing Council (USGBC) doesn’t reveal much more than that, possibly due to sidestepping of LEED 2009’s required energy reporting.
A snippet of LEED in Motion
The data was reported during USGBC’s Greenbuild conference in November 2013 as part of its report
LEED in Motion: Impacts and Innova-tion. Drawing from LEED projects that reported data over the 12-month pe-riod between July 2012 and July 2013, the report offers two main data points relative to energy performance:
On a simple average (not weighted by size), 450 LEED projects showed an average source energy use intensity (EUI) 31% lower than the national median source EUI.
404 LEED projects posted an average Energy Star score of 85.
Good news—on the surface
While the news is good on the surface (with the Energy Star score indicating average performance better than 85% of buildings nationwide, and well beyond the score of 75 needed for En-ergy Star certification), the report does not provide several data points crucial to a deeper evaluation of performance of LEED buildings. Building type, date of construction, square footage, or choice of LEED rating system do not accompany the data.
In addition, the report does not discuss median versus mean energy scores, a distinction that could be sig-nificant if there is a large variation in the energy data (debate over the sig-nificance of this statistical nuance was a point of controversy with USGBC’s last major data release, which was made in 2008 in conjunction with the New Buildings Institute).
According to the report, 1,861 LEED-certified projects were compli-ant with LEED’s mandatory energy reporting requirement (Minimum Program Requirement #6, or MPR6) during the reporting period, but only 450 provided an EUI through Energy Star’s Portfolio Manager.
Numbers “not spectacular”
Brendan Owens, vice president of technical development for USGBC, told EBN he considered the Energy Star average of 85 “okay—not spectac-ular.” He also told EBN that the source EUI number behind the 31% reduction is 158 kBtu/ft2∙year, which he called “a number I’m not enamored by. We have a lot of 18-wheelers in our fleet
Photo: Draper, Inc.
Draper introduced a full line of solar shading, including the non-retractable FlexLouver system, shown here, that can be used on interiors or exteriors and is available with motorized or manual operation.
mix,” arguing that LEED-certified building stock includes disproportion-ately more energy-intensive building types like healthcare facilities and data centers than the national average. (For context, see “Measuring Energy Use in Buildings.” The national average source EUI for office buildings is 166, with healthcare and food service aver-ages being much higher, and residen-tial lower. Note that site EUI figures, as used in the 2030 Challenge, are smaller numbers.)
Owens expressed some disappoint-ment about the number of buildings reporting data but defended USGBC’s approach. The industry was initially resistant to the reporting requirement when it was introduced in 2009 (see “All LEED Projects to Provide Actu-al Performance Data”), and Owens acknowledges that USGBC didn’t hit the ground running with clear report-ing protocols. He says that USGBC has been “getting a pretty good mix of utility bills, spreadsheets, and access to [Energy Star] Portfolio Manager accounts, but there is some degree of data inconsistency that we’re con-cerned about.”
“Part of it is that we didn’t require utility meters,” says Owens. It’s an added cost to install a meter on a campus building or commercial interior space that might not normally
have one, and MPR6 wasn’t written to push LEED projects into that. How-ever, Owens notes, that changed with LEED version 4 (LEED v4), released in November 2013, which requires building-level energy metering as a prerequisite.
Owens wasn’t able to provide num-bers accounting for the gap between the 1,861 LEED-compliant buildings and the 450 that were included in the data, although he said that more information would be released in coming months. An informal sur-vey by EBN of more than a dozen LEED professionals representing 400 projects suggests that many LEED 2009 projects have been certified too recently to have enough meaningful data. Respondents also pointed to a possible lack of follow-through—and corresponding lack of enforcement on USGBC’s part—as culprits for the lack of data. Very few had claimed the ex-emption for projects without a meter.
“Seems thin”
That theory was backed by Rob Wat-son, CEO and chief scientist at ECON Group and a longtime follower of LEED metrics. While Watson told EBN that the release “seems kind of thin,” he drew on his own past research in noting that it takes two years on aver-age for a LEED for Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance (LEED-EB-
OM) project to move through the certi-fication process, and that new building projects take three to five years to design, build, and certify, with another couple years to stabilize operations to the point where meaningful energy data can be available. (Owens couldn’t provide an exact figure but told EBN that about 1,300 of the 1,861 projects, or 70%, were LEED-EBOM.)
Given that timeline, Watson says, along with the “monumental task” of getting comparable, normalized data from buildings, the four years since the LEED 2009 launch might appear to be more time than it actually is to collect a large amount of data. But, he added, “It seems to me that there ought to be more outreach for earlier projects.”
The next wave of data reporting
In a move that could shift the focus away from Energy Star and its un-derlying dataset, which is not only grossly outdated but also difficult to normalize, USGBC is looking ahead to the next wave of sharing data in context: the LEED Dynamic Plaque. Also discussed in the LEED in Motion report, the plaque promises to be “a live LEED score that reflects current building performance.” According to Owens, the plaque will help LEED projects check how they are perform-ing relative to similar buildings and to their own energy models. A robust dataset for analyzing the energy-sav-ing success of LEED overall, however, may still be a long way off.
New Energy Data Is Chang-ing How We Judge Efficien-cy—and LEED Seeking lessons from New York City benchmarking data, researchers question every-thing we thought we knew about energy metrics.By Nadav Malin
In the beginning, there was Energy Star.
Supported by the online Portfolio Manager infrastructure and statistical
Photo: Paul Schlismann Photography, courtesy of Wight & Company
The Lewis University Science Center addition in Romeoville, Illinois, is certified Silver under LEED-NC 2009. According to Wight & Company, which designed and built the center, it elected to comply with LEED 2009’s energy reporting requirement, MPR6, through Energy Star Portfolio Manager.
models from the periodic Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Sur-vey (CBECS), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star has been the envy of the energy policy world; no other country has that kind of benchmarking tool. In fact, it was just licensed to Canada. (Energy Star for Homes and Energy Star labels for appliances and other equipment are mostly unrelated programs.)
Thanks to a flurry of energy bench-marking mandates (see “Energy Re-porting: It’s the Law”) in the last three years, however, we’re now starting to get unprecedented flows of data about actual energy use in certain cities (just New York and Washington, D.C., so far, but more are on the way). Sud-denly, the CBECS database is looking shabby. It’s out of date, thanks to a temporary funding cut that has since been revoked, and it’s awfully sparse in comparison to the new datasets.
As a benchmark for energy perfor-mance of New York City office build-ings, the national CBECS database has relatively few reference points, and they tend to represent smaller buildings, according to Constantine Kontokosta, Ph.D., P.E., deputy direc-tor of the Center for Urban Science + Progress at New York University (NYU) and associate professor at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU, who did a lot of the data crunching behind the reports that New York City has put out for the last two years based on the new data.
In the forthcoming paper “From Transparency to Transformation: A Market-Specific Methodology for a Commercial Building Energy Perfor-mance Rating System,” Kontokosta has proposed an alternative to Energy Star that draws on the newly available benchmarking data, as well as on ad-ditional data sources from CoStar and the Department of City Planning, as a framework for benchmarking the en-ergy performance of urban buildings.
Going beyond Energy Star
LEED project performance is just one aspect of Kontokosta’s analysis, which attempts to isolate the impact of a different variables on building energy
use. Using a range of building charac-teristics from these three datasets and applying regression analysis to correct for factors such as building age, height, and asset class, Kontokosta concludes that the source energy use intensity (EUI) of LEED office build-ings as a whole is not different in a statistically significant way from that of other office buildings in the dataset. He also finds that Energy Star-labeled buildings have a 10% lower EUI and that buildings that are both LEED-cer-tified and Energy Star-labeled have a 20% lower EUI.
This analysis is based on a relatively small number of buildings, however. Kontokosta cross-referenced a total of 685 office properties across the three databases, of which 44 are LEED certified. Given that small sample size, “we can’t really look at rating system type,” Kontokosta told EBN, “as it won’t produce statistically significant results.”
The majority of those 44 buildings are certified under LEED for Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance (EBOM), and most of the rest under LEED for Core & Shell (CS), both of which have limitations in their ability to affect overall building energy use. LEED-EBOM projects don’t typically entail major system upgrades, and LEED-CS projects have a limited ability to affect tenant energy use. As a result, while this assessment is likely a valid report on the relative energy performance of LEED buildings as a subset of large Manhattan office build-ings, it doesn’t tell us anything about how buildings that are designed and built entirely to LEED for New Con-struction standards actually perform.
Stopping short of Energy Star
Oberlin College physics professor John Scofield, Ph.D., takes a similarly dim view of Energy Star in his analysis of the NYC benchmarking data, pub-lished in the December 2013 edition of Energy and Buildings. Rather than com-ing up with an alternate method like Kontokosta, however, Scofield simply dismisses the high Energy Star scores achieved by the 21 LEED buildings he identifies in the dataset.
Despite the fact that Energy Star at least attempts to factor in occupant density and operating hours, Scofield reverts to basic source EUI numbers to conclude that LEED buildings as a whole are not more efficient than the overall collection of buildings. More specifically, he finds that the most basic LEED Certified-level buildings are actually less efficient, while the Gold-level buildings are more effi-cient.
The buildings included in this analysis suffer from the same rating system limitations as Kontokosta’s, in that they are exclusively LEED-EBOM and LEED-CS certified. Again in contrast with Kontokosta, who reins in his con-clusions, Scofield uses his findings—as he has in the past—to argue that LEED fails to deliver energy savings. One of his key assumption is that each of the LEED buildings has “under-gone extensive renovation in the last few years” and therefore should be compared to other recently renovated buildings. LEED-EBOM practitioner Jenny Carney of YR&G disputes that assumption, however. “Most commercial office buildings undergo piecemeal upgrades on a running basis; extensive renovations are more rare and are not often a precursor to a LEED project, in my experience,” she reports.
Photo: Tom Bastin. License: CC BY 2.0
The Helmsley Building at 230 Park Avenue in New York boasts an Energy Star score of 78 and a LEED-EBOM Gold re-certification. But what do these metrics really tell us? Not enough, some scholars contend.
Energy-efficiency advocates would like us to believe that, as buildings get more efficient and their energy cost goes down, their value increases. That may be the case, but you won’t find any obvious support for that theory here, where the highest-value prop-erties among New York City’s large buildings also tend to use the most energy.
There are a host of possible reasons for this trend: The most valuable properties tend to be tall buildings with high-tech tenants on corner lots. Kontokosta’s regression model reveals that buildings that are freestanding or on corner lots use 9% more energy than those in the middle of a block; that each floor added on a building in-creases source EUI by 1%; that newer buildings use more energy than old ones; and that a 10% increase in floor area devoted to data centers increases source EUI by 34%.
These confounding factors beg a larger question, suggests the U.S. Green Building Council’s vice president for research, Chris Pyke, Ph.D.: If efficien-cy is a measure of how much work output we get for our energy input, “what defines efficiency in buildings anyway?” Our conventional metric of energy used per square foot of floor area makes sense if you’re just look-ing at heating, cooling, and lighting energy, but in many commercial buildings today, other loads dominate the picture.
Btu per dollar
In search of a more relevant metric, akin to the way the energy efficiency of our economy is measured in Btus per dollar of gross domestic product (GDP), researchers from Buro Hap-pold and Happold Consulting mashed up the New York City energy bench-marking data with the CoStar Tenant Database and classified building ten-ants according to their likely economic contribution based on their Standard Industry Classification (SIC) code.
In work that they published as part of the Greenbuild Research 2013 compi-lation, the authors defined the “Build-
ing Economic Efficiency Coefficient” for 811 properties as the ratio of source EUI to economic intensity. They found a “loose correlation” between energy consumed and presumed economic contribution.
Applying their economic efficien-cy coefficient to 28 LEED-NC and LEED-CS-certified buildings in the benchmarking data set, they found a suggestion that LEED buildings have higher economic efficiency than non-LEED buildings and that their efficien-cy increases with the level of certifi-cation (although they note the sample set for this last finding is too small to be statistically relevant).
This work would have been much more compelling if they had actual economic output from the relevant buildings rather than presumed out-put based on the tenants’ SIC codes. The CoStar database actually contains that level of data in the form of tenant staff costs, but the researchers didn’t have access to those details, according to Pyke.
Many numbers, few conclusions
While more data is streaming in, the unfortunate reality is that we still have little insight into the market-wide impact of green building programs on building energy use. Perhaps more in-formation and analysis will eventually help answer that question, though it’s worth noting that LEED certification addresses much more than energy. There are even aspects of LEED, such as increased ventilation, “that might result in additional energy consump-tion,” Kontokosta notes. And while recent updates to LEED are likely to drive down energy use in future LEED buildings, it will take a number of years before those impacts are seen in the benchmarking reports.
The LEED conversation aside, the fire hose of new information is starting to help us understand energy-use pat-terns in urban buildings more general-ly. Kontokosta is now working on ana-lyzing energy patterns in multifamily buildings, for example, including the affordable housing sector, where resi-dents are especially vulnerable to high energy costs.
More generally, the slight improve-ment in year-over-year performance in New York (see “NYC Buildings Gain Three Energy Star Points in Year Two”) suggests that the window into energy use could, in itself, have an impact on owner decisions and tenant behavior.
Radon and Schools: A Study in Denial Most U.S. states get an ‘F’ when it comes to protecting kids from this common but deadly carcinogen. Maybe it’s time for design teams to take the lead.By Paula Melton
As awareness about air quality in schools has reached unprecedented levels in the U.S., one major indoor pollutant remains widely unad-dressed: radon.
It might not be the most trendy topic for building interiors, but soil chemis-try hasn’t changed since scientists first discovered high radon concentrations in buildings in the 1980s—nor has the fact that radon is considered the second leading cause of lung cancer deaths in the U.S. (tobacco smoke is number one).
Our standards for airtightness and ventilation have changed, and both can affect radon concentrations signifi-cantly. Many project teams and school officials assume ventilation systems will automatically keep kids safe, but radon experts disagree. Fortunately, forthcoming standards developed by the American Association of Radon Scientists and Technologists (AARST) for monitoring and mitigating radon in schools and other large buildings are designed to take the guesswork out of protecting building occupants from this radioactive carcinogen.
Do we have a problem?
Based on a national survey in the early 1990s, the U.S. Environmental Pro-tection Agency (EPA) estimated that 20% of schools had classrooms with elevated radon levels—and, argues
William Angell, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Minnesota College of Design and chair of the World Health Organization’s Radon Prevention and Mitigation Working Group, “there’s no reason it would have changed” since then. And although children are not considered to be at higher risk than adults, he points out, “risk is cumu-lative with radon over a lifetime. The more we limit exposure to radon early on, the more protective we are.”
In general, like most radon experts, Angell says testing and mitigating homes is the most critical effort for public health, “but it’s also important that schools test—and do so accord-ing to the national protocols.” He told EBN he’d tested schools that had “radon concentrations that were more elevated than you would allow urani-um miners to be exposed to.” And, he warned, “The only way to know is to test.”
That’s true even in lower-risk areas. As EPA explains on its Radon Zone map, shown above, elevated radon levels have been found in buildings in all three zones.
Testing existing schools
Testing schools and other large build-ings requires a different process than what’s used for testing single-family homes. When practitioners trained for residential radon mitigation are hired to test commercial buildings, there are two major pitfalls, according to Doug-las Kladder, director of the Center for Environmental Research and Tech-nology, which trains radon mitigation professionals in the U.S. and Canada.
First, they may only test a sampling of classrooms, he told EBN. The problem with that is, “When you have a school with elevated levels in classrooms, it’s rarely all of the classrooms—the reason being an unbalanced HVAC system. The potential for missing elevated locations is high.” He recom-mends that all occupied classrooms with ground contact undergo prelimi-nary testing simultaneously. If a short-term, two-day test suggests a problem, “Follow up before you start ripping holes in slabs,” he adds.
The second major pitfall, he claims, is “false positives” during long-term monitoring. “Testing should occur during time periods when kids are there,” he explains. Otherwise, high
radon readings could be meaningless because they reflect the state of the school when “the HVAC system is shut down or the fresh-air makeup is shut off.” If the testing devices can instead track hourly measurements, schools often find that radon levels go up at night, when the ventilation sys-tem shuts off, “but at 6 in the morning, they drop like a rock” when fresh air starts getting pulled into classrooms again. This means the ventilation system is adequately dealing with a potential radon problem—though regular monitoring is obviously war-ranted.
EPA recommends periodic testing for all schools because settling can cause foundation cracks that elevate radon levels. The agency also recommends using a long-term (90 days or longer) average in wintertime (when windows are sealed up and negative pressure is typically at a high) as an indicator of elevated radon, but Kladder claims this guidance is out of date. The Canadian government changed its protocols to take hourly readings into account two years ago, he says, and “there is discussion here in the U.S. about revising the protocols.”
If classrooms do test above 4 picocu-ries per liter (pCi/L) during occupied hours, EPA’s “action level” for radon mitigation, there is also still debate about how to correct the problem.
Radon mitigation in large build-ings
“It’s been kind of a tussle over the years,” Kladder says. “Do we suck on the dirt with ASD?” (active soil de-pressurization, the technique typically used in homes). “Or do we mess with the HVAC?” The answer has changed since the 1980s, he explained. “Let’s go after the HVAC system, which doesn’t require any additional capital costs. If you maintain the one you already have, you can deal with radon as well as improving indoor air quality.”
Ventilation adjustments may not get radon concentrations to acceptable levels, Kladder continues, in which case ASD may be needed, but “in order for those things to work, you have to create a larger vacuum under
Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Zone 1 (red) presents the highest risk for radon, but high concentrations in buildings have been found in every zone.
p. 14Environmental Building News • January 2014
the slab than what’s being created by the building. That’s not possible if you have an HVAC system that’s not balanced.”
R. William Field, Ph.D., a University of Iowa professor of occupational and environmental health and epi-demiology, agrees with Kladder that “anytime you increase air exchange in the schools, the radon levels should decrease,” but he adds a caveat: ven-tilation can make things worse “if the make-up air is coming from near a ra-don source” such as a crawl space—a phenomenon known in the industry as “radon mining.”
Mitigation choices need to be made on a case-by-case basis as well, cautions William Brodhead, proprietor of Pennsylvania-based radon mitigation contractor WPB Enterprises and a consultant to state and local govern-ments about radon policy. Referring to the lack of awareness among design professionals, he said, “Certainly if you talk to an architect or engineer, we shouldn’t have a radon problem because we’re going to be bringing in outdoor air”—but reality can be more complicated.
Science labs might have exhaust fans that create negative pressure, and the stack effect can do the same. “It can happen in any school, even in one that’s well designed,” he warned. If the school is meeting its ventilation requirements and there is still elevat-ed radon, a sub-slab ASD system can provide very consistent results—in part because occupants and facility managers can’t cause imbalances by covering heating grilles or turning off the outdoor air to a classroom.
Radon-resistant new construction
In an existing school, changing the location of the fresh-air intake or correcting native pressure problems with the mechanical system can be expensive and disruptive. That’s why many radon experts are trying to raise awareness among architects, mechan-ical engineers, and school officials about the importance of radon-resistant new construction, or RRNC. Most of the guidelines for new construction make sense—if you think about them—but
many commercial design teams just don’t have radon on their minds except in states and municipalities that have RRNC laws for school buildings (which is almost none).
A few choice words from Kladder: “Don’t put return ducts in the dirt.” Also, he notes, “It’s a very common practice to use the ceiling as the return plenum. But walls that go up into the ceiling communicate down into the soil,” and the negative pressure in the plenum can suck radon into the venti-lation system.
More mindful system design, along with a properly maintained HVAC system, should protect most children from radon exposure, but RRNC is more about the backup plan: radon “readiness.”
In effect, this means designing an ASD system into the building from day one,
explains Brodhead, who is working with the State of New Jersey—one of a handful of states in the U.S. to require RRNC in schools in high-radon ar-eas—to rewrite its radon code for new school construction.
Since its adoption in the 1990s, the radon section of the state building code has required the same system in schools as it requires in residences, with 3” piping every 1,500 ft2; but this adds unnecessary fans and energy consumption in a large building, argues Brodhead, who’s helping to write guidelines that make sense for commercial construction.
The advantages of built-in piping can’t be overstated, though. If the school turns up with a radon problem, you just have to install the fans and start running them—about a $4,000 fix, Brodhead estimates, rather than $30,000 for a sub-slab ASD retrofit or
State Radon Policies for U.S. Schools
With legal information collected by the Environmental Law Institute, this table represents the paltry number of state requirements regarding radon in U.S. schools. Among the few states where schools have any obligations at all, only two require a comprehensive program that includes testing, mitigation, and radon-ready new construction.
State Requirements Buildings Affected
Colorado Testing & disclosure of results All schools
Connecticut (high-radon areas only)
Testing
Radon-resistant new construction
Mitigation
All schools constructed after 2003
New construction
All schools with elevated radon
Florida (high-radon counties only) Testing (20% of occupied spaces) All schools
New Jersey (high-radon areas only) Radon-resistant new construction New construction
Oregon (high-radon counties only) Radon-resistant new construction New construction
Rhode Island (high-radon counties only)
Radon-resistant new construction
Testing
Mitigation
New construction & renovation projects more than $500,000
All schools
All schools with elevated radon
Virginia Testing & disclosure of results All schools
West VirginiaTesting
Mitigation
New construction
New construction with elevated radon
p. 15Environmental Building News • January 2014
as much as $150,000 to retrofit a me-chanical system.
The asbestos factor
Unfortunately, most districts are unlikely to test radon levels in their schools in the first place, and without policies in place to require RRNC, test-ing, or mitigation, that’s unlikely to change. “There are school districts that have been very responsible and not only tested once but tested periodical-ly,” explains Angell, “but there’s a lot of fear on the part of school officials,” who may be worried about the cost of making a fix.
“Some still remember what it cost to remove asbestos,” Kladder says, refer-ring to the mitigation fiasco that some districts have been dealing with since the 1980s. He has reassuring words for these administrators: “We’re not talking anywhere near those kinds of dollars and cents. Maintenance crews can typically do this.”
The burden of voluntary testing and mitigation shouldn’t fall on school dis-tricts, though, argues Field. “The U.S. EPA, Congress, and the various states where high radon levels occur surely could be more aggressive in taking steps to reduce radon in schools and daycares,” he told EBN. Field has com-pared going to school in a classroom with elevated radon levels to smoking a few cigarettes every day—something the government, teachers, and parents certainly wouldn’t want kids doing on their watch.
With policymakers slow to act and schools skittish, architects and me-chanical engineers may need to play the role of educators when they work on school construction and renovation projects—but first, they must educate themselves about the risks, which are real even in a school with a well-de-signed ventilation system.
Greater awareness of radon in com-mercial buildings, and especially in buildings occupied by children and teenagers, is at least as important as other air-quality issues.
New EHS Transparency Tool Based on Cradle to Cradle Program A new way to report product ingredients, the Environmental and Health Statement, puts yet another spin on transparency. By Paula Melton
Resilient flooring manufacturer Tarkett and the German consulting company EPEA Internationale Um-weltforschung GmbH (EPEA) have developed a new product ingredient disclosure format called an Environ-mental and Health Statement, or EHS.
The new tool, which draws on as-pects of the Cradle to Cradle (C2C) standard, aims to give designers and specifiers a clear view into product ingredients and other environmental attributes; it will also track the C2C product optimization process, accord-ing to Diane Martel, vice president of environmental planning and strategy at Tarkett. The company plans to pro-duce an EHS for each of its products in 2014, although it has not yet de-cided whether to publish them on its website. (The company has shared a sample with EBN for publication.)
EPEA, founded by chemist and original C2C co-developer Michael Braungart, Ph.D., told EBN that more of its client companies would be using the EHS soon. (EPEA helps companies evaluate and optimize their products according to the C2C framework, but Braungart is no longer directly in-volved with the development of the standard, which is now managed by a third-party nonprofit group, the C2C Product Innovation Institute.)
Why another tool?
The announcement comes on the heels of the resilient flooring industry’s Product Transparency Declaration (PTD) rollout—an explicit response to growing demand for the Health Product Declaration (HPD), which the Resilient Floor Covering Institute believes to be flawed.
Tarkett and EPEA say their new for-mat has advantages, but competing directly with the HPD is not their aim.
For Tarkett, “it really started with a strategy and a goal of becoming a Cra-dle to Cradle company” Martel told EBN. “The EHS was a natural deriva-tive from the work we’ve been doing for the last three years.”
The consulting company concurred, telling EBN that “Cradle to Cradle Quality Statements are a practice established at EPEA for many years. The statements address the needs of users to be informed about the im-pact of purchased ingredients on the healthiness of products and on the resource recoverability after use.” The spokesperson added, “The EHS is a new form of quality statement.”
Most companies using the tool will probably also be pursuing C2C certifi-cation.
What’s in the EHS
That said, certain features distinguish the EHS, and its creators are likely to seek recognition for it in LEED v4, which currently references the HPD format and its underlying Green-Screen methodology alongside C2C in a new product ingredient credit (MRc4: Building Product Disclosure & Optimization—Material Ingredients).
“The EHS integrates product safety during production, installation, and use” rather than simply listing in-gredients, notes EPEA. (This critique of the HPD, similar to one made by the Resilient Floor Covering Insti-tute, ignores the “notes” section of the document, which is similar to the EHS’s “Comment on Rating” column.) “It gives a comprehensive overview of a product from a C2C point of view that is easily understandable also for people who are not dealing with toxi-cological assessments every day.”
In addition to an ingredient list, haz-ard warnings, and notes about each component, the EHS includes informa-tion about water and energy consump-tion, waste, indoor air quality, recy-clability and recycling, and product certifications. The “environmental” sections of the EHS don’t follow ISO
standards for life-cycle assessments (LCA) and aren’t a replacement for them, notes Martel, who says Tarkett will continue to release LCA-based environmental product declarations for its products.
GreenScreen vs. C2C
Perhaps the most substantive differ-ence between the EHS and the HPD is the chemical screening system that underlies each. EHS references the C2C 3.0 Material Health Assessment Methodology, whereas the HPD ref-erences the GreenScreen List Transla-tor. The main difference between the two is not the chemicals of concern involved—both draw from multiple lists of toxic chemicals from govern-ments and health advocates around the globe, though the HPD references about 10 more than C2C does—but C2C’s risk-assessment process also takes into account likely exposure pathways throughout the product’s life cycle. This means certain toxic ingredients don’t disqualify products from C2C certification.
“In an HPD, the product ingredients are screened for chemicals of concern and health warning listings,” says an EPEA spokesperson. But with
the EHS, “not only hazards of single chemicals are considered, but the product safety during installation and use” as well as opportunities to use the material again. These sentiments, which the HPD Collaborative con-tends are a red herring in relation to the HPD format, echo those expressed by the developers of the PTD and continue a longstanding argument over “hazard-based” and “risk-based” methodologies for making material decisions. (See “Vinyl Group Launches Reporting Label for Toxic Chemicals.”)
Designers underwhelmed
Several architects and others in the design community whom EBN spoke with expressed reservations about the new format but refused to go on record with their critiques, citing a de-sire to be welcoming of a new entrant into the transparency field. However, some general concerns they raised are plain to see:
Tarkett’s release of an EHS only for a linoleum product rather than for its more commonly known, and po-tentially more toxic, vinyl products. (The company has since released a rubber-flooring EHS to EBN, and, as mentioned, is planning to complete
documentation for all its products in 2014, though it’s unclear whether the EHS will be public or only available upon request.)
Transparency about only certain as-pects of C2C rather than the program’s full five-part assessment. (The Social Fairness category is left out altogeth-er, while the other categories don’t provide rigorous quantification of the assessment.)
Marketing language that suggests en-vironmental preferability. (For exam-ple, the ingredient-disclosure section is titled “Good Materials” even if there are carcinogens and other chemicals of concern in the product.)
Good enough for LEED?
But Brendan Owens, vice president for LEED technical development at the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), felt it was too soon to judge the new format.
“I am excited that we can have an informed conversation about the detailed merits of more than one transparency program,” he told EBN. “I think Tarkett should be appropri-ately held out as a leader because they stepped out and said, ‘We’re going to do something.’” He maintains that “bashing” the program before it’s had a chance to develop further isn’t productive.
Still, Owens explained, it might be a while before the EHS can be consid-ered for inclusion in LEED version 4. Although USGBC gave itself flexibil-ity in the new rating system to add programs that meet credit intent, it doesn’t plan to start vetting new stan-dards till mid-2014 at the earliest—af-ter first developing a process for doing so.
Meanwhile, products that have earned certain levels of C2C certification can already contribute to material disclo-sure and optimization credits in LEED v4 without publishing any product ingredients or hazards. USGBC has hinted that the C2C program will need to encourage greater transparency in the future in order to remain a part of LEED. If developed further and picked up by other manufacturers, a tool like
Excerpt from EHS for Rubber Tile
As seen on the first page of this new disclosure tool, product ingredients and certain hazard information appear. For this product, more than 2% of the ingredients are unknown, but EPEA says it will encourage manufacturers to disclose all hazards down to 100 parts per million.
the EHS could provide the transpar-ency some of C2C’s critics have been seeking since the program’s inception.
NEWSBRIEFS
First LEED v4 Projects Certi-fied LEED v4 was just launched, but a commercial interiors project and an existing build-ing are already gleaming with Gold and Silver through the beta program.By Paula Melton
Just days after the official launch of LEED v4 at Greenbuild 2013, two proj-ects have already achieved certifica-tion: the Haworth Organic Showroom in Beijing (certified Gold under LEED for Commercial Interiors, or LEED-CI) and 1800 K Street in Washington, D.C. (certified Silver under LEED for Exist-ing Buildings: Operations & Mainte-nance, or LEED-EBOM).
Housed in the LEED Platinum Parkview Green, the Haworth Beijing showroom features 60% reclaimed materials, according to the furniture manufacturer. LEDs helped the project decrease modeled energy consump-tion 59%, and onsite graywater treat-ment helped reduce modeled potable water consumption 53%, compared with code baselines. The project earned 71 out of 110 points.
With an Energy Star rating of 81 (meaning it performs better on ener-gy and water measures than 81% of similar buildings in the U.S.), 1800 K Street is owned by Deutsche Asset & Wealth Management and managed by Transwestern. The building achieved LEED-EBOM Gold under LEED 2009 simultaneously, earning 64 points un-der the older system and 52 under the newer one. “The new LEED v4 rating system holds buildings to higher stan-dards, and we are excited to see how much building sustainability improves with these new guidelines,” stated Transwestern’s Allan Skodowski in a press release.
To date, three LEED for Core and Shell projects have also received pre-cer-tification under v4. Numerous New Construction (LEED-NC) projects are in the same v4 beta program that allowed such early certification under the new rating system, but these proj-ects take longer to complete.
West-Facing Solar Panels Take Heat off Grid in Sum-mer Flying in the face of conven-tion, new research suggests pointing solar panels west may be more effective—at least during summer in Texas. By Candace Pearson
A recent study conducted by the Pecan Street Research Institute found that in-stalling west-facing photovoltaic (PV) panels at a trial site in Texas generated more energy and more effectively re-duced peak demand over the summer than south-facing panels.
The report acknowledges that south-facing solar will produce more total energy over the course of a year, but during Texas’s long summer days, results show west-facing systems generated 4% more electricity per day than comparable south-facing systems.
In addition, west-facing systems better met peak demand by harnessing the sun’s afternoon rays when cooling loads were high; west-facing systems generated 49% more electricity during peak demand hours than south-facing systems. This allowed more energy to be utilized onsite instead of sold back to the grid. Homes with west-facing systems utilized 75% (18.78 kWh) of their PV-generated electricity, while 58% (13.43 kWh) was utilized in homes with south-facing systems.
The study did not look at solar panels installed to track the sun across the sky, which are less common on homes that have roof space but small yards. Also, the decreasing cost of panels means that simply adding more panels is typically more cost-effective than roof-mounted systems, due to the cost of tracking equipment. In fact, 13 of
the 50 homes studied had both south- and west-facing panels.
The grid-stabilizing benefits may give utilities more rationale to offer rebates to customers with west-facing sys-tems, but research to analyze whether these benefits outweigh increased pressure on the grid during other sea-sons is still in development.
Plumbing and Pipe-Fitting Union Welcomes Green Training Labor unions are beginning to seek sustainability education for a “competitive edge,” and Urban Green Council is happy to comply. By Candace Pearson
New York’s Urban Green Council has joined forces with a national labor union to provide training in sustain-able practices to thousands of plumb-ers, pipe fitters, sprinkler fitters, and HVAC technicians.
Members of the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipe Fitting Industry (UA) will receive Urban Green Coun-cil’s Green Professional Building Skills Training (GPRO) program, which includes material on technologies such as condensing boilers, solar thermal systems, and onsite graywater and blackwater recycling systems. “We’re seeing how sustainability is rapidly becoming a necessity in all types of buildings” said William Hite, presi-dent of UA. “GPRO training will give our members a competitive edge as our trade evolves.”
The trainings should also bring environmental benefits since systems designed for efficiency only perform well if they are installed correctly and maintained. In fact, if enough con-tractors, trades, operators, and service workers onsite have GPRO certificates, a building project can earn a LEED pilot credit.
According to Urban Green Council, GPRO will soon be made available to other building trade unions through
ASHRAE Drafts Energy Stan-dard for Data Centers Standard 90.4P for data centers will be performance-based and won’t require any modeling tools. By Candace Pearson
Data centers have been running into roadblocks attempting to prove com-pliance to ASHRAE’s general energy standard, so ASHRAE is responding by developing Standard 90.4P—a separate standard for data centers that does not require modeling tools.
Until now, data centers had been included in ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2013, the energy standard for most buildings (aside from low-rise res-idential). However, demonstrating compliance with the energy costs budget section was difficult, according to ASHRAE, because current indus-try modeling tools cannot accurately model data centers’ complex HVAC and power distribution designs. In addition, changing IT technology and emerging cooling strategies have repeatedly transformed data center design, causing some to view the pre-scriptive measures in 90.1 as inflexible.
The new standard will have perfor-mance approaches for heating, ventila-tion, and air conditioning, and power distribution based on a measure of power usage effectiveness (PUE), which can be determined by using a set of formulas. Interior lighting allow-ance is calculated using the building area. Prescriptive measures in Stan-dard 90.1 still apply to the building envelope and water heating systems, but a mechanical trade-off option is available for the building envelope. Overall, compliance with the standard will be based on predictive calcu-lations and is not meant to require modeling tools.
Standard 90.4P will be open for public review until December 30, 2013.
Solar Homes Slapped with Fee by Arizona Utility The usage fee for grid-tied res-idential solar systems has both utilities and environmental groups watching the impact on installations. By Candace Pearson
In what could become a trend, an Ar-izona utility will soon begin charging a monthly fee to homeowners with net-metered solar systems—solar pho-tovoltaic systems that feed electricity back into the grid.
Arizona’s largest utility, the Arizona Public Service Co., will charge a $0.70 per kilowatt fee to homeowners with solar systems installed or contracted after December 31, 2013. A homeown-er with a typical 70-kilowatt solar system will pay $4.90 a month.
The fee was authorized in November 2013 by the Arizona Corporation Com-mission, which found that costs of maintaining the grid for net-metered solar systems were unfairly being shifted to homeowners without pan-els. Nearly 1,000 protesters attended the hearing, arguing that homeowners installing solar have reduced demand on the grid and that penalizing them isn’t fair.
Now, more utilities are poised to follow suit; California has already approved leveraging fees up to $10 a month, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organi-zation known for drafting legislative templates used to enact conservative state and federal policies, plans to push for more of the same type of enabling legislation. John Eick, the legislative analyst for ALEC’s energy, environment, and agriculture program told The Guardian, “As it stands now, those direct-generation customers are essentially free riders on the system. They are not paying for the infrastruc-ture they are using.”
Other organizations warn the push is less about grid maintenance costs and more about trying to cripple the growth of renewable energy. The Sierra Club cites the fact that Arizo-
na Public had first requested a much larger fee—$50 or more a month—that would have effectively eliminated the financial incentive to install solar panels.
Group Seeks to Bring DC Power to Homes The EMerge Alliance is in the beginning stages of creating a direct-current power stan-dard to help homeowners save energy. By Candace Pearson
EMerge Alliance has expanded its efforts to advance direct-current (DC) power distribution by launching a new initiative to develop a residential standard.
As the solar market expands and more electronics fill our homes, utilizing DC power could bring increased energy savings and grid independence. Solar panels charge consumer electronics, appliances, LEDs, and electric vehi-cles more efficiently if they don’t have to convert to AC power. “We have seen the sustainability, flexibility, and reliability advantages that DC pow-er provides to commercial building spaces,” says EMerge Alliance chair-man Brian Patterson, “and it’s time to extend these benefits to homes and small businesses.”
The group hopes to develop a resi-dential DC power standard—as it has done for data centers—by creating guidelines for how to integrate DC with existing AC systems.
PVC Particles Make Marine Worms Lose Their Appetite A study suggests plastic de-bris in the sea slows the rate at which lugworms can process sediment, which could affect marine diversity. By Candace Pearson
A study published in the journal Cur-rent Biology found that microscopic pieces of plastic litter prevalent in the
ocean can slow digestion in an import-ant species of marine worms.
Researchers exposed Arenicola marina worms, commonly known as lug-worms, to microscopic unplasticized PVC (uPVC) at concentrations known to exist in oceanic contamination hotspots. Those that were exposed to sediment with 5% uPVC by weight took 1.5 times longer to expel waste, reduced their feeding activity by approximately 25%, and had up to 50% less energy reserves compared to a control group. The researchers assert that the prolonged digestion times “imply that microplastics, which are of low nutritional value, are being retained and subjected to extensive digestion, at an energetic cost.”
These aren’t just a group of constipat-ed sea worms. At a density of 85 indi-viduals per m2—typical of a tidal-flat habitat—lugworms are estimated to process 400 cm3 of sediment annu-ally. In a place where lugworms are a keystone species, like Wadden Sea, an intertidal zone in the North Sea, reduced feeding activity to the degree observed in the study would result in 130 m3 less sediment reworked and oxygenated per year, a process crucial to maintaining marine diversity.
The researchers call for policymakers to reconsider how PVC, polystyrene, polyurethane, and polycarbonate de-bris is classified in terms of hazard.
Tenants Drawing the Blinds in Their Glass Buildings New Yorkers may choose a glass condo or corner office for the views, but a new study shows that once they get there, they’re drawing the blinds. By Candace Pearson
A recent report titled “Seduced by the View” makes the case that all those floor-to-ceiling windows that New Yorkers pay for with higher rents and energy bills usually end up covered by blinds.
In a small, rather anecdotal, study con-ducted by New York’s Urban Green
Council, researchers focused on 55 residential and commercial buildings dispersed through Manhattan, Brook-lyn, and Queens. Over three months, they collected photos of the exposed sides of each building and took note of the direction that the windows faced and the time of day that they were photographed.
The researchers found that, on aver-age, blinds or shades covered 59% of these buildings’ window area, and more than 75% of buildings had more than half of the window area covered. Furthermore, tenants weren’t open-ing or closing the blinds based on the time of day: approximately the same fraction of window area was covered regardless of the position of the sun.
Buildings in the study were selected based on whether they were easily photographed from the street, and re-searchers only ended up with around 107 photos, but what they found seems to have a shade of truth. The windows that tenants pay a high price for often end up covered for reasons other than getting too much light; researchers suggest “perhaps it’s pri-vacy, or the inconvenience of raising them once they are lowered.”
Considering all the well-documented drawbacks of over-glazing—from increasing heating and cooling loads to causing bird fatalities—the Urban Green Council says it may be time to
rethink all that glass that just ends up as an inconvenience.
Coastal Wetlands Disap-pearing Faster Than Before The U.S. coastal wetland sta-tus report looks dreary, with huge freshwater and saltwater losses, while re-establishment programs fall behind. By Candace Pearson
Within five years, the United States lost more than 360,000 acres of coastal wetlands, according to a federal study, revealing restoration and re-establish-ment programs are barely making a dent when pitted against land devel-opment, sea-level rise, and violent storms.
A status report conducted by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oce-anic and Atmospheric Administration found approximately 80,000 acres of freshwater and saltwater wetlands in coastal watersheds disappeared each year between 2004 and 2009—a 25% increase from the acres lost per year in the previous survey. An estimated 71% of wetland losses were in the coastal watersheds of the Gulf of Mexico.
The report attributes much of the loss-es to severe storms and land develop-ment. Saltwater wetlands in the Gulf were severely inundated and eroded
Shaded Window Area by Direction of the Sun
Researchers found the amount of window area covered by shades or blinds hovered around 59%, whether the sun was angled at the windows or not. This suggests tenants leave the blinds down for other reasons, such as privacy.
by hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Ike. In contrast, 37% of freshwater wetland that was lost to upland was driven by urban and rural development, and human populations in coastal counties continue to grow.
The report did find evidence of re-es-tablishment programs making some headway. For example, freshwater wetland area from agricultural lands increased by 50,230 acres, and wet-lands from “other uplands” increased by 15,290 acres. However, some of these figures may include forested wetlands that were cleared for silvi-culture, and they still reflect a lack of re-establishment programs in coastal watersheds compared to the nation as a whole.
Paseo Verde in Philly First to Achieve LEED-ND Platinum Maximizing mixed use and transportation connections helped this Philadelphia proj-ect score the most points since LEED for Neighborhood De-velopment’s creation.By Candace Pearson
A transit-oriented complex in Philadel-phia for low- and moderate- income residents has become the country’s
first neighborhood certified LEED Platinum.
The Asociación Puertorriqueños en Marcha (APM), a Latino communi-ty development organization, and Jonathan Rose Companies, one of the developers behind New York’s Via Verde, collaborated to create Paseo Verde—a mixed-use neighborhood with 120 rental units and 30,000 ft2 of ground-floor retail and community space.
The $31.3 million complex qualified for a low-interest loan through a state initiative called EnergyWorks, ac-cording to GreenSource Magazine, by reducing projected energy use 27% compared to a similar baseline project. In addition to high-per-formance appliances, each apartment has an individually metered gas-fired heating and cooling unit that can be controlled by the tenant. The projected annual purchased energy use is 40 kBtu/ft2.
Paseo Verde scored a high 24 out of 27 for smart location and linkages, an import-ant credit category in
LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) 2009; the community is located directly adjacent to the fourth-busiest train stop in Philadel-phia, providing easy access to the city center; bicycle storage and a car-share program are also available to tenants. Other services, such as a fitness center, technology center, and medical clinic, are located onsite.
Utility Fined for Eagle Deaths Linked to Wind Tur-bines A $1 million fine against Duke Energy reveals that none of the wind utilities have a federal permit to cover protected-bird fatalities.By Candace Pearson
For the first time, a wind energy facility has been prosecuted for killing protected birds. Having reached a settlement agreement, Duke Energy Renewables is to pay $1 million in fines for 14 golden eagles and 149 oth-er protected birds killed between 2009 and 2013 by two of its wind farms outside Casper, Wyoming.
Although research shows that house-hold and feral cats are far more culpable for harming bird popula-tions, wind turbines are especially hazardous for eagles—many of which are federally protected—because eagles do not look up as they hunt their prey on the ground. Under the
Coastal Wetland Gains and Losses by Region
The Great Lakes was the only region studied that experienced a net gain of coastal wetland area between 2004 and 2009. Researchers say there is a desperate need for more re-establishment programs.
Source: U.S. Department of the Interior Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA
Photo: Paseo Verde
Paseo Verde’s four apartment buildings are clad in fiber-cement panels with swatches of color. Green roofs over the brick base between the buildings provides useable outdoor space.
Migratory Bird Treaty Act, companies are required to have a federal permit to kill protected birds, but as of yet, no wind energy facilities have obtained a permit, according to the Associated Press—and, until now, no wind facility had been prosecuted.
The court found that Duke Energy failed to build its wind turbines in a way that would prevent avian deaths. The penalty follows other success-ful litigation against companies that have been fined for environmental harm—BP was fined $100 million after the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and PacifiCorp paid more than $10.5 million in 2009 for electrocuting 232 eagles along power lines—but it may be precedent-setting relative to wind energy. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is now investigating 18 other bird-death cases involving wind tur-bines, and more have been referred to the Department of Justice.
Once a wind facility is constructed, it is difficult to minimize bird fatalities short of closing down. For now, Duke Energy has committed to installing radar technology and employing field biologists who will pause the turbines when eagles are in the vicinity.
Feds to Raise Renewable Energy Use and Install More Meters Behind Obama’s executive or-der to nearly triple renewables used by federal agencies also lie new requirements for ener-gy metering and disclosure. By Candace Pearson
A recent executive order issued by President Obama directs every federal agency to source 20% of its electricity from renewable energy by 2020 and institute new energy-metering and reporting practices.
The target currently in place instructs government agencies to source 7.5% of their electricity from renewable sourc-es, but the new order aims to nearly triple that share within the next seven years. Agencies are held to the 20% goal to the extent that measures are
“economically feasible and technically prac-ticable,” according to a White House mem-orandum; however, installing renewable energy onsite and retaining renewable energy certificates is recommended over purchasing certificates.
In addition to the boost for renew-ables, the order also holds significance for energy-management practices. Federal agencies are directed to install energy and water meters on their buildings and to enter monthly performance data into the U.S. Environmental Protec-tion Agency’s Energy Star Portfolio Manager. Annual benchmarks must be disclosed to the public through the De-partment of Energy’s tracking website, and participation in demand-response programs must be considered.
These measures drew praise from Rick Fedrizzi, president of the U.S. Green Building Council, who commended Obama for “insisting on integrating smarter energy-management best practices across the federal govern-ment” and “accelerating innovative energy-efficiency initiatives.”
Toxic Chemicals Can Be Inherited in Utero Researchers are finding even if toxic chemicals don’t persist, their effects on DNA function might—for up to five genera-tions. By Candace Pearson
A growing body of research from Washington State University finds that exposing rats to toxic substances predisposes their offspring even five generations later to serious diseases. But the substances studied are not mutagens, which affect DNA directly; rather, the research shows the inher-ited effects are due to simple methyl
molecules passed on during pregnan-cy.
Michael Skinner, Ph.D., and his re-search team have been exposing rats to chemicals, including Bisphenol-A (BPA), pesticides like vinclozolin and methoxychlor, and industrial chemi-cals such as dioxin. Again and again, diseases associated with each chemical surfaced in rats that were four and five generations down the line from the subject exposed.
The researchers credit this “transgen-erational” inheritance not to mutated genes but rather to altered methyl groups that change the ability of a gene to function. The methyl groups are passed on in utero when they latch onto DNA in a fetus’s germ-line cells, which eventually become its eggs or sperm.
The implications for toxicology are significant. The studies concretely link environmental exposure to predis-posing animals for diseases such as cancer, infertility, and obesity that are often purely attributed to genetics. Exposure levels in humans, espe-cially during pregnancy, may have to be re-evaluated. The findings also suggest that current chemical risk assessments may be missing part of the picture by accounting only for first-generation effects.
Photo: Jeremy Bittermann
Obama’s executive order directs federal agencies to pursue onsite renewable energy projects like the solar roof on the Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building in Portland, Oregon.
Imperfect Consensus in Green Building Standards Business rivals find common ground through ANSI, ISO, and other frameworks—but the process isn’t perfect.If you’ve ever screwed an LED re-placement bulb into the same fixture that used to hold an incandescent, you can thank Thomas Edison, who in-vented not only the incandescent bulb but also the “Edison screw.” It quickly became an international standard in the early 20th century.
Standards can make our lives easier, but even something as simple as light-bulb threads can lead to patent and licensing wars, along with industry in-fighting over miniscule technical specs. To set some ground rules, orga-nizations turn to nonprofit groups like ISO and ANSI, which are supposed to help competing industry players achieve consensus on details that help make the marketplace work more efficiently—by limiting the different types of screw bas-es for lamps, for example.
In the U.S., ANSI’s “Es-sential Requirements” document and the National Technology Transfer and Advancement Act of 1995 help define consensus, the tenets of which include:
Openness to all parties that have a material interest in the standard
A balance of interests among these parties so that no group can dominate the discussion, push a narrow agenda, or “standardize” its own patented or trade-marked technologies
An open and transparent process for developing the standard, achieving consen-sus, and voting
An open and transparent appeals process
In addition, ANSI requires attempted harmonization among similar stan-dards, with the idea that true consen-sus should result in a single standard for a given category. In the case of the Edison screw, harmonization made things simpler not only for light-bulb makers but also for fixture manufac-turers and for anyone who owns a desk lamp.
There was just one problem with the Edison screw. It originally achieved its “consensus” status while being a licensed technology that other manu-facturers had to buy the rights to.
In theory, the ANSI process should prevent narrow interests from profit-ing from standardization. In the green
building world, nonprofit trade associ-ations often put aside rivalries to reach agreement on technical details; this keeps the standard from benefitting just one company.
Despite some attempts at harmoniza-tion, the green building community still must navigate through a confus-ing tangle of competing systems and protocols, from eco-labels to model-ing tools to entire sustainable design standards.
Nowhere do the limitations of for-mal consensus come into focus more clearly than in the rivalry between the LEED rating systems and Green Globes.
Although LEED involves a public development process, with the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC)
fielding hundreds of thousands of comments, supporters of Green Globes have criticized USGBC for not developing the system through a framework like ANSI or ISO (see “Stan-dards for Standards” for more about leadership standard development).
Meanwhile, despite the ANSI standard on which Green Globes is loosely based, that system has historically involved far fewer stakeholders, and the final standard (like most ANSI standards, but unlike LEED) isn’t available to read for free.
Both LEED and Green Globes are considered consensus standards by the U.S. government, which is required to reference such standards to conduct its everyday business, but the discrepancy between the two ways of achieving “consensus” demonstrates the limitations of the term.
Source: Virtual Valve Museum
It is easy for standards developers to get caught up in miniscule details of seemingly simple technical specs. The difficulty of achieving consensus increases with complexity.
