Posted live from Greenbuild.

I mentioned Armstrong Ceiling Systems' booth earlier, and the fact that they don't use any wood that's not FSC, and that they don't have any added formaldehyde in any of their products. I didn't mention that all their ceiling tiles are Class A fire rated, because it started to feel I was cheerleading.

There's one other thing that I didn't mention.

In February, they're slated to roll out a ceiling tile made with 46% jute. The stuff goes from seed to harvest in 90 days; talk about rapidly renewable. Like all their tiles, no added formaldehyde. There was a sample there... it looked and acted just like fiberglass. These tiles will have the standard scrim facing that most of their lines use.

No word on what the line will be called.

Posted from Greenbuild '08.

A month ago, EBN was the first to report the news that the ASHRAE Standard 189-P committee, which has been developing the nation's first code-level national green building standard for commercial buildings, had been unexpectedly disbanded by ASHRAE.

At a special Greenbuild update today, Mark MacCracken, a USGBC representative to the committee, referred to reports of the committee's disbanding as "rumors." Come again? He later acknowledged that the committee had been, in official terminology, "cleared," and that "this probably wasn't handled as well as it could have been, in terms of communication." MacCracken also publicly confirmed what we had suspected: that due to stakeholders feeling left out of the committee, the standard was in danger of being appealed to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) on procedural grounds, which would have bogged it down considerably.

Read more...

Posted live from Greenbuild.

This has been long in coming, and judging by the response of the audience this afternoon, I'm not the only one who thinks so. Yes, I work for the guy, but I'm no sycophant. He's one of the most focused, dedicated, knowledgeable people I've ever known. A press release sent out from the USGBC today said this:

Executive Editor of Environmental Building News, Alex Wilson, received the award in the Education category. For more than 25 years, Wilson has been bringing unbiased, reliable information, tools and resources to the building industry. He is the author of numerous books and textbooks on sustainable building, and has written hundreds of articles for publications outside of EBN, including Popular Science and Architectural Record. He served as the executive director of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association and on the board of directors for the USGBC, and is currently a trustee of The Nature Conservancy — Vermont Chapter.

Take a couple minutes to listen to this... it's audio of the announcement and a very short film (kinda like the Oscars). The recording is poor but understandable, and lasts less than three minutes. Check out the enthusiastic crowd response.

Unlike the tale of woe I told last year, this time I got to see the award given. It was great to be on hand to witness the well-deserved moment.

(The following are photos of the movie... which, argh, were the best shots I got.)

Posted from Greenbuild '08.

If you thought the proliferation of various different types of LEED rating systems was confusing, wait till you find out what the Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI) has in store for LEED Accredited Professionals (LEED APs), the folks who can pass an exam to be recognized as an expert in LEED. (GBCI, by the way, took over the LEED AP program about a year ago from USGBC.)

First, I'll explain what GBCI has planned for the 65,000 people (like me) who are already LEED APs. These people will be known informally as Legacy LEED APs:

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Posted live from Greenbuild.

Here's another little scoop for you. The press conference announcing this doesn't start for another 15 minutes... but since I'm the co-editor of GreenSpec, I'm going to take this liberty.

BOSTON, MA, November 20, 2008 — BuildingGreen, LLC, publisher of the GreenSpec® Directory and Environmental Building News™, today announced the 2008 Top-10 Green Building Products. This seventh annual award, announced at the U.S. Green Building Council's Greenbuild Conference in Boston, recognizes the most exciting products drawn from additions to the GreenSpec Directory and coverage in Environmental Building News.

"Our selections of the Top-10 Green Building Products represent a wide range of product types in many different application areas," noted BuildingGreen president Alex Wilson. There are a particularly large number of interior products in this year's group of winners: the first FSC-certified and formaldehyde-free bamboo flooring; doors made with wheat-straw particleboard; a line of zero-VOC paint; a transparent finish produced from a byproduct of cheese making; and a line of organic fabrics.

Three of the products this year save energy, including a low-cost, solar water-heating system; a combination heating, water heating, and heat-recovery ventilation system; and a system for monitoring real-time energy (and water) use in buildings. Water saving products are represented by a line of rainwater storage tanks — the first rainwater storage equipment ever recognized in our Top-10 lists.

Fully half of the products this year are green in part because they are made from natural, rapidly renewable, or agricultural waste materials; natural materials often require significantly less energy to manufacture. A new compressed-earth masonry block is particularly noteworthy in this regard. "Most of the Top-10 products this year have multiple environmental attributes,"said Wilson.

BuildingGreen's Top-10 product selections, as in previous years, are drawn from new additions to the company's GreenSpec product directory. More than 200 product listings have been added to the GreenSpec database during the past year. "New products seem to be appearing all the time, making it a challenge for our staff to keep up,"said Wilson. The GreenSpec database the company maintains now includes more than 2,000 product listings.

A big driver in the development of green products continues to be the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED® Rating System (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), which awards points for the use of certain product types, such as certified wood, or for the energy or water savings that green products can achieve. "Designers of LEED buildings are looking for green products, and manufacturers are responding," said Wilson. In the online version of GreenSpec, users can find products organized by LEED credits.

The 2008 Top-10 Green Building Products are listed below. More complete descriptions and contact information is provided on the linked pages:

Read more...

Posted from Greenbuild '08.

As my colleague Nadav Malin has written, attempts to achieve LEED credits, particularly in the materials and resources category, sometimes involve "magical," that is, wishful, thinking.

At a session this morning on green blogging, a guy popped out of the audience who wields a much more interesting and perhaps even more audacious type of magic toward achieving LEED credits... sculpture.

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Posted live from Greenbuild.

This morning we had our annual breakfast at Greenbuild with invited participants from the top green firms in the industry — taking their pulse, getting their take. Architects were in force, but engineers and builders were also represented.

Much of the discussion revolved around the 2030 Challenge — who has signed up and who hasn't (the room was split roughly equally); why and why not; what the vague Challenge actually means (does it include occupant transportation, etc.?) and how to specifically measure it (Btu/sf? Energy use? Carbon?). Meanwhile, the first threshold, 2010, is looming.

The state of the economy and the uncertain future didn't seem to shake the confidence of the room much... project type and focus tends to shift in downturns, but things go on. One participant said, "We're going to have to admit that we can't ignore existing buildings. This is a sea change. We have to think like Europe and parts and Asia." On the other hand, in a recent Turner survey of all building industry markets, 3/4 of respondents said that an economic downturn wouldn't affect the decision to build green.

Education, as always, was a big topic. Institutions are churning out unprepared, undereducated students. The public doesn't really get the concept of energy conservation — they just want to save money. So do building owners. But, it was pointed out, "the right kind of knowledge can change behavior" (and also, cheekily, "the right person can defeat any system we design in"). The notion that we'll see some good changes when people learn how to compete against each other to save energy was floated, and it was good.

For the industry at large, dispassionate, deep data is needed — data that's normalized and consistent. And anonymous if necessary. There needs to be more POE, more measurement and analysis. There needs to be a wealth of numbers and details available, a track record.

I'm going to make an abrupt turn here and go gooey...

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Posted live from Greenbuild.

There are a couple booths that warrant special mention.

This year, the Armstrong Ceiling Systems booth is a metal greenhouse frame (below banners reading "Come see what's growing") that, after the show, will be donated to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Nice. Most of the companies at these trade shows, especially the big players, spend scads on high-concept booths — shiny, gleaming, lots of lights, computer screens, motorized gizmos — that may only see a few shows, if that.

I'm not cynical about Armstrong's motives. Sure, it doubles as a sweet marketing device — so what? I think it qualifies as permaculture. (And guess what else? Where wood is used in Armstrong's Ceiling Systems, that wood is FSC. You can't not get FSC from them. And none of their products have added formaldehyde. I think they've made a commitment, and I don't believe it's entirely market driven.)

But there's another big-player booth that's taken this sort of concept to an awesome extreme.

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Posted live from Greenbuild.

Vortex Fine Filters by Wisy, offered in the U.S. by Rainwater Management Solutions, passively filter debris in rainwater collected from drains and downspouts. An offset input on the top of the unit spins draining water around a self-cleaning stainless steel mesh filter; 90-something percent of the water is filtered and exits to holding tanks or more processing. (The rest goes somewhere else.) A first-flush occurs by design at each rainfall.

(Until they pointed it out to me at this booth, I hadn't realized that the convention center we're in was the first in the U.S. to use siphonic drainage — another thing I like.)

Big Belly Solar compacting public trash cans and recycling kiosks. I saw these things last year, maybe even the year before, and they're still a favorite. The real savings they can offer aren't immediately apparent under the glare of novelty. They increase capacity by five times over ordinary receptacles of the same size; and they signal wirelessly for pick-up when full, further reducing — by lots — the emissions generated and energy expended for pickups. The standard black side panels and hopper cover are made from 80-100% post-consumer recycled ABS. The exterior is 85% recycled galvanized steel (which is about normal for steel anyway).

Tournesol VGM modular green wall planting system. No PVC! Their grid is 100% recycled polypro, with a steel mounting system. The soil depth... er, thickness... is a choice of either 4.5 or 8.5 inches — unusually generous for living wall systems, and great for the plants. This is a brand-new product that they rolled out at this show; it's not even on their website yet.

Posted live from Greenbuild.

Yesterday, the president of Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES), Don McLean, stopped by our booth at Greenbuild to run through the features of his company's Virtual Environment energy and carbon footprint simulation tool for SketchUp and Revit. The new version of the software already works with the new features in SketchUp 7.

While this was going on, an attendee whose office uses SketchUp for preliminary design and Revit for the hard stuff (an increasingly common configuration) happened by, and was surprised to find out the depth of information this software pulls out of SketchUp models. It's pretty amazing. There's the free version, which has limited capabilities, and purchasable modules for energy, lighting & daylighting, solar, value & cost, egress, mechanical, and more — or the whole schmear is available in a suite.

Today Don and I had an unscheduled quick bite of lunch together up in the food court. Faced with the prospect of trying to explain his product here, I asked him to do it for me — using as few words as possible while providing the most meaning. He spoke extemporaneously while I scribbled: "It enables SketchUp users to incorporate more of their model in more effective ways into the analysis process."

And then we talked about Greenbuild over the years, the rising trend of greenwash, the increasing difficulties that professionals new to green have in cutting through the crap, and European sitcoms.

UPDATE: Check out the following from the Google SketchUp blog — if you're here in Boston, or know somebody who is, this could be a sweet thing:

Guess who's going to Greenbuild 2008?

Well, not us, but our friends at IES are! We wanted to let you know because they are offering Google SketchUp Pro customers a discount on their new Architectural Suite and Architectural Suite Plus software. Here's the deal: If you go to the Greenbuild Expo in Boston next week, visit the IES Booth (#1447) and you'll receive $250 off their software using the promo code GB08. This offer is also available on their website. If you're going to the conference to learn about building green, you may as well save some green while you're there.