GreenSpec Insights
Green Product Spotlight: Enhancing Resilience of Buildings
Posted by Alex Wilson on 04/11/2012
We need to create buildings and communities that are more resilient to natural disasters and other shocks. These building products can help.
As climate change becomes an ever greater reality, the need to create resilient buildings and communities becomes more important. Resilience is partly about adaptation to climate change and partly about common sense health and safety issues in an age of increasing resource constraints, growing economic swings, the greater vulnerability to...
Scoring the Referees: How Pharos Judges Green Labels
Posted by Tristan Roberts on 04/11/2012
[Editor's note: Today's guest post is authored by Bill Walsh, Executive Director of the Healthy Building Network.]
When building products carry different green certifications, how do you know which product is best? Maybe there is a way to compare apples and oranges.
As green certifications and labels have proliferated, so has greenwash. Even among legitimate certifications, conflicts and inconsistency have made them hard...
Beat the Bulb "Ban": LED Replacement Lamps in a New Light
Posted by Brent Ehrlich on 04/03/2012
The incandescent ban is here, but LEDs have improved rapidly in the last couple of years and there are now several bulbs that meet Energy Star criteria.
We've been hearing for years that "they're going to ban the incandescent bulb"--is that for real? Starting on January 12, 2012, the Energy and Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) began regulating energy-efficiency standards for 100-watt screw-in light bulbs (also known as Edison or A19 lamps). These bulbs are now required...More Heat Than Light: Six Wrong Ways to Daylight a Building
Posted by Paula Melton on 04/02/2012
Thanks to LEED and other standards, everyone's doing daylighting now--but not everyone is getting it right. Here's how it goes wrong--and how to do it right.
You can't turn around these days without seeing a case study that mentions the use of natural daylight to help save energy and enhance the well-being and productivity of occupants--especially students and employees.
Unfortunately, almost as common are horror stories of fabulous green buildings that make their occupants...
Toxicological Riddles: The Case of Boric Acid
Posted by Jennifer Atlee on 03/28/2012
Even water is toxic if you have too much. How do we keep a potentially harmful but necessary nutrient like boric acid at safe levels in our buildings and our bodies?
What do you do about a substance that is a biologically necessary trace nutrient, long considered nontoxic, and in a multitude of products--but that is also now listed on a major European Union chemical hazard list due to evidence that it is toxic for reproduction?
It's one of those riddles that I can imagine...
10 Green Building Products They Still Make in the U.S.
Posted by Erin Weaver on 03/22/2012
It's not necessarily greener to source products made in the USA. But it sure does create jobs.
Let's get one thing clear: the issue of energy spent importing stuff from China is a red herring. The distance from ports in California to China is about twice the width of the continental U.S., but ocean freighters are about 7.5 times more energy-efficient than...
Biobased Materials—Increasing Our Scrutiny
Posted by Jennifer Atlee on 03/20/2012
It's natural that we should gravitate toward biobased materials. But many of them are energy-intensive and toxic, so how do we judge what's best?
It still seems like biobased materials should be better for the environment. Even after the LEED...
Transparency in Action: Health Product Declaration Ramping Up
Posted by Jennifer Atlee on 03/15/2012
Life-cycle assessment, environmental product declarations, and corporate social responsibility reporting are a great start. But can we talk about health?
Here at BuildingGreen, we're pretty excited about the rise of the product transparency movement (as you may have noticed from recent coverage in January's EBN and...
Gypsum Board: Are Our Walls Leaching Toxins?
Posted by Martin Solomon on 03/14/2012
By any name--drywall, wallboard, or plasterboard--gypsum products may not be as innocent as we once thought.
Virtually ubiquitous in our buildings, gypsum board is widely seen as an innocuous building material. However, in the last decade,...
German Innovation in Solar Water Heating
Posted by Alex Wilson on 03/13/2012
I was amazed to see the large number of European companies represented in...
About the Authors
Alex Wilson is founder and executive editor of BuildingGreen, Inc., and coeditor of GreenSpec. For more than 30 years, Alex has been the most trusted voice on energy efficiency and environmentally responsible design and construction. Since launching Environmental Building News (EBN) in 1992, he’s built a reputation, resources, and staff to serve the companies for whom sustainable design is a core value.
Brent Ehrlich is BuildingGreen’s products editor, conducts research and writes product and category insights for the company’s GreenSpec product directory. He also contributes product reviews and feature articles for Environmental Building News, and is a contributing editor to McGraw-Hill’s GreenSource magazine.
Jennifer Atlee is research director at BuildingGreen, responsible for guiding the in-depth independent research that is the hallmark of all BuildingGreen resources. With her broad knowledge in sustainability, analytical acumen, and passion for improving the standards used to assess the sustainability of products, processes, and organizations, Jennifer brings strong direction to the research process behind GreenSpec’s product-screening decisions, and technical rigor to BuildingGreen’s custom research projects.
Tristan Roberts is Editorial Director at BuildingGreen, Inc., a position that requires broad knowledge about sustainable design, deep understanding of products, and mastery of all things LEED. Tristan Roberts brings that to Environmental Building News, GreenSpec, and LEEDuser, a plug-in tool supported by the U.S. Green Building Council to provide credit-by-credit advice for LEED projects.
Peter Yost brings more than 25 years' experience in building, researching, teaching, writing, and consulting on high-performance homes to his role as director of residential services for BuildingGreen. He has been called upon to provide his building-science expertise to the nation’s leading homebuilding programs, including NAHB’s Green Building Standard, USGBC's LEED for Homes, EPA’s WaterSense, and the U.S. Department of Energy's Building America.
Paula Melton, BuildingGreen’s managing editor, brings a dynamic style, critical mind, and sharp wit to the many feature articles, blog posts, and product reviews she writes for GreenSpec, BuildingGreen.com, Environmental Building News, and other BuildingGreen-supported websites.
Nadav Malin is president of BuildingGreen, where he oversees the company’s industry-leading information and community-building resources and consulting services. He also convenes and facilitates gatherings of industry leaders, and lends his technical expertise and vision to GreenSource magazine. Nadav was the founding chair of the Materials & Resources Technical Advisory Group for LEED.
Recent Discussions
The article suggests that from the air barrier location, the wall dries to interior within, and to exterior without. That's only the case when...
Tanya,
In regards to open-cell spray foam insulation it is a great choice epsecially in your application. With the right type of spray...
Facebook
Twitter
Charles,
In our case I think the air barrier (Huber's Zip sheathing) is vapor-impermeable to a significant extent. It is a coated...