The district heating and cooling system will replace coal boilers, cutting the university's carbon footprint in half and saving $2 million a year. It's also a learning opportunity for students.

With 3,600 bore holes, a massive new ground-source heat pump system at Ball State University is going to become the largest system of its kind in the U.S.

If we want to slow global warming, we need to stop being such tree-huggers and start embracing the world's forests. And yes, there's a difference.

This is part three in our "Wood Wars" series.

Part 1: Are FSC and LEED Killing American Jobs?

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.

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?

I've been working for the past couple weeks on a report on windows--the latest in BuildingGreen's series of special reports on green building (the last one covering insulation). This focus has reminded me just how much we expect of our windows and what an amazing job they do.

Good news for European LEED projects just came in, via a USGBC press release stating "U.S. Green Building Council Announces the LEED Green Building Program to Recognize Energy Credits from BREEAM."

Here are a couple key paragraphs:

A new study out of the University of Colorado–Boulder suggests that LEED buildings are more likely to place construction workers in danger than are their conventional counterparts. While the results of the new study, to be published in April 2012 in the Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, are getting a skeptical view among the LEED community, the authors insist that the effect of design choices on the safety of construction workers should be a stronger consideration for architects.

Life-cycle assessment, environmental product declarations, and corporate social responsibility reporting are a great start.

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.

I was in Boston last week for the annual Building Energy conference, sponsored by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association.