Back in 2008 when I wrote a series of articles for Environmental Building News on water, one of those articles, Alternative Water Sources: Supply-Side Solutions for Green Buildings, examined various ways of harvesting water and included an in-depth look at collecting air conditioner condensate.
Clear signage can help us find our way, it can inform us, and--in a green building--it can highlight environmental features. That signage can also, itself, make a statement about the environment.
Number 9 in my list of the top-10 green building priorities is to create resilient houses that will protect occupants in a changing climate or during extended power outages, loss of heating fuel, or water shortages.
Over the next ten weeks, I'm going to lay out my top-ten priorities for green building--starting, in Lettermanesque fashion, with #10 and working up to #1. These priorities are directed primarily toward the design and construction profession, but homeowners having a house built or work done on a house need to be part of this discussion too. This shouldn't be thought of as a hard-and-fast priority ranking. Of necessity, I've had to average the various considerations.
When I began researching concrete for last month’s EBN feature article "Reducing Environmental Impacts of Cement and Concrete," one of my goals was to figure out how toxins are bound within concrete’s structure.
Tradical® Hemcrete® is a non-structural, rigid, insulating, composite wall fill comprised (by weight) of about 38% hemp and 62% lime-based binder. The Tradical lime binder is manufactured in the U.K.
Commissioning is required for all energy-related systems that are part of the core-and-shell project. Conversely, if a system is not part of the core-and-shell scope, then commissioning is not required.
If your project is limited to providing a "cold dark shell," you might have no energy-related systems and theoretically may have nothing to commission for this prerequisite, making you exempt from it. Be careful, though, that you're not overlooking anything that could endanger your qualification for the prequisite.
This credit uses intersection density as a proxy for the level of community connectivity, transit accessibility and walkability.
Intersection density corresponds closely to block size: the greater the intersection density, the smaller the blocks. Small blocks contribute to neighborhood walkability.
The Sustainable Wastewater Management credit will continue to be tested in the pilot credit library as a replacement for LEED 2009’s WEc2 Innovative Wastewater Technolo-gies. The credit has been revised to encourage more project teams to pursue the credit by finding ways to eliminate, reuse, or recover resources from wastewater. The elimina-tion of water use for sewage conveyance is now focused on alternative technologies. Project teams are encouraged to consider the overall impact of the system such as ener-gy use and air quality which may negatively offset the environmen
