April 2009 Archives

I was in Prince Edward County—a beautiful island just off the shore of the eastern end of Lake Ontario—over Easter weekend and I caught wind of an artisan cheese company based in a LEED platinum building. That piqued two interests of mine—cheese and sustainability—and I decided to make a side trip to check it out.

I’m not a big fan of write-ups of green buildings that read like a laundry list of features (solar panels, wind power, …) because I think it’s the system as a whole, encompassing the building’s relationships with the local landscape and community that is most important. It is in the building of these relationships that Fifth Town excels. Fifth Town has designed their operations and facilities to be sustainable from the ground up. Their cheese is aged in underground ‘caves’ which can be kept at a cool temperature of 7-10 ºC without the aid of mechanical cooling. A cave ‘look-in’ can be seen in the foreground of the above picture, where passers-by can gaze longingly at shelves full of beautiful rounds of goat cheese. The cheese is made from goat’s milk delivered fresh from a network of local family farms within 100 miles of the factory. In order to supply milk to Fifth Town the farms must be Local Food Plus certified, meaning that the farms must be operated under an environmental farm management program, and their goats must be given non-genetically modified feed and treated humanely. The constructed bio-wetlands are nourished by the waste from the cheese-making process, and digest the light whey left over after the milk has been made into cheese and ricotta. To top it off, Fifth Town goes out of its way to educate visitors on their green features, with a number of detailed signs and a lovely ‘self guided tour’ printed on FSC certified recycled paper. The Fifth Town artisan cheese company just received LEED platinum certification in March.

Fifth Town has a friendly retail shop for visitors, and I must have sampled a dozen varieties of cheese before leaving with a few favourites to take home to family and friends. Their aged cheese was amazing and the bagel chèvre was soft, creamy and delicious.

FiveThirtyEight has published a wonderful chart and write-up that illustrates the problems environmentalists are having gaining traction with the American public:

This chart, adopted from a very interesting new survey of 2,164 American adults on climate policy, reveals part of the problem that advocates of more aggressive measures to curb climate change may be encountering as they seek to push forward initiatives like cap-and-trade.

As a follow-up to my earlier post on Shai Agassi’s vision for ‘refueling’ electric cars, TED talks has an excellent video of the man himself presenting his ideas on how to completely transform our automobile industry in less than ten years. More details can be found on the web page of Shai’s company, Better Place.

In a brief, excellent video on TED talks Saul Griffith demonstrates the harvesting of wind power from high altitude winds with kites. Kites offer two key advantages over ground-based wind turbines: they can access much faster wind speeds at higher altitudes, and they can sweep out much larger areas in the sky, thus capturing a lot more wind power (the power generated by a wind turbine is proportional to the area swept out by its blades).

SAB Magazine has a nice overview of paints and coatings and the meaning behind various eco-friendly certification labels, such as EcoLogo and Green Seal.

When it comes to decorating, aesthetics has not completely given way to environmental concerns. However, there is a rising conscientiousness toward creating healthy conditions for paint factory workers, painters and occupants. This, and the genuine concern regarding the human impact on the natural environment, is leading us to ask ourselves, “Is there a better way?” This simple question is driving the paint and coatings industry to make its products more environmentally friendly.

An article in the New York Times discusses innovation in simple cookstoves, which aims to dramatically increase their efficiency and decrease their output of carbon dioxide and black heat-absorbing soot.

“It’s hard to believe that this is what’s melting the glaciers,” said Dr. Veerabhadran Ramanathan, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, as he weaved through a warren of mud brick huts, each containing a mud cookstove pouring soot into the atmosphere.

Soot is also known to have a dramatic effect on health:

Doctors have long railed against black carbon for its devastating health effects in poor countries. The combination of health and environmental benefits means that reducing soot provides a “very big bang for your buck,” said Erika Rosenthal, a senior lawyer at Earth Justice, a Washington organization.

It’s about time we got moving on high-speed rail here in North America:

President Obama laid out a sweeping vision for high-speed rail in this country yesterday. Obama has already secured $8 billion in funding in the stimulus bill and plans to pursue another $5 billion over the next 5 years.

Worldchanging has a detailed discussion of the announcement, and highlighted this quote attributed to Daniel Hudson Burnham

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized.

Worldchanging examines a city-wide program to green the alleyways of Chicago:

In 2006, the City of Chicago’s Department of Transportation instituted a program to reduce damage wreaked by alleyways. Conventional concrete and asphalt are gradually being replaced by a variety of permeable pavers, some made from recycled industrial wastes like slag and tire rubber. The new porous paving allows up to 80 percent of rainwater to infiltrate the subsoil, filtering out pollutants as water returns to the aquifer and, ultimately, the lake.

Shai Agassi, profiled in yesterday’s New York Times, hopes to eliminate the need for slow recharging of electric cars and jump-start the electric car industry:

Unlike most electric-car technologies, which generally require you to plug your car into a power source and recharge an onboard battery for hours, the Better Place robot is designed to reach under the chassis of an electric car, pluck its battery out and replace it with a new one, much the same way you’d put new batteries in a child’s toy.

Agassi told me previously that his goal was five minutes or less for the whole process. “If we can’t do this in less time than it takes to fill your gasoline tank,” he said, “we don’t have a company.”

The American Institute of Architects has released its list of the top ten green projects for 2009, including Synergy at Dockside Green, a large mixed-use development in Victoria on a remediated brownfield site which achieved Canada’s LEED Platinum rating. I highly recommend checking out the AIA site with its detailed descriptions and gorgeous photos of the green features (including the shot of Dockside Green’s ‘water treatment system’ shown here) for all ten of the projects.

(Via Dwell. Photo credit: Vince Klassen.)

Dan Burden, founder of Walkable Communities in an excellent talk on the importance of walking, and of walkability to our quality of life:

As long as we build our cities for people they will be packed with people. As long as we build our cities for cars they will be packed with cars … and indeed it turns out that cars will move better if we design cities for people.

(Via Social Innovations Conversations.)

Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the IMF, on the current financial crisis:

I have yet to hear a single responsible official in any industrial country state what is obvious to most technocrats who are not currently officials: anything too big to fail is too big to exist. 

If the bankers were just stupid, as suggested by David Brooks, then regulatory fixes might make some sense.  But we know that bankers are smart, so it is their organizations that became stupid.  What is the economic and political power structure that made it possible for such stupid organizations to become so large relative to the economy?  Answer this and you address what we need to do going forward.

Paul Hawken, author of “The Ecology of Commerce”, on the environmental crisis:

Either way, the sheer size of the largest corporations tends to grant them the political and economic power to externalize costs that should properly be absorbed by the company and therefore be factored into the price it sets for its product. [p. 95]

Have we created organizations whose size, vast reach, and political clout have outstripped our ability to regulate them? William McDonough has said that “regulations are signals of design failure”. How do we design our society—our neighbourhoods and cities, our small and large businesses, our financial system—so that sustainable design is at its core and not something which needs to be enforced?

In a move designed to spur energy efficiency efforts world-wide, it was announced this week that the Empire State Building will undergo an extensive retrofit designed to save 38% of its annual energy consumption. The aggressive retrofit was planned in partnership with the Rocky Mountain Institute, Johnson Controls, Jones Lang LaSalle, and the Clinton Climate Initiative, and targets several key areas.

Load Reduction

1. Radiative barriers: more than six-thousand insulated reflective barriers will be installed behind radiator units on the perimeter of the building to prevent excess heat loss through the exterior wall.

2. Building windows: a suspended coated film, and a gas fill will be added to the over six thousand existing double paned windows to improve the thermal resistance to R-6 from R-2.

3. Tenant daylighting, lighting, plug loads: lighting power density will be reduced through the use of daylighting and task lighting, the installation of dimmable ballasts and photosensors in perimeter rooms, and plug load occupancy sensors for personal workstations will shut down equipment when it is not in use.

More Efficient Delivery

1. Chiller plant retrofit: load reduction will allow for the existing chillers to be upgraded and retrofit for higher efficiency performance.

2. Variable-air-volume air handling units: two floor-mounted units will replace four ceiling-mounted units per floor. Variable-air-volume units will allow for demand control ventilation, and floor-mounting will allow the HVAC system to be designed for a lower pressure drop, requiring less energy to run.

High Quality Controls

1. Demand control ventilation: CO₂ sensors will control the level of outside air introduced to the building. This will give better control over indoor air quality and prevent the wasteful addition of outdoor air when spaces are unoccupied.

2. Direct digital controls: the existing controls, and building energy management system will be upgraded, and will include temperature sensors, and electrical service monitoring.

3. Independent metering: tenants will have online access to their energy consumption along with sustainability tips. They will also be able to compare their performance to that of other tenants in the building.

The project is estimated to save $4.4 million annually, with a total incremental cost of $13.2 million over and above the cost of already planned upgrades. The building will be more comfortable to work in, with better insulated windows, improved indoor air quality, and well designed lighting. In order to bring tenants on board, 40% of whom will be turning over in the next four years, the Empire State Building has designed a space for the 42nd floor to market improvements to prospective tenants. They have also designed a ‘green build’ for tenants which will save $0.70-0.90 per square foot in operating costs annually for an additional first cost of $6 per square foot.

One of the key goals of the retrofit is to provide an example for the rest of the world to follow. To this end, a number of details and documents are available online, including decision making, rating and design tools and a “Lessons learned” document. Key among the lessons learned are:

1. An integrated design process including engineers, property managers, energy models, efficiency experts, architects and building management is necessary to achieve deep cuts in energy consumption. Tenant involvement is also essential, as many of the measures rely on their direct involvement.

2. It is very important for the retrofit to be aligned with planned replacements and upgrades of major building components for the project to be cost effective. If major upgrades are not planned, then retro-commissioning the building to optimize existing systems can save 5-15% of the energy used.

3. Unless the price of carbon increases dramatically (on the order of 8% per year), it will not be profitable to make the steepest cuts to energy consumption. The Empire State Building project leaves almost 50% of the carbon dioxide reduction potential on the table.

4. An easily repeated and streamlined process which allows for rapid categorization of buildings, and iteration between financial and energy modeling is needed.

Simply beautiful:

If ants can get in from outside, so can the cold winter (and hot summer) air. I followed the ants for a few day and figured out how they got in — there were a few rather significant cracks. So, I used the ants to find the leaks I should have caulked last fall.

The ants are still happy and doing their thing … except now, outside. Our house will be warmer next winter and cooler this summer. No trucks loaded with chemicals came by our house.

(Via What’s On?.)

Björn Stigson, president of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, comments on energy efficiency in buildings in an interview with Worldchanging:

The price of carbon will not do anything for the energy efficiency of buildings. Energy efficiency of buildings is a very important part of the efficiency improvement in society, but it’s such a fragmented value chain. So the price of carbon is not going to have any real impact, for the individual … Between the owner of the building — residents, so on — the lever for change for any individual actor in that value chain would be so small. So if you want to improve the energy efficiency of buildings, you have to look at the building codes and formal standards. The example of California is a good example.

Nicolai Ouroussoff expresses his hope for urban renewal in America in a New York Times article which considers how four iconic cities—New Orleans, Los Angeles, The Bronx, and Buffalo—might be remade and revitalized:

The country has fallen on hard times, but those of us who love cities know we have been living in the dark ages for a while now. We know that turning things around will take more than just pouring money into shovel-ready projects, regardless of how they might boost the economy. Windmills won’t do it either. We long for a bold urban vision.

The Sustain MiniHome, a line of sustainable and off-grid pre-fabricated homes designed in Toronto, is highlighted in a recent Guardian article on “reinventing the trailer park” as a model for green development:

[Sustain Design is] partnering with trailer park owners in Canada to transform older parks into those perfect ecotopia villages, with MiniHomes replacing the formaldehyde models … the goal is to return the parks to as close to their pre-development incarnations as possible, through habitat restoration, de-paving of surfaces to improve groundwater quality, and rainwater collection. Thomson also envisions organic gardening; community solar power, wind turbines, and electric vehicle fleets; even organic grocery delivery and pet waste compost collection areas.

The expansion of the Vancouver Convention Centre, which will be celebrating it’s grand opening this week, features the largest green roof in Canada with more than 400,000 plants covering almost 2.5 hectares. The expansion, which is aiming for LEED Gold certification, also has an extensive water conservation program, and will heat and cool the building with a sea-water based heat pump to conserve energy. One of the touted green features is shoreline and marine habitat restoration which, for a building which juts out into the ocean, struck me as a bit unlikely. It turns out that the pre-existing shoreline was de-contaminated, and a large concrete reef was added to the base of convention centre expansion. From the Times Colonist:

A new $8.3-million concrete reef - or marine life “habitat skirt” - should be swarming with new sealife within months around the base of the Vancouver convention centre expansion project. Barnacles, mussels, seaweed, starfish, crabs and various fish species are expected to inhabit the five-tiered underwater structure being installed this week.

Interestingly,

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans demanded the convention centre install the new marine life facility to replace the habitat displaced by the expanded centre.

(Via Jetson Green. Photo from Vancouver Convention Centre website.)

The UK Green Building Council is making recommendations to improve biodiversity in urban landscapes, potentially bringing wildlife back into the city and providing green corridors “to allow mammals to commute”:

Under recommendations from the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC) for developers, planners and policy-makers, otters could return to urban rivers, bats could roost under bridges, swifts could flock to office blocks and peregrine falcons could soar above cathedrals.

(Via Worldchanging.)

The Toronto Star is reporting that a large solar panel factory, based on thin-film solar technology, will be built in Kingston:

Four entrepreneurs from Toronto announced an ambitious plan yesterday to build a $500-million solar module manufacturing facility in Kingston, an investment expected to create 1,200 direct and indirect “green-collar” jobs in the area.

There is a nice overview of the steps being taken to reduce the environmental impact of concrete production in yesterday’s New York Times:

Now the experimentation is more elaborate, designed to tailor the concrete to the need. Increasingly, that need includes the environment. Aesthetic considerations aside, concrete is environmentally ugly. The manufacturing of Portland cement is responsible for about 5 percent of human-caused emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. “The new twist over the last 10 years has been to try to avoid materials that generate CO2,” said Kevin A. MacDonald, vice president for engineering services of the Cemstone Products Company.

There is some fantastic stuff in this Worldchanging interview with Amory Lovins, energy efficiency guru, and co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute:

The cornucopia of efficiency is real, but it’s the manual model: we actually have to go turn the crank. It’s not easy, but it’s easier than not doing it. And if we do get serious about using energy in a way that saves money, some big problems like oil dependence, climate change, and the spread of nuclear weapons will go away, not at a cost but at a profit, because efficiency is cheaper than fuel. That’s a prize worth working hard to capture.

Two Portland Habitat for Humanity Homes Seeking LEED Platinum:

There’s a conundrum in the green building world that a lot of people are working on.  They’re trying to figure out how to build homes that are both sustainable and affordable — homes that most of us can approach.  I could rattle off a list of folks working on this, and Habitat for Humanity would certainly be at the top.

I’m encouraged to see progress on this front. New homes will not be truly sustainable unless they are also affordable for all home buyers.

William McDonough, in melodramatic fashion, points out that buildings are built for people:

I’m amazed there’s so much focus on carbon, yet [architects are still] using toxic materials … It’s a nightmare — you’re effectively delivering a killing machine. We have to put as much focus on materials as on energy.

(Via Jetson Green.)