Newsletter // GreenerBuildings News :: April 8, 2010

I'm stealing the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance's program name for this week's newsletter in part because I love the Green Building Opportunity Index that the group just produced in conjunction with Cushman & Wakefield, and because it seems appropriate for some of the other items being posted on GreenerBuildings.com this week.

The Green Building Opportunity Index (G-BOI?? Hmmm, better not go there . . .) is an elegant measurement index that ranks the top 25 central business district office markets in the U.S. across five categories: Office Market Conditions, Investment Outlook, Green Adoption & Implementation, Local Mandates & Incentives, State Energy Initiatives and Green Culture. Perennial green darling San Francisco came out on top with Oakland (!!) in second -- guess there's a "there" there now (with apologies to Gertrude Stein). Aside from a couple of head-scratchers, such as Pittsburgh, home of the Green Building Alliance, Carnegie Mellon University and the first-ever LEED-2.0 certified building, not having a "green culture," I'd say these guys have a real winner and I'm looking forward to the upcoming international index -- hint, hint.

Another winner in the tools category is the online LEEDUser.com website. It is easy to use and full of practical advice on how to document LEED projects. Necessarily it's a bit thin on detailed green design how-to (I mean, really, how could you do something like that), but there is a real goldmine of professional insights in the LEEDUser Forums. In just a few minutes on the site I found answers to questions I had been banging my head on for weeks.

The U.S. EPA has announced its first round of Small Business Innovation Research grants that hopefully will result in better "bricks," metaphorically speaking, of course. The grants help prove and/or scale cool ideas, such as using colored glass cullet as cement replacement.

We all know that bricks are just about one of the worst building materials from an embodied energy perspective, though if they are left alone, they can almost last forever -- of course, the rub with durability is that just because something CAN last a long time, doesn't mean it WILL last a long time. So, many people tout wood as a more environmentally friendly alternative building material, which it is on so many levels, though I doubt we'll be seeing wood high-rises in my lifetime.

Naturally, the challenge with wood is that you have to kill trees, and often forests, to get it and this somewhat paradoxical situation is why you have people fighting to the death over wood in LEED. In the latest salvo over the certified wood credit, on one side you have an online petition sponsored by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) that has garnered 5,000 signatures supporting the recognition of SFI and other certification labels, while the heads of 14 major environmental organizations with a combined membership of approximately 8 million people have written to USGBC to urge retention of the FSC benchmark.

As someone who has been involved on this issue for quite a while, I think the USGBC has it almost right. They are setting up a set of program benchmarks that gives credit to any certification label that meets the requirements. The reason FSC was chosen initially was that it covered the range of best practice forestry issues -- ranging from ecosystem integrity to social concerns -- that LEED was seeking to embody as a leadership standard. There is no doubt that since SFI was launched in 1994 it has made huge strides both as an organization and in terms of improved industrial forest practice. In essence, SFI has really cleaned up the factory floor.

While this is a good thing compared with how things used to be, forests are not factories. They are living, intertwined ecosystems with 20 times the biodiversity of monoculture tree factories.

If SFI can meet the program performance benchmarks set up by USGBC it should be creditable under LEED, however, USGBC should not dumb down its benchmark to accommodate political pressure. It would be a shame to have the USGBC in a position that it is destroying forests to save them.

Eventually, I hope to see bricks, wood and other single-purpose materials be replaced by building integrated photovoltaics and other dual-purpose technologies.

As Danielle Merfeld writes, the solar industry is making huge strides in cost reductions and efficiency improvements.  But we also need someone, either inside or outside the industry to combine these improvements with the practical application of these technologies to the buildings sector. We are seeing some of this in the windows sector with a raft of new applications from Suntech and a real knock-out product from Pythagoras (Disclosure: I'm a Pythagoras advisor) that's coming down the block.

This has been a good week on the green building project front with China's first LEED Platinum building and first LEED Platinum CI projects awarded by the U.S. Green Building Council. Congratulations to Pratt & Whitney for its Shanghai Engine Center -- a joint venture with China Eastern Airlines -- and DNA Green Design for their pinnacle achievements. Last week USGBC had a high-level delegation in China for the Sixth Annual Intelligent and Green Building Conference sponsored by China's Ministry of Housing and Urban/Rural Development, which culminated with an MOU signed between USGBC and the China Green Building Council.

On the corporate front, following on the heels of Kimpton's announcement last week that it's seeking Green Seal certification for all 50 of its properties -- several of which have already been certified -- Marriott has committed to 300 LEED-certified hotels by 2015, with 40 projects registered or certified already.  These portfolio level commitments reflect a sea change in the hospitality industry, which as increased the number of projects in the green pipeline from the tens of properties in 2007 to hundreds of properties today, reflecting the participation of other major chains, such as Hilton Hotels and Wyndham Worldwide and Starwood Hotels & Resorts.  Starwood's W San Francisco Hotel became the 7th hotel in the U.S. to become LEED Certified with a Silver rating.

This week's Look-Grandpa-I-picked-up-the-$20-bill-you said-was-fake-but-it's-real! award goes to the NBA for its Green Week, which spotlights work to increase energy efficiency, waste management and recycling, and green office practices by the league and its teams. The Miami Heat plays in the LEED certified American Airlines Arena and several teams are going through energy and environmental audits in partnership with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Sounds like a slam dunk to me.

Rob Watson
Executive Editor, GreenerBuildings.com
You can reach Rob at rob.watson@greenerworldmedia.com or follow him on Twitter @KilrWat.

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