Columns/Blogs

There is no doubt that the mission of sustainability as it pertains to construction has exploded well beyond simply lowering the environmental footprint of a building. Today there are more and more building certification programs in general. The USGBC’s LEED program is the dominating choice. And the Green Building Institute’s Green Globes program is gaining traction, especially within the U.S. government. And we now see BREEAM, the world's leading sustainability assessment method for master planning projects, infrastructure and buildings in North America.

One of the most popular aspects of sustainable buildings is its focus on the well being of the occupants in those buildings. According to the one expert source, there are 120 million employees working in buildings each day in the US. The cost for personnel represents 90% of total business costs. The productivity and health of staff are often affected by the conditions of the office setting.

Health and Wellness in sustainable buildings continues to create interest as to how to quantify the level of occupants’ well being. One of the newer certification programs in this field is the WELL Standard which is gaining ground. WELL was first introduced in 2012 by the Delos Living LLC company. The group was initially supported by the Clinton Global Initiative to develop spaces that enhance occupant health and quality.

The USGBC’s LEED version 4 continues to grow in North America as well as across the globe. According to Mahesh Ramanujam, the new President and CEO of USGBC and GBCI, LEED is growing worldwide with over 36,000 certified commercial projects. That represents over 5 billion square feet of certified space. He also states that every day more than 1.85 million square feet of space certifies LEED.

As sustainable (or "green") products continue to grow in popularity, the claims by marketers of those products often go a little too far in their boasting of the sustainability of the product. In an attempt to somewhat regulate the green claims being made, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) created a Green Guides document in 1992. The guide has been updated repeatedly with the most recent update taking place in 2012. The Green Guides are designed to help marketing personnel avoid making environmental claims that mislead consumers.

The 800-pound gorilla will be sharing a cage that we call sustainability. For several years the American High Performance Building Coalition (AHPBC) was advocating change in public policy where there was only one green building certification program required for public building construction. For the most part, the sole green building rating system was the USGBC’s LEED building certification program. The AHPBC was promoting choice on the part of local, regional and national green programs.

Several green building rating programs, including LEED and Green Globes, have begun moving away from materials and items that have single attributes. In their place, a more holistic approach to aspects of green buildings with multiple attributes is in vogue.

Greenbuild: Iconic took place in October at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The attendance was down a bit from previous Greenbuild conferences. The expo floor had fewer exhibitors and smaller exhibits compared to earlier events. Despite those observations it was clear that there remains a hunger for more information on green building issues. This is not a “movement” that attracts just millennials. Over 100 educational sessions were offered and the attendance at those sessions was very diverse with 100-200 attending most of them.

Energy related incentives for homeowners and commercial building owners have been included in federal legislation since the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The good news is that the legislation over the past eleven years created excellent incentives for residential properties and commercial facilities to invest in cool metal roofing, energy efficient windows, insulation, and solar power. The bad news is that the incentives from legislation do not last forever. A recently passed omnibus spending bill eliminates uncertainty...at least for a while.

Several years ago, a clever financing program was introduced to allow homeowners to lower their energy costs. The program was referred to as PACE – an acronym for Property Assessed Clean Energy. The first pilot programs took place in California around 2007. At that point it was accepted by 24 states in 24 months.

It's important for designers to have at least a cursory knowledge of the vast universe of building products and materials at their disposal. To assist them, architectural firms maintain libraries containing thousands of samples of everything from carpeting to roofing. Many of these building materials have been available for decades, and as a result a designer is normally familiar with the physical properties of them.

We are now officially in the 2016 hurricane season. We already had a named Atlantic hurricane near the Azores in January! Colorado State University (CSU) is predicting near average activity in the Atlantic. CSU predicts a total of 12 named storms, and six hurricanes (three at Category 3 level or higher).

Our society is accepting of trophies given to children just for participation in a sport, as opposed to winning. We accept teachers awarding students for their rationale for determining an answer to a problem even if the answer is incorrect. We even live in a society where college students feel that they don’t have enough time to study for final exams so those tests should be eliminated out of fairness.

Washington State recently announced plans for a second phase of investigation on toxic chemicals in rainwater runoff from roofs. The original project started in 2013 with the Washington state Department of Ecology receiving a grant for their work to determine if roof runoff was contributing to the pollution in the Puget Sound.

If you have been reading this monthly column, you may have noticed that I enjoy gazing into the future. The latest issue of MIT Technology Review did not let me down. In that publication they are highlighting top ten “breakthrough technologies” that will change the way in which we will see the world in the future, and how the world will work in the future. The futuristic technologies, according to MIT, apply to the medical field, genetics, communications, energy, space, and transportation. Here are summaries of these technologies for you to ponder.

The Resiliency of buildings and communities remains very important to a variety of organizations. The dialogue related to resilience is often linked to global climate change and its effect on more powerful storms and a higher incidence of those storms, making our cities, communities and buildings more susceptible to damage. Winter is a difficult time to be talking about climate change and global warming, especially in light of record amounts of snow and record cold temperatures. But while we dig out in the east, others are dealing with February tornadoes.

As the political process of electing a new President intensifies with each debate, campaign commercial and promise made, we learn more about the activity or inactivity of our elected representatives. Some say that these folks who live and work inside the DC Beltway are detached from their constituents.

This month I'm deviating from my traditional column on technical or green topics. The holiday season and the end of another year got me thinking about some things that I wanted to share. The song tells us this is” The Most Wonderful Time of the Year”. And despite the dark and broken world in which we live, we truly do have much to be happy about.

The 2015 Greenbuild Conference and Expo took place in Washington, DC in November. The motto for this year’s conference was “Monumental Green”. The amount of education sessions and exhibitors was indeed a monumental effort. Over 120 education sessions took place over three days, plus numerous additional educational sessions on the show floor amidst more than 600 exhibits of a variety of sizes and shapes.

On October 21 we celebrated “Back to the Future” Day to remember the famous 1985 movie and its depiction of our future. Even though the prediction from the movie to see the Chicago Cubs win the World Series in 2015 was wrong (thank you Mets), it was fun to think about items like hover boards, flying cars, and cars that ran on food scraps. Let’s not forget that the movie did correctly predict hands-free video games and wearable technologies. This is a good time to take a look at the future of the building construction industry as well.