Thinking about buying a new car? Perhaps your SUV gets 12 miles to the gallon? Or your 1985 Chevy won’t pass the emissions test? Consider this tidbit from Wired:
“Pound for pound, making a Prius contributes more carbon to the atmosphere than making a Hummer, largely due to the environmental cost of the 30 pounds of nickel in the hybrid’s battery.”
Once you pull up to the gas pump, on the other hand, it’s a whole other story.
Right now the general building industry is seeing a lot of red, not green. With the housing markets in free fall, homeowners finding out that their mortgage debt exceeds the value of their house and with the foreclosure crisis continuing to grow it doesn’t look good. But even with all this bad news there is one bright spot in the building world, green homes. A recent survey by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), new home buyers would spend almost an additional $9,000 on a home with effective energy efficient features. Another consumer study that indicated that 85% of recent home buyers would choose one home over another because of energy efficiency features. The study also reported that buyers are willing to pay an average of $19,000 more for a green home.
Recently the NAHB marked the 10th anniversary of its National Green Building Conference before a record crowd of more than 1,200 attendees. At the meeting some of the pioneering green builders reflected on how they have gone from being “the people no one wanted to sit next to” to being “the most popular guys in the room.”
Given these signs it looks like more builders will be focusing on building “greener” new homes which should help everyone.
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I recently came across a article about something I had never heard about before, green burials. The idea is amazingly simple, saves cost and is the environmentally responsible thing to do.
The basics are pretty straight forward, there is no embalming fluid used in the body, a biodegradable casket is used and there is no concrete vault used. This takes us back to the way burials were preformed prior to the Civil War, kind of the way nature intended. It’s sort of the ultimate form of recycling.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution had the original article that sparked my interest, you can read it here - AJC Green Burial.
There are a couple of reference sites that are worth a look.
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If you are looking at doing some remodeling and want to incorporate green principals and practices you might have some problems with a run of the mill remodeling contractor. One way to help ensure that your contractor is familiar with green remodeling is to see if he or she is certified by the National Association of the Remodeling Industry (NARI) as a Green Certified Professional (GCP). According to the NARI, to be qualified as a GCP the remodeling contractor must meet all of the following requirements:
Does this guarantee that they will be the perfect green contractor, no, but it certainly is a check on the positive side for the contractor.
For more information check out the NARI site.
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The AIA Committee on the Environment (COTE) created their annual top ten list of green projects. The information about the projects is contained on the AIA site.
The projects are pretty neat but somewhat disconnected, on the surface, from green homebuilding. If you dig a bit deeper you can find some things that do directly apply to homebuilding, the measurements they use to rate the various projects used to create the top ten list. These measures can help you on the journey to a greener home.
The high-level list follows:
1: Sustainable Design Intent & Innovation
2: Regional/Community Design & Connectivity
3: Land Use & Site Ecology
4: Bioclimatic Design
5: Light & Air
6: Water Cycle
7: Energy Flows & Energy Future
8: Materials & Construction
9: Long Life, Loose Fit
10: Collective Wisdom & Feedback Loops
The detailed information for each from the AIA site is below:
The National Association of Home Builders has a great publication available to the public for free. It is the Model Green Home Building Guidelines. While the primary audience is home builders it is also a valuable read for the average consumer. There is also a checklist available that is kind of the “Cliff Notes” version of the guidelines.
The Guidelines are a good way to get a quick overview of the key areas involved in green building practices. There are 6 main areas that the guidelines cover; Lot Preparation and Design, Resource Efficiency, Energy Efficiency, Water Efficiency / Conservation, Occupancy Comfort and Indoor Environmental Quality, Operation, Maintenance and Education.
In summary, the Guidelines can give you a jump start on understanding the key parts of green design and the associated construction processes. Best of all – it’s free.
Green roofs can take multiple forms, the one we will be talking about for this article are defined as: a building roof that is partially or completely covered with vegetation. While this type of roof isn’t used much in residential construction it is most popular in commercial construction (flat roofs are most adaptable to green roof practices). The idea and implementation of green roofs has increased greatly over the past few years. In 2007 green roof implementations in North America grew by 30% according to the “Green Roofs For Healthy Cities” organization. Among the benefits of green roofs are more cleaner air and carbon dioxide elimination, reduced energy consumption for the building and a cooler cityscape, less stormwater runoff, and more green spaces for people and animals.
A green roof is composed of multiple layers or components. The base is often some type of waterproof membrane. There also may be root barrier and drainage and irrigation systems. This is then covered by soil or some other type of custom growing medium. A flat roof is the easiest roof style for the implementation of green roofs.
There are a number of great websites out there that will provide you with more information on green roofs. They include:
Green Roofs for Healthy Cities
Green Roof Project (residential)
Now go get green.
We’ve been trying something new for about a month. Publix sells "reusable grocery bags" for around $1 per bag. The same or very similar bags are also sold at Target, Wal-Mart, and Whole Foods and appear to differ only in color and logos.
My wife picked up 10 bags at Publix about a month ago, and I have been pleasantly surprised at the results, in spite of the initial cost.
The EPA’s recently issued their Lead: Renovation, Repair and Painting rule which will take effect in April 2010. The main impact of the rule is that remodeling activities that occur in houses built before 1978 that have pregnant women or children less than 6 years old will have to follow a strict set of requirements. They mainly include keeping dust to a minimum and cleaning up thoroughly after the work. Contractors will also need to take a training course to obtain the required certification. For details you can check the EPA site. You can also get educational pamphlets by calling the EPA’s National Lead Information Center at 800-424-LEAD (5323).
After the item yesterday about the rising price of food and the potential for shortages this site popped to mind. This isn’t really a “green” related site but the principle and result is great. FreeRice.com was created in late 2007 by John Breen, a computer programmer from Bloomington Indiana to help his son study for the SAT. The site is a online word game where the player is presented with a word and four possible definitions, if they pick the correct definition FreeRice.com donates 20 grains of rice the United Nations World Food Program. The rice (actually, the money for it) is provided by sponsors who advertise on the site. The site generates enough traffic that enough rice is donated each day to feed over 7,000 people. As of early April over 25 billion grains of rice had been donated!
It’s fun, a great way for kids (and adults) to improve their vocabulary and help a very worthwhile cause - reducing world hunger. Go give it a shot.
It has been offered up that biofuels like ethanol will help create jobs and reduce the overall problem of global warming. While this may be true it could come at a cost greater then the help it offers.
A number of countries have jumped on the biofuels bandwagon in the past few years. The US Congress is developing a proposal that would grow biofuel production to 36 billion gallons by 2022 from the current 2012 mandate of 7.5 billion gallons. The European leaders are requiring that a minimum of 10% of fuels will have to come from biofuels by the year 2020. The trend is obvious.
This past Tuesday the United Nations released a major report on bioenergy. Among the positive statements about the benefits of biofuels there were also alarms raised about the negative impacts of biofuels. The report said “Unless new policies are enacted to protect threatened lands, secure socially acceptable land use, and steer bioenergy development in a sustainable direction overall, the environmental and social damage could in some cases outweigh the benefits,”
It also says that bioenergy represents an “extraordinary opportunity” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it warned that “rapid growth in liquid biofuel production will make substantial demands on the world’s land and water resources at a time when demand for both food and forest products is also rising rapidly.”
Josette Sheeran, executive director of the United Nations’ World Food Program, said on the agency’s Web site Tuesday that the rising prices are “threatening to plunge more than 100 million people on every continent into hunger,”
In addition to the UN report there was also an excellent paper written by the National Center for Public Policy Research titled “Thanks to Congress, Ethanol and Biofuel Mandates Cause Food Prices to Soar”. In the paper the author, Dana Joel Gattuso, writes that the redirection of food crops to biofuels is causing food prices to soar. It also stated that this is “drawing us into an ugly “food-versus-fuel” battle: “Any diversion of land from food or feed production to production of energy biomass will influence food prices from the start, as both compete for the same inputs.”
Does it come down to a fight between clean “renewable” fuel versus food? Do we lose either way? Let us know what you think.
The full UN report is available at esa.un.org/un-energy/pdf/susdev.Biofuels.FAO.pdf
The National Center for Public Policy Research paper is available at http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA564.html
April 22 is Earth Day (depending on which Earth Day you observe!). I’m sure you have seen a number of news items about Earth Day and they go all across the board. While I tend to question some of the articles due to their heavy doses of “green washing”, the overall trend is a good one. Any time that we can get people to think about how to better the environment and reduce our consumption of resources it’s a good thing. So please take some time out to talk to your friends and neighbors about green issues and see if you can help spread the work.
Have a Happy Earth Day!
I found a very interesting blog by Fiji. If you have not heard of Fiji bottled water, it actually does come from Fiji. It is a favorite of my mother in law (in spite of filtered tap water at home), and does taste pretty good as water goes.
The blog is Fiji Green Blog and highly recommended. The back and forth between commenters and Fiji Green Gal are entertaining and surprisingly informative.
Personally, I am not a fan of bottled water and agree with many of the posters that tap water in a mug or thermos is just fine and a good glass of iced tea or mug of hot coffee is even better. But, if you are going to drink bottled water, Fiji Green Gal makes a strong case why Fiji water should be your choice.
I have not yet found a comparison of other bottled waters, but will keep looking. Please share any stats, links, or other information in the comments about beverage choices and their greenness!
You may have missed us over the last few weeks as vacation time rolled around and we really took advantage of it. To kick back off, I put together a few real life tips from our trip to the beach of little things that can help make your vacation just a little greener.
| CarbonRally.com is a neat site that we’ve mentioned before. It tracks actions you take to reduce your carbon consumption and impact on the environment. We’ve created a group called “greenho.ws” that is open for everyone to join!So far, with just three team mates, we have climbed to the second page on the leaderboard and would like to go higher!
Join with us to take simple, often obvious, and generally easy actions to help keep the environment green. It’s easy to sign up: just click the “JOIN MY TEAM” link to the left. If you are not already signed up with CarbonRally.com you will be prompted to create a user name and ID. Quick path to join us would be to click again on the link at left, or look for us in the teams section (at the moment, we are on the second page). Full disclosure here: I did NOT sign up to go vegetarian for two days. It’s tough to pass up those burgers at Five Guys! |
I was reading back through some “old” green articles and came across one in the Wall Street Journal. It was “Going ‘Green’ at Home Doesn’t Have to Cost a Fortune”. The article by Lauren Baier Kim talks (minimally) about low cost ways to go green at home and cut your energy costs. If the Wall Street Journal reading crowd is looking to save a few dollars by improving their energy efficiency, you know it must be impacting people across the board. It’s a real quick read at Going ‘Green’ at Home Doesn’t Have to Cost a Fortune.
I haven’t had my morning caffeine yet and already a half dozen green articles or ads have jumped out at me. I am gain surprised at how quickly interest in the topic has grown.
Here’s a sample of what I’ve seen so far today, with some comments:
There is a very intriguing article in this week’s issue of Time magazine. The article by Michael Grunwald has a tagline of “Politicians and Big Business are pushing biofuels like corn-based ethanol as alternatives to oil. All they’re really doing is driving up food prices and making global warming worse – and you’re paying for it. Mr. Grunwald makes the argument that while ethanol is being hyped as the eco-friendly answer to our energy problems it really is increasing global warming, destroying forests and pushing food prices up.
Give it a read at Time and let us know what you think.
Oh no, not another list! Yes it is, anytime we can provide ways to save money and energy it is worth talking about. This was a quick little read in the online version of This Old House Magazine. It covers everything from plugging your chimney to selling your house (?). Give it a read and see if you can find some savings.
It’s at This Old House.
There are three paths we can follow to a greener country. One of based on the "where have you been?" and "why haven’t you done more?" philosophy. Another follows the path of denial by saying "what problem?" And the third falls somewhere in between.
In many ways, the first two may do more harm than good.
