Buildings find it easier being green

Sometimes I think that if I see one more green building story beginning with some inane reference to Kermit the Frog I think I will scream.

After all, how many times can you read "Kermit was right;" or "It's easy bein' green;" or my favorite, "Channelling Kermit?"

CNN/Money have a mainstream story this month showing what we have known for years: green building just makes sense. From energy use, to operating costs to improved occupant satisfaction, we already know this about green buildings.

When we will see stories entitled, "Only morons still build with toxic materials"? Or, "Traditional materials no longer make sense"?

CNN

Ralph Lauren goes green?

Ralph Lauren Magazine has a great, short article on green building.

Although it mentions Jon Hensley's embarassingly large 15,000 sf home as a "green" home, the article also mentions the wonderful effort's of the National Association of Home Builders. I am quoted in the article, but they did not include most of our interview. At least this information is getting to a new audience that normally would not know of such things.

Green House Effect
by Lauren Payne

Offset Your Car and Home Carbon Emissions

Despite what many people assume, I do not drive around in an all electric vehicle, nor do I walk everywhere either! After all, many of our projects are located far away, well outside of San Francisco.

To reduce our impact, we use ZipCar for the staff vehicle needs, and we purchased a TerraPass for the one company car to compensate for the emissions produced even just driving our relatively low 6,000 miles a year.

Now the good people at TerraPass have a TerraPass for your home. The Home TerraPass reduces carbon dioxide emissions by funding clean energy and efficiency projects. The greenhouse reductions from this purchase are in direct proportion to your home energy emissions.

TerraPass

For more on carbon emissions, read on...

Add your own Graywater System

Graywater, the collection of soapy sink and bath water to be reused to flush the toilets, is a great idea. After all, why do we waste clean drinking water to flush the toilet?

Currently, due to health concerns, Graywater is prohibited in California for use in toilets, but allowed for irrigation. For more info on using Graywater in California, click here.

WaterSaver Technologies has invented a brilliant solution. Their Aqus installs a small tank under your sink to collect soapy water. A tiny water line runs back to your toilet, feeding in the water.

Last month, the good folks at WaterSaver sent us a kit to install in our office. Just opening the box was amazing. It really is a wonder of ingenuity, from the instruction diagrams to the simple way the mechanism operates. We quickly learned it takes someone quite handy to install the device when I tried to dump the project onto our intern, Emily.

They debuted their wonder at West Coast Green last week, and it was the hit of the show.

Priced at under $200, the Aqus can save some of the 4.8 billion gallons of water flushed down U.S. toilets each day. Since water is still relatively cheap, they estimate a payback of four years, but given the low price tag, who cares?! The real beuaty of their invention is that is brings Graywater savings to any existing toilet.

Story at Treehugger
WaterSaver

Method Home

There is a great article in the paper today about our friend and neighbor, Eric Ryan at Method Home:

Six years ago, at the height of the Internet boom, Eric Ryan's friends laughed at him as he turned down one dot-com job offer after another to start a company in the stodgy, low-tech business of household cleaning products.

Today, many of those dot-coms are long gone.

And Ryan's company, San Francisco's Method Products, was recently named the seventh fastest-growing private company in America by Inc. magazine.

Read on:
Cleaning up without dot-coms
Belittled entrepreneurs choose household products over the high-tech industry and become highly successful

More West Coast Green feedback

'Green' building ideas sprouting up all over
San Francisco Chronicle

"The workshop that drew the largest attendance was "The Inevitable Architect: A Phase-by-Phase Guide to Green Building," presented by Eric Corey Freed, a principal with organicARCHITECT (www.organicarchitect.com) in San Francisco.

He had so many people in his room that we had to pull people out for the fire hazard. They gave him a second session the next day, and that one also filled to standing room only."


Wow, I am blushing! All of the talks at West Coast Green were packed, actually. This indicates to me how important it is to get this information out there to the people who need it.

I loved this line in the article:
"A big draw for the public in San Francisco was the opening speech, "A Contract With Our Future," by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

"People were crying and changing careers after hearing that guy for one hour...'

Metaphor?

Is this a visual metaphor of how we think about our buildings? We spend much more on the operations of our buildings than we ever did on their construction, yet we focus on the short term, upfront only costs of building.

It costs a lot of money to build a poorly designed building. It only takes some thinking to design something much better.

Interview on EcoTalk

Here is my interview with Betsy Rosenberg of EcoTalk.

Eric Corey Freed tells us why he's an Organic Architect and says that with buildings among the worst environmental offenders, we can no longer ignore the obvious: the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, there is no business case for building with toxic materials, and we shouldn't be green because it's hip or because we feel guilty: we should do it because it's logical.

Listen Here (MP3 Stream)

My column on GreenerBuildings

We had some interesting questions for this month's "Ask the Green Architect" column:

Are there green cleaning products for commercial spaces?

Are lawns environmentally friendly?

Is historic preservation part of green building?

Eric on EcoTalk Radio on AirAmerica

On Wednesday, 04 October at 9pm PST, Eric will be on the Air America Radio show EcoTalk with Betsy Rosenberg.

We had a lively talk on green building trends at last week's West Coast Green Conference, along with Kevin Danaher and other conference attendees.

Listen locally at:
KQKE-AM 960

And for a full list of all national stations, click here

Subscribe to this podcast
Subscribe to this iTunes podcast


EcoTalk is also seeking a new sponsor, so if you have any leads or suggestions, please contact Betsy here.

West Coast Green Review

Shades of green: Conference highlights San Francisco for its leadership — and shortcomings — in environmentally sensitive building

Read Andrew Tolve's wonderful review of the West Coast Green Conference this past weekend.

An excerpt:
"Green architecture is still very much emerging," Eric Corey Freed, one of San Francisco's top green architects and a host at West Coast Green, told the Guardian. "And although San Francisco is the capital, even here it hasn't reached the point of ubiquity that we expect it to. We're still very much in our adolescence. We're like teenagers with pimples and crackly voices."

In 100 years, Freed added, history will likely look back on our time as the era of the green revolution.

If he is right, perhaps San Francisco will have done enough to be deemed a nucleus of the movement — and important conferences like West Coast Green will take priority over the opening of new shopping malls.

Full Story

West Coast Green Report

I just spent three exhausting and exhilirating days at the West Coast Green Conference.

My final report: we made history.

This show will be a catalyst for great change in the coming months. In a wonderful demonstration of how galvanized and focused the green building movement has become, the show attracted more than double the anticipated number of visitors! (4000 expected, more than 8000 attended as of Saturday morning).

For me the show is:
* a chance to see old friends and hear how they current explain sustainability;
* meet new young people excited by these ideas and get infected with their enthusiasm;
* see traditional businesses change their methods and help them chart a new course

Some highlights of the event:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Tom Paladino, Paladino Consultants
Cameron Sinclair: Co-founder, Architecture For Humanity
Hunter Lovins: Founder & President, Natural Capitalism, Inc.
who all gave soul wrenching lectures urging us to take action. Some were brought to tears.

My own talk on Thursday morning was so crowded that the displaced people complained and I was asked to provide an encore the following day. I don't think people realized that morning how every lecture would be packed to the gills. The toughest part of the conference was choosing between the eight consecutive seminars.

The charming Wanda Urbanska, Producer & Host of Simple Living on HGTV, interviewed me at the show. As did the passionate Betsy Rosenberg of EcoTalk Radio and the energetic Sarah Rich of Inhabitat. Look for links to these as they are posted.

DVD's of the lectures and the presentations will be available here shortly.

For those of you who attended the show, I would love to hear your feedback (comments, compliments or criticisms). Plans for West Coast Green 2007 are already underway, so your voice is needed.