Green ArchiTEXT

Can JUST label bring social justice to building materials? | GreenBiz.com

By Molly Miller

What is the human toll for our purchases? Do the organizations we support care about their employees? Do they support the local community? How is their money invested?

These are some unanswered questions leaders in green building design say we have not addressed as we have developed ways of evaluating green buildings through certifications, such as the International Living Future Institute's Living Building Challenge (LBC) and the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED certification.

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At the Living Future's annual conference last week in Seattle, Jason McLennan and BNIM founder Bob Berkebile launched the JUST label, an extension of the Declare label that addresses social justice and equity issues, such as as diversity, worker rights, health care and employee happiness, occupational safety and stewardship practices, including investments and community involvement.

Both Declare and JUST are part of a push for greater transparency for products materials in green buildings. READ MORE >>

via www.greenbiz.com

Is This the Google of Green Building?

By Andrew Heaton

Once upon a time, the average office worker was able to find out whether or not his or her building was LEED certified and to what level (if they even understood what that meant), but finding out anything useful in plain English such as why it is or isn’t energy or water efficient and whether the daylight or indoor air quality is any good has been difficult.

Now, however, that is changing. Using a new tool developed by the US Green Building Council  (USGBC) referred to as the Green Building Information Gateway – essentially a search engine for green building – anyone will be able to find out what energy/water savings measures are in place, whether or not building materials have been obtained from sustainable sources, what aspects of the building make air quality and cleanliness excellent or not so good as the case may be, and lots more. READ MORE >>

via designbuildsource.ca

Green versus Gray: Nature’s Solutions to Infrastructure Demands | Solutions

By John Talberth, Erin Gray, Logan Yonavjak, Todd Gartner

Cities around the country are starting to realize the economic—to say nothing of environmental—benefits of this shifting reality. A recent analysis by New York City found that green roofs and bioswales could help meet water-quality goals with savings of more than $1 billion compared to conventional infrastructure; the Chesapeake Bay could reduce nitrogen loading at less than half the price by using cover crops instead of upgraded wastewater plants. The City of Philadelphia found that the net present value of green infrastructure for storm-water control ranged from $1.94 to $4.45 billion, while gray infrastructure benefits ranged from only $0.06 to $0.14 billion over a 40-year period. And using a system of wetlands, North Carolina could minimize storm-water runoff for 47 cents per thousand gallons treated. Using conventional storm-water controls, this figure jumps to $3.24 per thousand gallons.^3-5

An emerging hypothesis in environmental management settings is that investment in ecosystem-based green infrastructure solutions provides economically superior environmental quality outcomes when compared to investments in technology-based or “gray” infrastructure. READ MORE >>

via www.thesolutionsjournal.com

Experientia's Ecofamilies Pilot Monitors Energy Use Online

New Experientia videos, showing the Ecofamilies and Stories projects respectively, focus on monitoring domestic energy consumption in different areas of Europe.

The Ecofamilies video (in French with our English subtitles) is a feature on the project by France’s TV France3. For Ecofamilies, Experientia partnered with the Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment (CSTB) of Nice, France, and a series of other agencies, for a French sustainability project, aimed at the development of a web platform for a pilot house to monitor domestic energy consumption.

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From March-June 2012, Experientia conducted participatory co-design workshops with 30 volunteer families. The workshops aimed to discover the real behaviours, attitudes and needs of families when it comes to energy consumption.

The project produced an innovative technological solution that allows families to have a concrete understanding of their energy consumption, and of the choices that are available to reduce it, with personalised tips, and detailed, useful information on household energy use. READ MORE >>

via www.experientia.com

Make It Right's Online "Lab" Ups the Dialogue on Green, Affordable Design

Make It Right’s new Laboratory is a free online discussion site where people interested in sustainable, affordable design can learn, share and discuss the world of green construction.

EngagingCities Explores Innovative Outreach as Key to Urban Space Design

By Alexis Canter and Brie Hensold

Nearly every public project conducted in the United States incorporates some form of public outreach. Today, in an increasingly global and digital era, traditional public meetings often fall short of reaching the increasingly diverse and information-saturated citizens of today’s American cities. Or, the efforts fail to incite the interest required to achieve the long-term buy-in for planning and design strategies that’s needed to see a project through to successful implementation.

Successful projects, on the other hand, leverage the process of outreach into sustained interest in outcomes. Public process participants, in the most ideal scenario, become the champions of the project through the long road of implementation and the ever more daunting challenge of ongoing governance. In this way, engagement becomes a critical path toward both project realization and design excellence.

Defining Innovation

Inspired by an academic exploration at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in the spring of 2012 and launched this week by Sasaki’s Urban Studio, the Currents: Engaging volume illustrates five recent innovations in public outreach as it related to the design and construction of public spaces. These are defined as process-as-event, on-the-ground, real time, early wins, and accessible materials. Each concept posits an alternative to the traditional public meeting format and is reinforced by a series of notable case studies in which outreach was a critical component of the design. READ MORE >>

via engagingcities.com

SymbioCity, A Holistic Approach to Environmental and Economic Sustainability

Tonight at the Tulane School of Archiecture: Phil Thompson on "SymbioCity, A Holistic Approach to Environmental and Economic Sustainability":

"The Swedish American Green Alliance has a strong emphasis on the challenge of creating sustainable cities. Sweden is at the forefront of this area and has produced a complete concept called SymbioCity. This concept builds upon the notion that shared urban systems create synergies; holistic approach to landscape planning, transportation and waste management, from which the gain is both environmental and economic."

For more on the SymbioCity concept, check out their website here.

 

Looking to the Cloud Toward the Future of Building Design | GreenBiz.com

By Tilde Herrera

Over the last several years, many companies have turned to cloud computing to help them further their sustainability goals.

By storing data and software virtually, which is accessible from our laptops and desktops, they eliminate the need to run their own data centers, while also reducing energy and electronics waste.

But cloud computing also allows people to collaborate and share data in ways they've never been able to in the past. At the same time, the cloud offers a high degree of computational power that may unleash a revolution in the way we design buildings.

A GreenBiz.com webcast held this week explored the potential of the cloud to change building design. It was a high-level view of the opportunities, current struggles and ways in which vendors are trying to bridge the gap. READ MORE >>

via www.greenbiz.com

U.K. Neighborhood Records Its Electricity Use on the Street

By Andrew Price

A little feedback can go a long way. In Brighton, in the United Kingdom, a group of residents living on Tidy Street are recording their daily electricity use on a giant infographic painted on the street outside their homes.

As The Tidy Street Project website explains:

Each day the participants' electricity usage over the previous 24 hours will be marked; and each week participants can choose to add another comparison line that will show how their electricity consumption compares to another region in the UK or even a different country. We hope that the residents, in collaboration with a local graffiti artist, will produce an engaging artwork that will stimulate the street and passersby to reflect on their electricity use.

The project has been running for roughly three weeks and already the participants' electricity use has dropped by 15 percent. Imagine what we could do here in America if we had smart meters and real-time energy use displays in our homes. Lots of people are aware that energy use is a creeping problem but virtually nobody is aware of how much they use.

via www.good.is

Cross-Curricular Resource Challenges 11-13 Year Olds to Rethink a Sustainable Future

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has launched a skills-based, cross-curricular learning resource challenging pupils aged 11-13 to rethink a sustainable future. based on lessons from nature.

‘Futures’, a Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) topic for Key Stage 3, has been developed by the Nuffield Foundation in partnership with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The Foundation is working with education and business to encoutage people to re-think and design a sustainable future through the idea of a ‘circular economy’. The programme aims to support use of the resource in 1000 UK secondary schools by the summer of 2012.

Speaking at the Association for Science Education (ASE) Annual Conference 2011 at the University of Reading, MacArthur said: “STEM Futures challenges young people to see future challenges as potential opportunities. It explores in particular the idea of rethinking and redesigning our current system using insights from living systems. .We want to provide a stimulus for creativity and innovation, we want young people leaving school understanding the huge opportunities a re-thought future can offer.”

The freely available resource, piloted in a selection of UK schools last summer, features 28 hours of teaching time complete with teachers’ guidance notes, pupil activity sheets, a learning journal, presentations, films and animations. Pupils will learn how to use Circular Economy thinking to explore key issues relating to waste, transport and climate change, before using the acquired knowledge and skills to conduct an enquiry-based project of their choice. Teaching is supported by a set of CPD modules.

Cris Edgell, STEM Project Head, Nuffield Foundation Curriculum Programme, added: “Nuffield’s cross-curricular STEM projects encourage pupils to explore problems in depth through science, mathematics and design & technology and through project work to encourage better understanding of how these disciplines – along with engineering – interact in the real world. Futures does just that, supporting the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in its longer-term approach based on the principle of ‘using things better’ rather than ‘using things up’.”

To download Futures for free visit: www.nuffieldfoundation.org/futures