Did you know that ingredient labels are not required on cleaning products? Good news for us, the Environmental Working Group recently released their 2012 Guide to Healthy Cleaning, in which they rated more than 2000 household cleaning products for non-toxicity and disclosure. More Read More..
Jeff Whitney, the head building inspector in Grand County, Utah came by the straw bale construction site in Moab where my wife and I are volunteering. He needed to inspect the flashing and some other details before we applied our first coat of plaster to the exposed bales.
Straw bale construction is not recognized in the Utah state building code, but because of Mr. Whitney, Grand County is the only place in Utah where it is explicitly allowed. In fact, the county’s straw bale construction provisions are right on his office’s home page.
“Other jurisdictions around the state used to say, “hell no, “ said Mr. Whitney, who wears a cowboy hat and white mustache, “But now they are starting to call us.” Click here to read further. We need to have more building officials willing to look “Outside the Box”.
A decade ago, the Rocky Mountain Institute released Cool Citizens: Everyday Solutions to Climate Change: Household Solutions. It was full of great tips for what you can do to reduce your energy use. However I found the most important feature was this page, which ranked measures you can take by the bang for the buck. It was pretty shocking, demonstrating that we have been pretty much sold a bill of goods, of expensive green gizmos, that cost a fortune in proportion to the money and carbon they save; a programmable thermostat saves more than changing all your windows. Insulating your ducts saves more than an entire solar hot water system.
ive percent of America’s electricity is used for residential air conditioning, and it is considered now to be a necessity, not a luxury. It’s usually needed most when the sun is shining, so as I have noted since 2006, Solar Powered Air Conditioning Just Makes Sense. For most of that time I have been looking at absorption units that run like a propane fridge, but I recently mused that perhaps it is time for a change in the way we think about this:
I am wondering if the solar powered air conditioner might not be in the end a small, high efficiency home with a small, high efficiency air conditioner powered by a big honking bank of photovoltaics, and be done with it.
Being a highly cost-effective design-build firm, we spend a significant amount of time and effort on project budgets. We publish the construction costs of most of our projects, discuss pricing in many of our posts, and have even gone to the extent of designing a construction cost cheat sheet. To us, the design and the finances of a project are interconnected. We’ve never cared for the vague and uninformed approach toward construction costs that are all too common in the architecture industry. In fact, it’s common for us to dive into a realistic construction budget discussion as early on as the initial interview for a new project.
The level of interest in and desire for ‘greener’ buildings is now pretty much mainstream. Consumers and businesses are taking seriously the benefits of operating in an environmentally responsible manner. As consequence it is becoming an expectation that companies will incorporate environmentally aware approaches in everything that they do, including their buildings.
So, why do it? Why does it matter and what is the business benefit?
