Green Building & Manufacturing Articles
Green Builders' Study Forecasts Job Growth
Building green could add hundreds of billions of dollars to the economy, according to a new report released by the United States Green Building Council.
USGBC
The study, conducted by consultants Booz Allen Hamilton, predicts that over the next four years, green building practices will create 7.9 million jobs and contribute $554 billion to the gross domestic product of the United States.
The report, which was released at U.S.G.B.C.'s annual Greenbuild conference last week, also estimated that spending on green construction already supports more than 2.4 million jobs from 2000 to 2008 and generated more than $120 billion in wages over that time.
"This study validates the work that the 25,000 people who gathered at Greenbuild and every member of our movement do everyday," said Rick Fedrizzi, the president and founding chairman of the U.S.G.B.C. "Our goal is for the phrase 'green building' to become obsolete by making all building and retrofits green."
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BIM sure to bring creative disruption
Once in a generation, perhaps, a new technology comes along that enables rapid innovation and change. Sometimes, too, such change leads to a whole new batch of companies that pursue the changes aggressively, while their older, larger competitors are still trying to figure out what happened.
I've a hunch that Building Information Modeling-BIM-is one such technology. And I suspect that it is going to cause problems for some firms that have, perhaps, become too comfortable in their own markets.
Transformative technology has led to major disruption in the past, and there may still be a few construction veterans around who remember at least the tail end of one big one: the evolution of mechanical excavators.
Clay Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School, wrote an influential book in 1997 called The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Although it was not about the construction industry specifically, one important chapter dealt with the mechanical excavation sector, and what happened when the big players in the days of steam shovels using cables, pulleys and drums were faced with upstart companies exploiting the (then) newfangled idea of hydraulically actuated backhoes.
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EPA Issues Final Rule for Regulating Stormwater Runoff
The rule takes effect in February 2010 and will be phased in over a four-year period.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued its final rule for controlling the discharge of pollutants from construction sites. The agency says the main goal of the rule is to improve the quality of water across the nation. The rule takes effect in February 2010 and will be phased in over a four-year period.
The EPA has made a fact sheet available on its website: Final Rule: Effluent Guidelines for Discharging from the Construction and Development Industry. A link to a 251-page pre-publication version of the federal notice is also included - view here.
Construction activities like clearing, excavating and grading significantly disturb soil and sediment. If that soil is not managed properly it can easily be washed off of the construction site during storms and pollute nearby water bodies, according to the EPA.
The final rule requires construction site owners and operators that disturb one or more acres to use best management practices to ensure that soil disturbed during construction activity does not pollute nearby water bodies.
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States Adopting BIM
The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) began using building information modeling (BIM) in 2003; by 2007, the agency was requiring basic models for all projects and encouraging more complex models incorporating energy performance and construction scheduling. Now, both Wisconsin and Texas have adopted BIM programs for state construction projects, and other states are considering similar programs.
For GSA and state governments, BIM offers not only a way to get project teams on the same page but also a way to track energy performance, renovations, and other changes over a building's life.
In Wisconsin, the state began exploring BIM after an executive order signed by the governor in 2006 required all state buildings to conform to high environmental and energy-efficiency standards. In July 2009, after a 13-project pilot program, the state became the first to require advanced models for all state projects with budgets over $5 million and new construction projects over $2.5 million. The state requires building information models from several members of a project team, including architects and structural, mechanical, and plumbing engineers. It does not, however, require the team to work on a single model or even in a particular modeling software-the state accepts models created in five software packages.
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Wind Turbine Certification Forthcoming
For the last few years, technical committees have been working to address a glaring problem facing the wind industry: the lack of a standard method for rating the performance of small wind turbines. Two groups-the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) and the Small Wind Certification Council (SWCC)-are working on separate parts of this goal.
AWEA has headed the effort to write a new ANSI standard that will govern wind turbines with a swept area of 200 square meters or less. The standard will set out methods for testing and rating the performance of these turbines, and should be complete by the end of 2009.
SWCC, a newly formed nonprofit organization, is working on a method for certifying that turbines have been tested to meet the new standard. According to Larry Sherwood, executive director of SWCC, it's currently difficult to compare the power curves published by small turbine manufacturers. "Even if you are comparing turbines that were tested at the same wind speed, the way different manufacturers test their turbines can be quite different," he told EBN. Sherwood expects that the SWCC will begin certifying wind turbines toward the end of 2010.
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What Building Teams Are Doing To Conserve Water Inside Buildings
While hard data on total water use in buildings is somewhat difficult to come by, the U.S. Green Building Council estimates that buildings account for 14% of domestic water consumption in the U.S. Other sources report 12%-a relatively small percentage compared with, say, agriculture, but it represents tens of billions of gallons of domestic water consumed every day.
In addition to the millions of single-family homes in the U.S. and Canada, hospitals, laboratories, industrial facilities, apartment and condo complexes, commercial kitchens, sports arenas, hotels, and office developments are particularly large consumers of domestic water for interior uses. For instance, toilets in commercial buildings alone consume 1.2 billion gallons of water a day.
There are also severe inefficiencies in the system. For example, EPA WaterSense estimates that 80% of the 12 million urinals in the U.S. use up to five times the federal standard of 1.0 gallons per flush and waste more than 150 billion gallons of fresh water a year, enough to supply 1.5 million homes.
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National green building code is in the works
When it comes to building projects, this one's a monster.
The construction zone is essentially the entire country. The builders are a variety of specialists, including architects, plumbers, masons, and lighting, heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning experts.
Since July, they have been meeting in cities - they were in Philadelphia last month - to construct not with bricks and steel beams, but with words.
The goal: a code to guide all development of green commercial buildings in the United States.
The International Green Building Code would, as its name implies, also be available to other countries. But drafting it has been the work of U.S. construction professionals who share a desire for the built environment to incorporate more green features.
Pennsylvania is one of only two states with a government representative on the 28-member drafting body. The other is California, the only state to have a green building code.
The Sustainable Building Technology Committee is an arm of the International Code Council, a Washington association of 50,000 members that develops residential and commercial building codes and standards that states, counties, and municipalities adopt or use as a guide in creating their own.
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As Nuclear Reactor Fleet Ages, Engineers Ask,' Is 80 the New 40?'
Could nuclear power plants last as long as the Hoover Dam?
Increasingly dependable and emitting few greenhouse gases, the U.S. fleet of nuclear power plants will likely run for another 50 or even 70 years before it is retired -- long past the 40-year life span planned decades ago -- according to industry executives, regulators and scientists.
With nuclear providing always-on electricity that will become more cost-effective if a price is placed on heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions, utilities have found it is now viable to replace turbines or lids that have been worn down by radiation exposure or wear. Many engineers are convinced that nearly any plant parts, most of which were not designed to be replaced, can be swapped out.
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Zombie Nuke Plants
Oyster Creek Generating Station, in suburban Lacey Township, New Jersey, opened the same month Richard Nixon took office vowing to bring "an honorable peace" to Vietnam. This nuke plant, the oldest in the country, was slated to close in 2009 when its original forty-year license was ending. It had seen four decades of service, using radioactively produced heat to boil water into high-pressure steam that ran continuously through hundreds of miles of increasingly brittle and stressed piping.
If constructed today, Oyster Creek would not be licensed, because it does not meet current safety standards. Yet on April 8 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)--the government agency overseeing the industry--relicensed Oyster Creek, extending its life span twenty years beyond what was originally intended.
Seven days later workers at the plant found an ongoing radioactive leak of tritium-polluted water. Tritium is a form of hydrogen. In August workers found another tritium leak coming from a pipe buried in a concrete wall. Radiation makes metal brittle, so old pipes must be routinely switched out for new ones. The second leak was spilling about 7,200 gallons a day and contained 500 times the acceptable level of radiation for drinking water.
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LOW-TECH IS HIGH-TECH IN ENERGY SAVING BUILDING MATERIALS.
It could be that some high-tech wizardry will provide an endless source of clean energy for the future. Maybe electric cars will wean us off of oil. Maybe solar panels will let us walk away from coal. I don't know. But I do know that when we're looking for energy solutions we shouldn't ignore the low-tech basic solutions like incorporating passive sources of energy into our new homes and insulating the dickens out of all of them, new and old.
We may also find that low-tech is not so low after all. High-technology and serious science is put into the research and development of something as simple and energy saving as a tube of caulking. It's hard to image a sheet of wallboard as high technology, but it can be.
It's well known that having a large thermal mass inside a building can regulate its temperature and thus reduce the load on its heating and air conditioning system. The thermal mass, like an interior brick or adobe wall, a concrete floor, a stone fireplace or even heavy plaster walls can moderate the temperature of a room making it easier to heat or cool, saving money and energy.
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'Green' Building Sector to Contribute $554B to GDP from 2009-13
While the green building industry added $173 billion to the U.S. gross domestic product from 2000-08, that's just the beginning. From 2009 to 2013, that amount will more than triple to $554 billion, according to a new report from the U.S. Green Building Council and Booz Allen Hamilton.
The return on energy savings is not near as great as the overall economic impact. From 2009-13, green buildings should help reduce energy use by about $6 billion, compared to $1.3 billion from 2000-08, according to the report, "Green building, green jobs and the economy." (PDF).
When it comes to LEED-specific construction, which contributed about $830 million to the GDP from 2000-08, the future looks sunny. From 2009-13, the figure jumps to $12.5 billion.
Over that span, the green building sector should create about 7.9 million jobs, compared to 2.4 million from 2000-08, the report states. Those figures include jobs created directly, indirectly and by induction.
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HARVESTING, SCAVENGING AMBIENT ENERGY.
If governments can't turn down the planet's thermostat through policy, then disruptive innovation will have to do the job. Currently, available clean and renewable energies as well as new inventions will be needed to displace the burning of oil, coal and natural gas if their emissions can't be checked.
We've only scratched the surface of what might be possible in energy innovation. For example, compared with research and development in wind and solar energy there's little focus on harvesting ambient energies. There's energy in our immediate surroundings that could possibly be captured, stored and put to work. There's untapped energy everywhere.
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As Sewers Fill, Waste Poisons Waterways
It was drizzling lightly in late October when the midnight shift started at the Owls Head Water Pollution Control Plant, where much of Brooklyn's sewage is treated.
A few miles away, people were walking home without umbrellas from late dinners. But at Owls Head, a swimming pool's worth of sewage and wastewater was soon rushing in every second. Warning horns began to blare. A little after 1 a.m., with a harder rain falling, Owls Head reached its capacity and workers started shutting the intake gates.
That caused a rising tide throughout Brooklyn's sewers, and untreated feces and industrial waste started spilling from emergency relief valves into the Upper New York Bay and Gowanus Canal.
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Toxic Waters: Polluted Harbors - The Video
Aging sewer systems and urban storm runoff are two of the worst sources of water pollution in the United States. In Newport, R.I., residents live with regular beach closings and sewage overflows.
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Toxic Waters: Coal in the Water
Jennifer Hall-Massey of Prenter, W.Va., explains how water pollution, which she believes is caused by nearby coal companies, has impacted her family and community.
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Toxic Waters: From Air to Water
A growing number of coal-burning power plants around the nation have moved to reduce their air emissions, many of them are creating another problem: water pollution.
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LED Controls: 15 Examples of LED Lighting Control in Action
This whitepaper explores 15 examples of LED lighting in application, with a brief description of the controls strategy used to achieve the desired results.
1. Freezer Case
LED lighting produces a compound energy benefit when installed in freezer cases. Substantial energy savings can result from the improved directionality of LEDs, better optical control, less light loss from operation of fluorescent lamps at low temperature, and reduced heat.
In this application, the addition of occupancy sensors, which reduce light levels by 50% when the space is vacant, generates additional savings.
See all 15 examples
Waste Not: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
Waste is threathening to choke our planet. But it could help save megawatts of energy, tons of CO2, and valuable resources, if used properly.
There is a new continent and it is bigger than the United States. Its a vast expanse of plastic debris floating on the Pacific Ocean. The sight of hundreds of kilometers of waste is disgusting, yet plastics aren't even the worst consequence of a culture of excess and wastefulness.
More than a billion people worldwide go hungry, while the average household in Europe and the United States throws away one third of all food bought. Food worth more than 48 billion dollars is thrown away in the U.S. every year.
"If we can get people to consume less, buy less, then that is going to have environmental benefits all along the production chain," says Mike Webster of Waste Watch, an NGO based in the UK.
Wasting less food would cut down on the consumption of water, fertilizers, and pesticides. Less waste would also mean smaller landfills. In the U.S. and Europe, about half of all municipal waste is landfilled, in the developing world as much as 80 percent.
Worldwide, the annual production of municipal solid waste had grown to a staggering 2.02 billion tons by 2006, according to the latest Global Waste Management Market Assessment report. In 2011, the authors expect to see a rise to 2.8 billion tons. And food makes up a big chunk of this.
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