Earlier today, NAIOP national released a report that looks at the levels of energy efficiency a standard office building can achieve while remaining economically feasible.

The study looked at whether commercial development could achieve reduction

The Casey in Portland is designed to use 52 percent less energy than a similar, conventional building

targets of between 30 and 50 percent above ASHRAE 90.1-2004. It compared results on a four-story, 95,000-square-foot, Class A office building in climate zones represented in Chicago, Baltimore and Newport Beach, Calif.

The results?

“Findings show that although significant energy efficiencies can be achieved (varying by climate zone), reaching a 30 percent reduction above the ASHRAE standard is not feasible using common design approaches and would exceed a 10-year payback. The study concluded that achieving a 50 percent reduction above the standard is not currently reachable.”

Here is the breakdown:

Chicago had a 23 percent increase in energy savings at a $188,523 cost increase at an 8.8 year payback.

Baltimore had a 21.5 percent increase in energy efficiency at a $165,148 cost increase at an 11 year payback.

Newport Beach had a 15.8 percent increase in energy savings at a $169,898 additional cost at a 12.2 year payback.

Ouch. Those are long paybacks for most developers. But then again, developers ARE targeting these goals and reaching them. Heck, there are net-zero buildings under development! NAIOP’s goal in developing this study was to prove that a one-size fits all approach does not work in green buildings, but that almost seems to holds true in countering the study, too. Though most of the developers who really push the green envelope, both in design and energy efficiency, are long-term holders of buildings.

Is that what it all comes down to? What a developer’s business model is?

The study also said elements of a holistic, integrated design approach that could create higher energy efficiencies were impractical in the study’s building prototype. The example the study gives is that a geothermal system requires an additional two acres of space, at least in the Newport Beach model.

To read the entire press release, go here.

It’s looking like the next two weeks are going to be busy weeks for those who attend green building events. The problem is that with so many things going on, it can get really hard to keep track of them. So, for your convenience, here is a short rundown of what’s going on:

Feb. 24, Tuesday: Resilient Community Planning in the Global Context. 5 p.m. at Gould Court, University of Washington campus. More info here.

Feb. 25, Wednesday: The Cascadia Chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism hosts its first event at Mithun’s offices. Andrew Schmid of Sound Transit will discuss the connection between public transportation and community development. It is free and begins at 6 p.m. For more information, go here or email info.cnucascadia@gmail.com.

February 26, Thursday: Jason McLennan, CEO of the Cascadia Region Green Building Council, will give a lecture in Tacoma on green building, the new economy and the future of the building industry. It’s at Tacoma Public Utilities. Free for Cascadia members, $10 for all others. More info here.

March 3, Tuesday: The Northwest Environmental Business Council is hosting a one-day conference on stormwater at the Hotel Murano in Tacoma. It costs $145 for NEBC members and $160 for non-members. More info at www.nebc.org.

March’s WSU Innovators luncheon, called ‘Recovery or Reinvention,’ looks at how business will repond to the recession. More info here.

March 4, Wednesday: The NEBC hosts its monthly lunch at McCormick & Schmick’s Harborside. This month’s topic is air quality and nonattainment areas. Dennis McLeran will speak.

Mark Johnson from Jones & Jones Architecture and Landscape Architects will speak at the Mercer Slough Environmental Education Center on sustainable design as part of Bellevue’s Living Green Series. Talk runs from 7-9 p.m. More info here.

March 6, Friday: Built Green, 2009 Conference. $135 for Built Green members, $180 for non-members. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is keynoting the conference. More info here.

And that, my friends, should tide you over!

In today’s marketplace, so many things claim to be “green” that it can be really, really tough to decipher what’s green and what’s greenwashing. Sometimes, green measures even conflict with each other.

Apparently, that’s the case with LEED and Green Globes, at least in Washington State. Green Globes,

Green certifications duke it out!

administered in the U.S. by the Green Building Initiative, is a green building certification that I have only come across a few times in my travels. LEED is by far and without question the more prominent certification of the two.

However, LEED’s prominence is due in large part to its inclusion in state and city government incentives and requirements. For example, Washington State requires major buildings meet LEED silver or higher to receive public funding. Seattle requires developers meet at least LEED silver to receive a density bonus. Those requirements have gone a long way towards making Washington a leader in its number of LEED certified buildings, and LEED projects on the board.

Senate Bill 5384 would change the state mandated requirements by adding the Green Globes standard as an alternative to LEED silver.

Now, it might surprise some to learn that Cascadia, the region’s go-to organization for green building, is lobbying hard against this. But then again Cascadia is part of the U.S. Green Building Council and the U.S. Green Building Council created LEED, so it stands to reason that it would support LEED certification. The bill is also opposed by the Washington Environmental Council and the Washington Conservation Voters, which represents many different environmental organization statewide.

An advocacy e-mail appeared in my in-box today asking readers to call state legislators to make sure

A truly green globe

Green Globes is not included in state law as an alternative to LEED. The e-mail says “Green Globes was created by the timber and chemical lobbies as a much weaker alternative to LEED,” and that it is untested, funded by industry and requires no third party verification. 

I don’t know enough about Green Globes to report on whether any of the above allegations are true. I know board members of GBI represent a number of different interests from universities to business. I know a number of industry organizations heavily support their initiatives (though to be fair, industry also supports USGBC).

I also know the actual bill, available here, has a piece in it stating all major projects receiving state funds that are four stories or under must use wood and wood products as building materials in them. Not sure how that fits into the point of the bill and it seems a little odd to me but make of it what you will.

If you’re interested in this topic, Architect Online has an excellent rundown of the two systems by Christopher Swope here that I highly suggest reading. Swope points out that LEED could benefit from a bit of competition.

For still more information, visit GreenbuildingsNYC here.

What do you think? Is LEED too restrictive and is Green Globes the way to go? Is Green Globes a less strict certification? Weigh in by commenting below!

A, NEBC forum tomorrow on electrifying vehicles and the grid will not be at Ridolfi as originally planned. Instead, it will be at the offices of Foster Pepper, 111 Third Ave., Seattle, 30th Floor Conference Center.

Speakers are Ron Johnston-Rodriguez from the Port of Chelan County, Susan Fahnestock of the Green Car Co. and Will Patton of Foster Pepper. They will discuss the Washington State Plugin PHEV Project and the state of electric vehicle to grid efforts.

For more info or to register, go here.

Yesterday, the New York Times published an opinion piece by David Brooks called “I Dream of Denver.” The piece, based on the late January news on what cities Americans want to live in, calls into question what Americans want from their cities, from density and from their lifestyle.

Reading the piece, I kept thinking about how the descriptions of how people want to

Illustration courtesy of Doug Boehm

live are quintessentially Seattle culture. One thing Americans want, the article says, is a stuffed garage “filled with skis, kayaks, soccer equipment, hiking boots and boating equipment. These are places you can imagine yourself leading an active outdoor life.” If that’s not Seattle, I don’t know what is. Then again, Seattle was named third on the list of cities Americans would most want to live in.

This sentiment, of people from other cities knowing Seattle and identifying with it, never struck me harder than at the U.S. Green Building Council’s 2008 Greenbuild conference in Boston when faced with a trio of reporters from the Eastern half of North America. When I said I was from Seattle, all three of them (two from New York City and one from Toronto, I believe) all sighed and said, “I want to live in Seattle!”

One of the New Yorkers went so far as to say, “Everyone wants to live in Seattle.”  Which stuck me as funny because from my experience, everyone wants to live in New York. And when going to college in Boston, nobody I spoke with had really ever heard of Seattle.

The reporter went on to say that once people realize they can have an urban lifestyle … and not live in an apartment, they fall in love.

(Not sure if they also fell in love with this city’s must-have-a-car mentality or the lack of a subway but that’s a different story.)

Cabin

A remote log cabin

The mix of home-life and city-life has always been my favorite thing about Seattle. But the NYT opinion piece points out that urban-living is still an ideal of the young, and I am in that demographic. Even here in Seattle, there seems to be a large amount of baby boomer residents who just want more space, whether it be in another state, on one of the islands or in a more spacious city neighborhood. My mother, for example, recalls the excitement of living in urban Chicago in her youth but now wants nothing more than a remote log cabin in Montana.

Is the desire to live in an urban environment a sentiment of youth? Will we, like our parents prefer to retire in a more remote space? … or is it generational? Will today’s younger generations (meaning Xers, Yers….etc.) still idealize open space and isolation or will we choose density?

What do you think? Comment below or answer my poll at right.

P.S. If you read the NYT article, also check out the comments. They’re pretty interesting.

Being green all the way down to your toes!

Being green all the way down to your toes!

Ok. So they’re not  really green buildings…. but they’re green shoes!

This footwear, worn deliciously by my DJC co-worker Laura, is by Simple Shoes. And they simply seem to have everything. They’re made of recycled inner tubes and car tires, organic cotton, 100 percent post consumer paper pulp and they come in a box that was 100 percent recycled. The suede is also from an ”environmentally proactive supportive tannery,” whatever that means. 

They look comfy, come in numerous colors, are stylin’ and reuse numerous materials.  Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the company also has vegan shoes.

Simple shoes can be bought at our local Seattle Nordstroms. Now if only Nordstrom’s could make energy efficiency cool…..

Today, Sightline issued a new update to its Cascadia Scorecard. Sightline is an environmental think tank, based in Seattle. Its scorecard is a progress report that tracks seven trends in the Pacific Northwest including pollution, population, sprawl and economy.

The scorecard is a plethora of information. Here are some of its findings:

• In 2008, the Northwest states or Oregon, Idaho and Washington spent almost $30 billion on imported fossil fuels, what it says is a record high. That breaks down as $16.6 billion for Washington, $9.4 billion for Oregon and $3.6 billion for Idaho. Regionally, that’s the equivalent of $10,000 for every family of four.
• The share of residents living in walkable or transit-oriented neighborhoods has increased in each major Northwest metropolis since 1990. But the scorecard says if recent trends continue, it will take 56 years for the Cascadian city average to match the compact-growth record of Vancouver, BC. Today. 
• People in this region consume the energy equivalent of just over 2 gallons of gasoline per person every day, which is nearly double the scorecard’s model of Germany.
• People in British Columbia live an average of two years longer than residents of the Northwest states. Also, if BC were an independent nation, it would have the second longest lifespan in the world after Japan.

To see more fun facts about the intersections of our lives, the environment and the future, read the scorecard for yourself at http://scorecard.sightline.org/.

On my last post, commenter Webb, mentioned something spectacular: the story of stuff. And I realized that despite my good intentions, I have not yet posted this

Courtesy The Story of Stuff

delightful video on my blog. Most likely, if you’re a real sustainably-minded person (or one of the 4 million viewers), you’ve already seen it.

But if not……..

Go here http://www.storyofstuff.com/ on your lunch break. It takes about a half hour to watch but is well worth the time.

This week, I attended a conference hosted by The Seminar Group on sustainable development and green buildings. Among many interesting topics, one theme kept coming up over and over again: if we want green buildings and other parts of sustainability to catch on, we need to change the market.

Is consumerism the answer to a new society?

Hmmm. How to do that.

Susan Drummond of Foster Pepper said it comes down to how we make our money. Many industries, she said, make money on the idea of more. As a lawyer, she bills by the hour to make more. Utilities make more the more power they make. A developer makes more with more projects, as does a contractor.

But the production of more, she said, itself depends on the supply of natural capital, or those natural aspects we make money off of… like oil, or trees or vegetables. She said that frontier of natural capital is closing. And if it is closing, businesses need to adapt and create new, sustainable models of working.

But there are different interests - from transportation to land use to renewable energy - that need to be addressed. Together, they resemble a herd of cats. And how do you herd cats, she asked? By moving their food. So business needs to look at strategies that move the food bowl. (This is what the entire conference was about. Moving the bowl in looking at new strategies for transportation, land use etc.)

Later in the conference the idea of a changing market came up again when, A-P Hurd, a vice president of local developer Touchstone, spoke. One problem with the local market, she said, is essentially that things are too cheap. Water is cheap. Energy is cheap. And if they are cheap, there’s not much of an incentive to save it.

“We are going to have to, at the very least, reflect the cost of providing these things to the people, ” she said. “If the market is going to find the ability to innovate, it is going to need to find a way to get a payback on that innovation.”  

It sounds complex. But Drummond said it really comes down to one thing:

“Frankly, all we are doing is changing how we shop,” she said. That applies to your home, your food, your car. Instead of asking what’s in it for me, we need to expand our view and ask ‘what’s in it for humanity?’  

Is that really all it is? Changing how we shop? Can the market be transformed by thoughtful consumerism? And if so, how do you harness that change…..

What do you think?

This is a guest post by Dave Bennink, owner of Re-Use Consulting. 

This last week has been full of bad news relating to major corporations cutting jobs.  These job cuts are nothing compared to the amount of jobs that have been shipped overseas in the past decades.  Did you know that the City of Buffalo used to have

Image courtesy Dave Bennink

600,000 people in it and now it only has about 290,000?  First the jobs left and then the people followed.  This has left Buffalo wondering what to do with tens of thousands of abandoned homes. 

So where are we heading?  Jobs disappearing, economic slowdowns and global warming are just the start of our problems.  Fortunately, there is some good news to share:  The building deconstruction industry is creating thousands of green collar jobs, and these jobs cannot be shipped overseas! 

For years, building deconstruction has been much slower and more expensive than demolition.  Building deconstruction is the systematic disassembly of a structure to maximize reuse and recycling.  In recent years, hybrid deconstruction has allowed deconstruction and adaptive reuse companies to take down buildings faster and cheaper, completing 2,000-square-foot homes in 3 to 4 days as one example.  Even with these improvements, building deconstruction still creates 10 to 20 times more jobs than demolition while hoping to achieve an on-site landfill diversion rate of 70 percent or more (before comingled recycling options). 

These are all local jobs that cannot be shipped overseas and we are working to make them living wage jobs requiring different levels of experience and potentially launching workers into other related careers.

One thing that is clear to me is that building owners don’t want their structures demolished, they just want them removed.  Almost everyone I have talked to would rather see the their building moved intact, deconstructed, or at least salvaged or even preserved in place through adaptive reuse as long as it doesn’t take much more time and it doesn’t cost more money.  That helps the building deconstruction contractors by basing their efforts on a solid foundation. 

People realize that deconstruction creates more jobs, helps the environment, preserves local architectural elements, and assists lower-income home owners to maintain their homes.  It is also a sustainable effort, unlike some green solutions that just slow down the problems.  Deconstruction is not just saving energy and resources compared to producing all of those materials new again, but reversing problems like global warming and natural resource depletion. 

In Buffalo, we have begun to think of the streets full of abandoned homes as an asset to the community instead of a liability.  If it is decided that they must be taken down, then by deconstructing them, some of the value they hold is returned to the community, and I can tell you after 16 years in this field, it’s a great feeling knowing that you are making a difference. 

I am excited about efforts by the city of Seattle and King County, among others, to promote building deconstruction. 

The Building Materials Reuse Association is leading the way, holding a conference on the subject in Chicago in April 2009 (www.bmra.org).  Cities and groups across the Country are starting job training programs by forming deconstruction crews.  Demolition contractors are converting to deconstruction companies by performing deconstruction when their clients ask for it or it makes economic sense.  General contractors hoping to keep their crews from quiting in slow times, are beginning to offer deconstruction to their clients, knowing that they may be able to provide work to their laid-off crews.  Some schools are considering classes on deconstruction and some businesses are forming around the sales of the salvaged materials or the manufacturing of products (like tables, chairs, etc.) made from reclaimed materials. 

So if you are tired of this economic slow down and want to make a difference, join us by considering building deconstruction and considering buying reclaimed materials.  It’s  ’buying local’ and ‘employing local’ all at the same time while heading toward our goal of zero waste.

- Dave Bennink, RE-USE Consulting