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

I was born in Bellingham and have always lived in Washington. Yes, that means I’m allergic to sunlight and spend 11.23 months a year with extremely pale skin, and the other .77 months with extremely red skin. For me, there is a positive to all that rainfall and that’s river and stream kayaking. Recently, I was able to pay penance for all of that praying for rain. I helped

Items donated to flood victims, photo courtesy Dave Bennink

organize a flood relief effort in Western Washington where materials from buildings that we were deconstructing and salvaging were donated to families around the Pacific Northwest.

The January floods damaged hundreds of buildings around the area and many of the homeowners didn’t have sufficient insurance to cover the repairs. A typical home may have had to replace sheetrock, insulation, wiring, wood flooring, doors, sliding glass doors, cabinets, appliances and more. My clients couldn’t help with the sheetrock and wiring by they donated almost 100 doors, over 40 cabinets and many other expensive items including a large amount of lumber and plywood. The value of these donations was in excess of $75,000!

What was I most impressed with? It was either because they donated them anonymously or

Wood donated to flood victims, photo courtesy Dave Bennink

because they did it in these tough economic times. This project was a real pleasure to be involved in and I met a number of good people that help people in need in all sorts of ways. I would like to publicly thank all of our donors for their generosity and pray that we don’t need to do this again next fall or witner. I do hope it keeps raining though, sorry about that!

When it rains in Seattle (as it often does) water flows along city streets and sidewalks, picking up toxins, before it is sent to a storm drain and eventually ends up in Puget Sound. This is the largest polluter of the Sound, sending 52 million pounds of pollutants into it every year.  That’s a conservative estimate but it’s nothing new. 

What is new is a map, produced by a team of GIS students from the University of Washington that shows where the storm drains - that send the water into Puget Sound - are. Turns out there are 4,500 public manmade storm drains, according to the team. The map was produced for People for Puget Sound, a nonprofit that advocates for healthy policies for the sound. The map also includes 2,123 natural drainages that receive inputs from the watershed system of additional drains, and 297 storm drains from the Washington State Department of Transportaion and 70 bridges. Industrial and private drains were not included in the project.

What poisons end up in the sound? Yummy things like copper, zinc, mercury, flame retardants, PAHs, and petroleum hydrocarbons. Some of these pollutants, like phthalates, which are found in plastic bottles and packaging, get dissolved in stormwater, making them hard to remove, if not impossible.  Pleasant.

Why should we care? Because, on a very base level, the Puget Sound is a huge economic driver that helps support our local economy. Not to mention the environmental aspects. 

So what does the image look like? Here it is…

Courtesy People for Puget Sound

Bruce Wishart, policy director for People for Puget Sound, said the map shows the enormity of the stormwater problem which impacts the sound.

Heather Trim, urban bays and toxics program manager for the organization, said the students went well beyond their class project to create a terrific map that advances knowledge of stormwater inputs. “We have been told by agencies that it would be years before we could get this map and yet the students have produced this tremendous resource.”

How about it readers, is this image a tad surprising? Or is it what you would have expected?

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!

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.

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/.

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

The Internet has been awash with green trend predictions for the last year, so I figured I’d show you where the predictions are in case you missed them.

What do you see in green's crystal ball?

First, there’s Jetson Green’s Seven Green Trends to Watch in 2009. The post from one of the top national blogs in the country calls out broad idealogical trends for the most part, like “non green will not survive,” “change leadership will thrive,” and “everything will shift.” For more on what that means, check out the post.

There’s Jerry  Yudelson’s Top 10 Predictions for the Green Building Industry 2009. Culled from conversations Yudelson’s had with building leaders in the U.S., Canada, Europe and the Middle East, it’s a wide range of predictions (that might be worth paying attention to, considering Yudelson knows almost everybody that’s worth knowing in green). Among the predictions, Yudelson says green building will benefit from the Obama administration, the focus of green building will begin to switch from new buildings to greening existing buildings, awareness of the coming global crisis in fresh water supply will increase, LEED platinum rated projects will become more common place and zero net energy designs for new buildings will gain increasing acceptance in both public and private buildings.

And earlier today, I listened to the Sustainable Industries Webinar on its nine trends for 2009. Among the trends, it said the smart grid will take off, this will be the year of the carbon market, green building sets the code (meaning it becomes a larger part of city’s building codes), and there will be a green jobs hiring blitz. While I can’t find this information for free on the Web, it is in next month’s edition of the magazine, and will likely be available online at some point here.

As for Seattle, I’m a reporter so I’m not going to predict what this year will bring in green building. It could bring a living building or a passifhaus to the city. It could bring more incentives. Or all new initiatives could dry up, due to the economy.

On the city side, the year will likely bring an official priority permitting program (rather than just a pilot program), and a deconstruction permit that is decoupled from the demolition permit. On the state side, Ecology might revamp SEPA to specifically include greenhouse gas emissions in its measurement requirements (for more on this, click tag SEPA below).

What do you think this year will bring to Seattle? And what do you think will be the biggest trends in the region?

Now that the very last remnants of ’snowpocalypse’ are gone, I thought it would be a good time for the DJC Green Building Blog to ask “just what did we learn?”

(For those of you not in the Seattle area, a thick blanket of snow carpeted the Pacific Northwest for most of the past week and a half. In Seattle, this amounts to a once-every-15-years-event).

As a city there weren’t many surprises: we learned Seattle doesn’t really know how to deal with snow and local drivers understand how it works even less.

But as individuals did we connect to our immediate environments a little bit more? I did. I live in a very walkable neighborhood with a market, restaurants and a coffee shop all across the street. A little further away there’s a retail district and a movie theatre. I walk to these places constantly and use them frequently.

But here’s the thing: beind snowed in forced me to think about my local amenities differently. No longer did I have the choice to drive to the movie theatre. If I wanted to go, I had to walk. And if I wanted other entertainment not across the street, well I had to reconsider just how much I wanted that too. Was I willing to walk for it?

Cutting out the choices shifted my perspective. If city planners ever hope to make the car a defunct item, that’s the kind of space they’re going to need to create.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who was thinking differently: all of my local restaurants were packed whenever I passed by them (even sushi.) People I know who never take the bus were doing it. Or walking to places they had never considered walking to.

The Seattle Times  reported on local retailers seeing big foot trafffic. Looking back on the week and a half, it was annoying, yes. But having Mother Nature limit my choices for me was also kind of nice.

Green building is about creating a structure that gives back to its community a little bit more than the standard product. But a green building in the middle of nowhere only does so much good. Sustainable living, on the other hand, is about creating a community that doesn’t just take but gives back. In a way, the snow made me give back more to my community because it forced me to interract even more with it.

There’s a kind of momentum there, if a city could only capture it. But how is it possible to capture a forced locality, if you will, and turn it into better urban planning? It seems like there’s a great opportunity there, if only someone would step up and find a way to take it.

Remember that time, last July or August, when you caught a view of the Puget Sound out of the corner of your eye… maybe above Pike Place Market. Maybe crossing a ferry to Bainbridge. Maybe at Discovery Park. And you just thought to yourself ‘Wow.’

Hold that memory in your head. Now imagine what this region would be without Puget Sound. If you voted for the Pike Place Market property tax levy because of the

Puget Sound

 market’s intrinsic value to this community, then imagine how much more intrinsic is that body of water that is an environmental and economic driver of the Pacific Northwest.

Guess what, it’s sick. It’s really, really sick. So sick, the Puget Sound Partnership has spent the last 18 months figuring out what it would take to cure it with its draft action agenda. But hold your horses, the document is still only a draft and is ready to change based on your comments.

If you care about the sound… or would like to have future memories with the sound in it, I’d read my story in the DJC tomorrow, check the action agenda out here, and start investigating the issue and how you can make a difference. It’s worth it.