Obvious headline, I know, but it had to be done.

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from the USGBC announcing that the Olympic Village in Beijing that houses 17,000 athletes (at left) had been certified gold under leed for neighborhood development, and is the first international project to be certified under that program.

And I thought finally! Enough with Michael Phelps, let’s learn about some buildings! (Sarcasm. Partially….) Unfortunately, the USGBC doesn’t say much about the green features of the space so I have to rely on other sources.  The Environment News Service says it uses solar cells, geothermal heat pumps, solar heat, solar hot water, solar thermoelectric cogeneration and intelligent control devices.

The announcement, however, seems to be drawing its bit of attention. On the Archinect site, the comments are particularly vehement with one commenter named Apurimac stating, “Show me a development in the states at that scale with a LEED gold rating and I’ll eat my hair.”

I am interested in seeing how the Beijing village will compare with the Olympic Village in Vancouver, B.C. for the 2010 Winter Olympics. I attended a forum put on by the Network for Business Innovation & Sustainability in February and based on that, there’s certainly going to be some competition.

Vancouver’s got two villages - one in the city proper in the Southeast False Creek area (in the yellow rectangle in the picture at right) that is already billing itself as a model in sustainability, and one in Whistler. The Southeast False Creek village is planning on using many of the same devices as Beijing including intelligent control devices and nifty solar technology.

To see a video on the villages, click here. To learn more about the details of the Vancouver villages, click here.

Vancouver calls its villages sustainable because, like the Beijing project, they will be lived in after the Olympics are done. The Southeast False Creek project also considers itself sustainable because it is creating a mixed-use, walkable neighborhood on a historic industrial site. The details are much too much to include in this posting, but I’ll keep you updated as it moves along. It should be fascinating to watch. To see the original sustainability goals for the Southeast Village, click here. To see how it was updated this July, click here.

Of course, like Apurimac’s comments show, many would question whether a project of this size should be considered sustainable at all. But that’s a question for another day.  

Is anyone else out there waiting to make the comparison? Is the Vancouver project going to be more sustainable just because it will be able to benefit from green technology improvements in the next couple years? I, for one, will be waiting to find out.

For more on the comparison, check out Basil and Spice here. For more photos on the Beijing Olympic Village, visit Inhabitat here, or check out Curbed San Francisco for more here. More on the Vancouver Olympic village here.

Beijing village photo courtesy of the official Web site of the Beijing Olympics. Vancouver picture courtesy of Vanoc.

I told you I would update you on the position for Washington State Director of the Cascadia Region Green Building Council and here I am with the update!

The position (open until filled) is responsible for planning and figuring out all of Cascadia’s programs in the state of Washington, together with regional staff and volunteers. Let’s just say it takes a lot of experience and leadership (though my favorite part about the description is ‘must have a sense of humor.’ If only that was always a job requirement!) To read more or apply, click here now.

Cascadia is also hiring a development director, based in the Seattle office (but will consider candidates in Vancouver, B.C., and Portland). Go here for more.

In other job news:

• City of Seattle is still “looking” to fill two spots on its green building team, though I can’t find job applications for it anywhere. Maybe you’ll have better luck.
• Belt Collins is hiring a senior level engineer with 10 years of experience who is committed to sustainabilty. Contact esouthard@beltcollinsnw.com. (Belt Collins is also renting space in its Pike Place offices FYI).
• The city of Eugene, Ore. is looking for a waste prevention and green building program manager here.

And that’s all for today folks! For more, check the tag ‘jobs’ below.

How much trash does a “green” event produce? Evidently, a lot if you’re the U.S. Green Building Council’s GreenBuild 2007. The annual conference, held in Chicago last year, created 44 tons of waste.

Granted, 91 percent of it - or 40 tons -  did not end up in the landfill, according to Dan Bulley, chair of the Volunteer Committee for Greenbuild in 2007. Instead 300 college students sorted through the waste.

Of the 40 tons of waste diverted, Bulley said seven tons were food scrap, and six tons were wood from expo displays in the exhibit hall.

What’s 40 tons of waste? For people around Seattle, it’s all the dog droppings left in Snohomish County over two days. For out of towners, it’s 260,000 items that washed up on New Jersey’s beaches over a year. For the U.S., it’s on the low end of the total waste a person produces in a year.

When you rationalize the numbers out, the mass waste makes some sense…. it was a week long conference and expo with an exhibit hall and 25,000 participants, so Bulley says it works out to about 3.5 pounds of waste per person (nevermind most people only stayed three days but we’ll go with it….).

But does mass waste ever make sense? The diversion fact is commendable. And the image of college students rifling through my waste (yes, I was at GreenBuild) is something to ponder. But did that 44 tons of waste need to be created in the first place?

Think about it… thousands of people gathering together to figure out how to save the environment and how to build green. And yet they still can’t not use things. 44 tons of things. Thrown away. Isn’t green building all about the idea that the little things - like 44 tons of waste - matter?

No wonder right wing talk show hosts call greenies hypocrites.

Remembering back, the hefty 187-page program could have been …. digital! Or it could have been easier to compost food scraps, or recycle nametags.  Those participating in the expos could have used less literature or cards that pointed attendees to a Web site.

Or, as a green building consultant said to me the other day, the entire conference could have been virtual. If 44 tons of trash sounds like a lot, imagine the carbon emissions from the millions of miles of air travel. (I for one met people from the U.K, Japan, Canada….)

This is by no means an isolated event, just a high profile one. But it seems to me an example of the kinks, shall we say, in the green building movement. Do I have something here or is it too much to think that people promoting green … could change the way they do things? It’s like not seeing the forest for the trees (that were at least, diverted).

For more, Building Design + C0ntruction runs the full press release here. FrontBurner asks if green trash is still green here. Or in another scenario from Wired Magazine here, Brandon Keim explores a Japanese city that just stopped waste collection. Now there’s an idea. 

Hold the presses Seattle sustainability people! Marni Kahn is taking an extended sabbatical from the Cascadia Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council and has resigned her position as Washington State director!

This, my friends, is a big deal.

For those of you that don’t know, Cascadia is pretty much the main face of green in this region. It hosts conferences, trainings, brings speakers to town and is the official information source for LEED and Living Building information. In Washington, the go-to girl for the last two years has been Marni Kahn.

Marni specializes in providing sustainable design and construction educational training curriculum to… well just about everybody. She is a “firm believer,” according to her profile on Cascadia, that people, not technology make great places.

She also smiles through everything, whether it’s hosting world famous speakers or managing gigantic conferences. Seriously.  Good luck Marni in your next step, whatever it may be!

Yes, this does mean there will be an open position for the Washington director, and it’s a choice position. Stay tuned and I’ll tell you all about it once the information is public.

The move is just the most recent in a series of job changes for longterm Seattle green people (witness both Lynne Barker and Lucia Athens of Seattle’s Green Building Team). Has any other mover and shaker moved on to a new position? Is this a trend or just general business?

Let me know what you think below, or wish Marni good luck!  For more on Marni’s history, visit the bio page of Building Seattle Green here.

Hold onto your hats folks, the LEED you know and love (or heck, hate) is growing up.

If you’ve worked with LEED before (like the people that worked on the LEED gold Hearst Tower in Manhattan at right), you know what it looks like. You get equally weighed points for energy efficient design, renewable energy use, construction waste management and low emitting materials to name a few areas, though there are certain points you have to get. A project gets to be LEED platinum by getting between 52 and 69 points for new construction, and only 26 to 32 points for LEED certified.

Well, on Tuesday, the USGBC announced it opened its public comment period on LEED 2009, part of LEED 3.0…. and it basically looks nothing like what you know LEED to be. (more…)

If you’re already a LEED AP, or just want to take your green building education to the next level, the Cascadia chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council has a great opportunity for you.

In June, Cascadia launches ‘Living Building Leader.’ A program designed to go further than LEED and educate participants about the different parts of a living building. The very, very best part of this for people interested in living buildings across the country is it’s an online course, so even if you live in New York City let’s say, you can take it too!

The first session is June 4th. The topic is “spirit and meaning in design” and examines how buildings can celebrate place, culture and the environment. Jason McLennan, CEO of Cascadia, is presenting this topic.

For more about the program, click more (more…)

I know I’ve questioned the validity of ratings before but this one is pretty cut and dry: according to the USGBC, Seattle has the most LEED certified buildings of any city in the country.

So what does that mean? Seattle has the most LEED certified buildings, but does that make it the greenest city?

Not according to a whole host of previous green city ratings - I wrote about that topic and Corvallis, Ore., being the greenest city earlier this year (to see it look under topic ratings below).

So Seattle’s got the most LEED certified buildings. Why? Is it the city’s policy of requiring projects that get public funding to be LEED silver (after all 10 of the LEED certified buildings are owned by the city of Seattle including Seattle City Hall). Is it a critical mass of green-oriented architects in the city? Is it incentives? What do you think? Comment and tell me what in Seattle really made LEED take off.

If we take a step back from Seattle, Washington State isn’t doing too bad itself. According to Cascadia’s latest Greenbuilder newsletter (an excellent source of information that I would recommend anyone interested in regional green building sign up for) as of April 3, the regional stats look like this:

Washington has 83 LEED certified projects with another 503 registered, or on the boards. Oregon has 69 certified projects and 315 registered. British Columbia has 32 certified projects and 199 registered. And Alaska has three certified projects and 22 registered.

And check out the other cities that round out the list of top five. They are (in order): Portland, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Grand Rapids, Mich. Pretty much the usual subjects, though some of you might be doing a double take at Grand Rapids. The city is actually quite a green leader and has a lot of new construction going on. For a more localized explanation, though written in 2006, check out the Rapid Growth site at http://www.rapidgrowthmedia.com/features/sustain16.aspx.

By the way my blogging program is acting up… hopefully tomorrow it will let me do everything it’s supposed to like make links. More on this tomorrow!

Paul Hawken spoke last night at Living Future in Vancouver. He covered a wealth of topics from the future of buildings (self sustaining) to the purpose of nonprofits (to join together) to cities being the best birth control available. He also said he reeallly likes engineers.

But at its core, Hawken’s talk offered a central warning for those in the green building movement: get ready because things are going to change so quickly it will shock the world.

Hawken said we’re heading for a world where the price of everything will keep rising in a seemingly endless cycle. To get at oil and natural minerals, drills will dig deeper, which will use more energy, which will spread to cost hikes in basically everything including food. He calls it the “red queen dilemma.” It’s this price rise, he said, that will be the catalyst for the world changing the way it does things.

“I believe we have shifted from one regime to another. One that subsidized us and our lifestyle… to one that is going to radically change our relations to ourselves, sustainability, mini-mansions….”

That change will put designers, architects and developers that are already at the forefront of green building through practices like the living building (in its base definition a building that is self sustaining) in the spotlight, as all the world turns to them for advice and leadership.

But before you, green building professional, throw your hat in the air at all the new business you will retain, Hawken’s next sentence offered a warning. “I just want to caution you. I think your star may rise faster than you’d want it to… I’m not saying this to flatter you. I’m saying this to warn you.”

(more…)

In the last year, I have attended both Globe2008, presented by the Globe Foundation, and Greenbuild, presented by the U.S. Green Building Council. Though both are international events billed as convergent conferences for business and sustainability, I have to say if there’s anyone keeping score, Globe is clearly the winner.

Point 1 - Media Room. As a member of the media it makes sense that I start in the obvious spot. Greenbuild had a small media room with three outlet connections and free WiFi. Globe had a spacious media room with multiple computers, outlets, Internet connections, refreshments and paid WiFi. I’ll take computers over free Internet any day.

Point 2 - Crowds. Both conferences featured long lines for registration, but only Greenbuild kept audience members waiting for hours in theirs. The Starbucks line in Chicago also took 30 minutes to get through, if you were lucky. The Starbucks line at Globe took 2 minutes. Greenbuild fed attendees lunch, which at times, took around an hour to serve. Globe made attendees buy their own, but took no time. Greenbuild was also so crowded at times, it was overpowering, though that energy did make certain events highly charged.

Point 3 - Attitude. In my November article here I report on a number of audience concerns including Greenbuild’s being too touchy-feely and commercialized. I heard none of this at Globe. Instead, I heard a business-focused way of addressing problems like planning for a different future, and keeping a business or government viable in a changing market. In short, Greenbuild celebrated success, Globe looked at what needs to be fixed.

Point 4 - Star headliners.The USGBC wins this one easily, with Bill Clinton and Paul Hawken as headlining acts. Globe had Gordon Campbell, the premier of British Columbia; Prince Philippe of Belgium; and a number of international ministers.

Like all events, there are some extenuating circumstances. Greenbuild was originally supposed to be in Los Angles and was switched a year before the date, to Chicago. I’m also guessing Greenbuild had a larger attendance, as it had 23,000 people and Globe won’t yet release attendance numbers. A Globe representative did confirm its attendence was well over 10,000. Globe also is a biennial conference, giving planners more time to nail down the details, while Greenbuild is every year.

Nevertheless, there are some lessons there on how to best manage a conference. Even self proscribed climate change skeptic Peter Foster of Ontario’s the Financial Post said it was well organized.

The interesting question will be to see how Living Future, the local Cascadia chapter of the USGBC’s annual conference, fares in Vancouver in a month. If it’s anything like last year’s inaugural conference, it will be less frenetic than Greenbuild and a bit more free than Globe. For that, we’ll just have to wait and see. I’ll cross my fingers if you do…..