The Environmental Protection Agency announced its 2008 Green Power Leadership Awards and the community of Bellingham is officially one of five national winners in the Green Power Partner of the Year Category. And the only winner (in that category) that is a city, or community as the case may be. And oh, by the way, it’s the second year it has won this award.

For those of you who don’t know, Bellingham basically rocks when it comes to

The beautiful city of Bellingham

The beautiful city of Bellingham

renewable energy. In early 2007, the Bellingham local government chose to buy 100 percent green power for all city-owned facilities. Later the same year, the city helped launch the Bellingham Green Power Community Challenge, the goal of which was to increase green power purchasing among city residents and businesses to more than 2 percent of the city-wide electricity use. The community has surpassed the goal and buys more than 81 million kilowatt hours of renewable energy certificates; about 11 percent of the community’s total electrical use. More than 2,400 households and businesses buy power through the challenge.

Portland General Electric won an award in another category - the Green Power Beacon Award. In part, the utility won the award for its GreenPowerOregon.com Web site, which features coupons, a power calculator and information.

Other winners in the award category included Intel Corp, University of Pennsylvania and Cisco Systems. Winners in other categories included The Estee Lauder Companies, PepsiCo., the Philadelphia Phillies.

Almost inspires you to pay that extra $3, $6 or $12 a month towards renewable energy, eh?

For more information, visit the city of Bellingham’s Climate Protection Program.

I’ve been on vacation the last week in Chicago/Michigan/Indiana so here’s some news items you might have missed:

Seattle is a walkable city!  According to Walk Score’s listing of the 138 most walkable neighborhoods in the country, Pioneer Square hits number 18, Downtown Seattle (wherever that is) is 33, First Hill is 46, Belltown is 61, Roosevelt is 64, the International District is 83, South Lake Union is 85, University District is 86, Lower Queen Anne is 97 and Wallingford is 133. And overall, Seattle is the 6th most walkable city, following San Francisco, New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia. I don’t know that I agree with the ranking, do you? For more opinion on whether Seattle reeeeallly outranks Portland, check out the Seattle Weekly here. For more on urban development visit Seattle MetBlogs here, and  Sightline’s has more here with some pertinent reader comments!

The first meeting of the Green Building Task Force is tomorrow from  3:30 to 6:30 p.m. at the downtown library. The goal of the force over the next six months is to figure out how to actually make Seattle the “green building capital,” and help achieve Nickel’s February goal of improving energy efficiency in commercial and residential by at least 20 percent. I wrote about that in the DJC here. They’ll be looking at policy options, financing programs, efficiency incentives and regulatory mandates.

There will be two teams: one will work on existing building stock, the other will work on new. That’s an important point, as many energy efficiency programs or government mandates only look at new projects, and not existing, even though there is by far much more to fix in existing buildings.

I love sources that provide a virtual who’s who of green people and this task force does just that. Members include reps from AIA, AGC, BOMA, Master Builders, Mithun, NBBJ, Touchstone, Seattle Steam… you get the idea. To see the actual list, go here.

In other news, I learned on my trip that US Weekly has a spread in its current edition about green celebrity tips. I’m not sure how I feel about this, but if you (or your kids) want to know what Cameron Diaz does to go green, check it out. I must admit the part comparing carbon emissions from celebrity perks (like personal jets and yachts) to everyday life (coach seating, a little sailboat) was a tad - shall I say - enlightening (or depressing, take your pick). Treehugger covers it here.

I have a story in today’s DJC on the year’s 10 best new green products, according to (our kind of competitor) the Sustainable Industries Journal… but were they really the best?

The products range from odd to ordinary, at least in what their function is. Here are three of them:

I’d never heard of the Solar Tracking Skylight by Solar Tracking Skylights of Chicago but it sure sounds interesting. It’s a self-contained, self-managed skylight with mirrors that move to adapt to the sun’s position. It’s designed to provide light all day, not just when the sun is shining directly above. They’re half the size of typical skylights and customers include Whole Foods, Wal-Mart and the U.S. Military. … and they also look like they came out of a space movie! Yea for space movie products! (If you want to see a video of how it works, visit the Web site at the above link).

Lamberts Channel Glass by Glasfrabriks Lamberts of Bavaria, Germany is a self-supporting column that can be used as interior or exterior walls. They’re made from 40 percent recycled glass and are decidedly pretty, judges said. At left is the product in use at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo. One judge, Clark Brockman of Sera Architects in Portland, said, “Let’s just face it, it’s sexy.”

Sexy. Usually a word NOT associated with green building products (or projects for that matter). But judge for yourself from the picture at left….

Then there’s local winner Salvaged Hardwood Tables by Urban Hardwoods of Seattle. Urban Hardwoods has salvaged 3,000 trees, that would have otherwise ended up being wasted,  and turned the wood into tables. This one was salvaged from Kirkland and costs $4,200 for the tabletop.

But like it or not, these are all the opinions of a handful of (granted knowledgeable) judges. Perhaps you too are a judge in disguise. If so, tell me about the best green product not on the list. Post your comments below.

SI assures us all the products are real green products rather than examples of great greenwashing. But how well green products work is also controversial. For more on that topic, click the tag green materials below and read the entry ‘Green products not so great, says Gehry specifier,’ and comments.

Other blog posts on this at Jetson Green and Portland Architecture.

These are three of the 10. To learn about the other seven, read my story here. 

For those of you not from the Pacific Northwest, Gerding Edlen Development Co. is widely regarded here as one of the best role models for sustainable project development. People want to know what they’re working on - and what they think is the next big thing in sustainability, as evidenced by my story on their Casey Condominium project being the DJC’s most read and most e-mailed story on Friday. 

So when I spoke with Mark Edlen, Gerding Edlen’s managing partner last week, and he said within a year LEED platinum would be “an absolute yawner” in his office, you better believe my ears perked up. Instead, he said it’s on to net zero buildings that consume more trash than they produce!

We were talking about the platinum rating because The Casey (at right), a $60 million, 61-unit building, is supposedly the first LEED platinum multifamily high rise in the world.  

It’s also the firm’s first foray into “eco-luxury”  - a combination of ultimate ecological consciousness and luxury (something not often associated with green buildings).

In fact, it is widely agreed upon that the green building movement has done a particularly bad job of combining function and beauty, something that most agree must become a stronger focus. But Mark’s focus behind developing green projects is that a project should not compromise anything from site to construction to occupancy comfort, just to be sustainable.

So why not go after green luxury, the same way you’d go after green office or hospital space?  What do you think? Can a building be both?

To read a local perspective, click here or here. For real estate stats, go here. For more go here. If you’re interested in Gerding Edlen, you can read about another one of their project’s in a December story I wrote here.

But if you want to learn more about the Casey, its green features, the difficulty of building green multifamily to such a high level, and the building’s art component, there’s only one place to look: the story in the DJC. Check it out here.

Last week I came up with my own “brilliant” idea: create an online forum where people that work in green buildings would record their experiences to create a better understanding of how green buildings really feel.

That post was in response to Weber Thompson’s blog that is doing exactly that. If you missed it, that blog also answered my question on how the team is measuring their building’s performance (see tag below for Weber Thompson).

Now I’m asking you what your brilliant ideas are?

It’s no secret that Seattle (and Chicago, and Portland and New York etc….) are racing to be the greenest city in the country. So if Seattle wants to hold onto that goal, what should it do? Should density be the focus or should it be regulations through things like stricter energy codes?

On a broader scale, is urban planning the answer or is it more incentives?   

For a British perspective on what cities should do, see a BBC story here. For a video on the nature of sustainability and its future from the perspective of Sir Norman Foster, click here. Or you could check out Sustainable Ballard’s Web site here to see what one Seattle neighborhood thinks, or Sustainable Capitol Hill’s site here.

I’ll admit it: I often take Seattle’s environmentally friendliness for granted, even though I know it’s a leader in many areas.

Renewable energy? City buys it. Green building? City does that too. Recycling? Um, duh.

Sometimes, it takes an ice cold swim in reality to remember these things we take for granted, aren’t commonplace. Today that dose of reality came in the form of a quiz from Grist.org. To take it for yourself, click here.

I took the quiz and for most of the questions I couldn’t for the life of me click the obviously negative answers (excepting, of course, the traffic categories). I found myself naively wondering… are there actually places in the U.S. where all of these negative answers are normal? Keep reading to learn about the quiz and what lesser known green cities are doing (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!

If Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels and City Council President Richard Conlin get their way, you will be charged a 20-cent “green fee” on all disposable shopping bags from Seattle grocery, drug and convenience stores, starting Jan. 1, 2009.

According to SPU, about 360 million disposable bags are used in Seattle every year, most plastic. That translates to 600 bags for each Seattle resident.

And those handy white foam containers that hold your pho soup or Mexican takeout, pictured at left? Under the proposal, you’ll also stop seeing those. Instead, businesses would have to replace everything from foam plates, cups and egg cartons with a different product by Jan. 1, 2009. Then, they would have to switch to using compostable or locally recyclable packaging by July 1, 2010.

The changes were announced in a proposal today supported by Nickels and Conlin. The legislation isn’t ready yet, but Conlin said it should be finalized, and considered by council, in June.

Nickels said Seattle is the first city in the country (that he knows of) to create a program like this, though cities across the world are adopting similar policies. At least 20 U.S. cities have banned polystyrene food packaging including Portland and San Francisco.                                                                             

Other options include packaging made of corn starch and sugar cane. A spokesperson for local restaurant group Tutta Bella, pictured at right, said at a press conference today that due to the restaurant’s recycling and composting of everything from expired pizza dough to food containers, the waste from all three restaurant locations combined fills only one garbage can per day.

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