Green Building Elements

Restaurants here in San Francisco open, and close, almost as often as the fog rolls in so we don’t usually pay an extreme amount of our precious attention to another restaurant du jour. Mixt Greens recently opened but they don’t qualify for new kid on the block status nonetheless they do deserve green props. Thus I direct my attention to their third installment of the Mixt Greens empire.

This third location, located in SoMa, just opened and used zero-VOC paints to improve the air quality, and I could definitely smell the food and not the fumes. They even used recycled paint to cover their ceiling. I didn’t find any bamboo or cork for the flooring but something better as they used an unfinished concrete floor with 50% flyash content. That high flyash content along with the fact that the floor will last a long time (plus it’s easy to clean) makes that choice a no-brainer. Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s news included the story that testing on FEMA-supplied temporary housing trailers in Mississippi and Louisiana has found extremely high levels of formaldehyde in the air, despite earlier reports issued by FEMA indicating that there was no problem.

Tests by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on more than 500 trailers in Louisiana and Mississippi showed formaldehyde levels that were five times higher than levels in a normal house. The levels in some trailers were nearly 40 times what is normal.

The CDC is saying that people living in these trailers “should move out quickly — especially children, the elderly and anyone with asthma or another chronic condition.”

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