Green Building Elements

It wasn’t exactly a quite hush that settled over the San Francisco’s Moscone Center for the 50th PCBC convention but the crowds and exhibitors for this annual builders convention came in about one-half of last year. Nonetheless, in this era of minimalism and slimming down the show offered an array of notable speakers and some innovative products. Now of course, with the slogan “The New Age of Innovation” we hoped for more progressive Green products and not just in a marketing sense.

On the creatively intriguing side, we walked into the Icynene Inc. display booth only knowing that they create their Icynene LD-R-50 spray foam insulation partially from Castor oil. Honestly, we didn’t exactly know the origin of Castor oil. Castor oil comes from Castor beans (not true beans from Castor plant) and don’t serve a normal food source, so not food for insulation here. Castor crops don’t require pesticides or fungicides or even water to grow and are rapidly renewable. For this insulation, they use 15 percent castor oil (and unfortunately 85 percent polyglycol, which in our eyes is like using B15 biodiesel. Fifteen percent is better than zero percent but still a long way to go. This product helps eliminate dust, pollen and contains no VOCs as it is water blown. Most traditional cellulose insulation comes from 80% newspaper (up to100% post-consumer recycled) and 20% binders and fire-retardants, commonly borax, boric acid, sulfuric acid, ammonium sulfates and/or other chemical compounds. Smell the goodness.

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Even in a Greencentric city like Berkeley, locals and Bay Area visitors would be Green with envy when they see the just opened David Brower Center. It feels healthy just to walk through the Green down-to-the-bones building which combines advanced technology along with simple recycled materials.

When entering for their housewarming party we had a difficult time not noticing the soaring concrete walls which made us think more dot com than gallery. The fact that in creating a building with an oh- so-feathery carbon footprint (when compared to most structures) Principal Architect, Daniel Solomon included up to 70 percent slag in those walls. Read the rest of this entry »

Now that we are all in danger of losing our homes, and the young are so burdened by their unthinkably immense college loans, perhaps we need to find out how to build with absolutely nothing down.

Who better to show us how to DIY on a budget of zilch, than the homeless builders of Berkeley who created the innovative squatters park made famous by the documentary movie Bums Paradise.

Here’s another way to build with no money down, no mortgage, no credit, and —no cash.
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Instead of usual colors that we associate with wine such as white or dark red, our color paradigm might shift to say Gold. With the CADE Winery just about to open, this solar powered and organically farmed winery, hopes to garner LEED Gold status and if so, would be the first Estate Gold LEED certified winery in the Napa Valley.

When visiting a winery, people’s olfactory system normally goes into overdrive but instead of inhaling the aromas of vanilla, rosemary, oak and sage here we took deep breaths of the air. As in indoor air quality. No stuffy AC here as the building relies on natural ventilation. While others admire the wines, we admired the other green aspects. CADE will utilize 100% solar power and organic farming methods which both sound tasty to us.

From top to bottom, we got our buzz from the other building features like the concrete composed that contains a generous amount (30 percent) of fly ash, steel made up of 98 percent recycled material, FSC glass and wood, as well as blue jeans for insulation and its own concrete mass for cooling.

The Green aspects just don’t stop at the building. It’s too bad that we didn’t bike or drive our electric car (we did carpool) because the winery offers a plug-in base for hybrid electric cars; and bicycle racks. Even better, they offer a shower (hopefully with low flow showerhead) so cyclists can clean up before tasting or event.

One the eating side, they will have a full-time chef on site who will focus on organic, sustainable cuisine grown on site. We haven’t had the chance to sample some of the sustainable cuisine but we’ll report back when we do.

We, like many people, wondered about the name. The winery name CADE derives from a Shakespearean term used for an oak cask or barrel, — comprises more than 60 acres, 23 of which were planted as vineyards in 2003. Of the remaining land, 28 acres will be protected in a land trust to ensure that they will always remain open space.  Now there should be a big “Cheers” to that fact.

What do get when you mix four of the Bay Area’s top green stars, a LEED certified location, lunch and corporate sponsor wanting to spread its green wings? The spirited Sustainable Symposium sponsored by Ace here in glorious San Francisco. The symposium, in short, brought some energetic and often useful ideas from the knowledgeable and spry panel (not to mention moderator and Chicago Ace Hardware store owner Lou Manfredini) and created solid dialogue in what could have been one of another “How to green this and that discussion.”

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While we are on the topic of decreasing our energy footprints in small homes, I’d like to share the simple and small round yurt design, that has been around for ages. The yurt is a type of “Green Weefab Mini-Home” and can be customized into another kind of hand-built “Earth Sheltered House” for those on a budget.

Yes a yurt is a portable, felt-covered, wood lattice-framed dwelling structure used by the nomads in the steppes of Central Asia for centuries, and yes it is also a modern dwelling here in the west. I have often seen yurts perched on ocean side clifftops, in horse pastures for riders, and used as outdoor guest houses for those with big yards. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you want to get paid for saving energy? If so, then you won’t want to miss this all important webinar that covers a host of incredibly useful information for home owners and builders. Organized by Treehugger Consulting, reserve your seat now as space is limited.

Reserve your Webinar seat now at:

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/861707592

Tree Hugger Consulting presents “Green Building Incentives 2009: Where and How to Get Them.” This webinar will cover tax credits and rebates available for energy saving building techniques and materials in the United States.  Where to find them, what to do to get them, and how to apply and receive them.

Both commercial and residential buildings will be covered.  Applicable projects include new construction, remodels, additions, and some building repairs.

Homeowners, building owners, designers, and contractors are all welcome to learn more about how to get paid for saving energy.

The webinar is scheduled for an hour and a half to allow plenty of time for questions.  The cost is $20.00.  After the registration form is complete, you will be directed to our secure PayPal site.  A confirmation email with the webinar details will be sent to you after payment is confirmed.  If you do not receive the confirmation email within two (2) business days, please send an email to treehuggerconsulting@comcast.net.

Title: Green Building Incentives 2009: Where and How to Get Them

Date: Thursday, March 19, 2009

Time: 8:00 AM - 9:30 AM PDT

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

System Requirements

PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server, Vista

Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.4 (Tiger®) or newer

If you have any questions regarding the webinar, please contact Dawn Killough at treehuggerconsulting@comcast.net.

Treehugger Consulting’s Dawn Killough is a regular contributor to Green Building Elements. Click here for a complete list of her informative and interesting articles.

Click here to learn more about Treehugger Consulting.

Sometimes being green means taking on the “less is more” philosophy. Such would be the case with the Cavallo Lodge over in Sausalito. For the recently opened lodge, about half of the current lodge rooms they converted from the previous officers quarters, military barracks and the like. But don’t think of this place like Full Metal Jacket but rather Organic Cotton Robe.

We visited there a few months ago for the Going Green conference but we didn’t get a chance to survey the property much. This time, we got to stay over and even check out the spa. (Life is tough) The lodge, waiting for LEED Silver certification, offers new rooms and the classic ones. Even though the new ones offer radiant heating and the hot water comes via tankless water heaters, which reduce the energy consumed by those dinosaur era traditional water heaters. They installed photo-voltaic panels on 12 of the 14 new buildings’ south-facing, standing seam metal roofs which produce about 75 percent of the electricity necessary to run the buildings.

We cozied up in one of the existing building rooms which offer more charm (like the tine roof ceilings and the detailed antique radiator). By reusing the existing buildings, they already considered their carbon footprint. We can only be impressed by the fact that the brains and money behind the lodge used nearly 100% of the building shells and retained or repurposed roughly 75% of the building cores. We applaud these efforts as they not only extend the life cycle of existing building stock, conserve resources, and reduce waste but it also retains cultural and historical resources.

Although we couldn’t see the insulation we knew that they used blue jean insulation in the contemporary lodging and a portion in the Healing Arts Center. Speaking of the Spa, they constructed the floors and ceilings from rapidly renewable materials such as bamboo, wool or cork. Besides green building attributes they offer creativity by repurposing plastic dry cleaning bags (that come off site) for spa guests to take home their wet bathing suits.

Almost no other plastic can be seen on property and the staff couldn’t be nicer (as well as pretty well informed about the green aspects. Now if they could only get rid of the few incandescent bulbs (in the spa and the lodge) then we would be that much more pleased.

Photo by Kodiak Greenwood

As Bugs Bunny used to say “What’s up Doc?” In the newly opened chiropractic office the reply would be “green”, as in green building. Yes, green building continues its march into the homes and offices across America and some doctors realize that sustainable interiors means healthy patients (or at least healthier). Take for instance, the new Executive Express Chiropractic designed by Martinkovic Milford Architects and built by Peacock Construction. A small place to be sure but the designers make good use of space to mention the healthy additions.

When we entered, we couldn’t help but notice the curved leather wall. We even stuck our grills right against the wall to smell the leather. Yep, it smells like leather. It actually is. But the green minded architects didn’t lose their minds, they used EcoDomo, which uses real leather scraps from shoes, and other leather manufacturing facilities, then grind it into shreds. They use water and other natural binding ingredients (mostly natural rubber and acacia wood bark) then eventually deliver them with a sticky peel-off back that requires no off-gassing adhesives.

We never claimed to be interior decorators but we can appreciate the Maya Romanoff paper wall covering that smartens up the treatment area. The covering looks even smarter when considering that it comes by way of stamping rayon fibers on wet wood pulp, which produce an attractive wall covering that displays both texture and depth.  The wall covering comes from rapidly renewable materials, particularly Mulberry, and is 100% biodegradable.

The designers added several other green elements including:  Benjamin Moore Eco-Spec paint, the treatment room dividers come from the 3-form “full circle” line that uses a form of fair trade for the families in Nepal who helped raise the silkworms to create the striking panels, and even the artwork and mirror framing employs FSC certified wood.

One thing kind of bugs us. The marble countertops and shelves come from EuroStone which create these products from and combo of 90% recycled marble chips and a polyester resin as binding agent. Excluding the resin as a natural element, it’s walking a pretty thin line to claim that using marble chips from quarries would be considered green. If they didn’t mine the resource in the first place then no chips would exist.

Who’s next in the waiting room?

Leave it to the State Compensation Insurance Fund, the quasi-public workers’ compensation insurer based in San Francisco, to bring more green building to the Bay Area. Okay, we’re stretching it a little to call Vacaville the Bay Area but what’s a few miles for a true green building.

The fact that the $77 million green campus that consists of three 85,000-square-foot buildings diverted more than 20 percent of the building materials from the nasty old landfills. Much of those materials included concrete and cork and rubber flooring. Not only did the architect HOK and Milpitas-based Devon Construction reduce waste by using recycled building materials, but State Fund diverted a whopping 75 percent of construction waste away from landfills to recycling vendors.

This campus which expects to receive LEED Silver certification early next year, hit a big on the energy savings front with solar panel system, energy-efficient light fixtures, lamps, heating and cooling systems and other electrical equipment; and in the high-tech world they added “server virtualization” technology that reduces the number of servers needed to support the facility. The Green IT people must love that.

We (and probably most of the 750 workers) applaud the use of various low-emitting materials such as adhesives, paints and carpets. They also significantly reduced the building’s water footprint by incorporating low-flow toilets, waterless urinals, and an irrigation system using non-potable water.

We say that that is $77 million dollars well spent.

Photo credit: Steve Proehl