Newsletter December 23, 2005 Green Building - II
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Redbud Wind - energy project archive
This wind turbine icon provides a link to track progress at the Redbud Wind I site at Enid, OK. The intent is to provide an ongoing look inside the procedures of wind energy analysis at this site. The icon will appear in future newsletters.
Prelim
Permafrost is losing its permanence across the Northern Hemisphere, altering ecosystems and damaging roads and buildings across Alaska, Canada, and Russia. Government scientists warned today that over half the area covered by this topmost layer of permafrost could thaw by 2050 and as much as 90 percent by 2100.
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Green Building - IIConsider once again this quotation from Robert Ivy, reprinted in last week's KnowledgeFarm (December 16), "...architects now know that their work has immense impact on the environment, consuming 70 percent of electricity in this country, twice the energy consumption of cars and trucks". Consider that buildings constructed today may have a useful life of fifty years or more and will thus have a long lasting effect upon the net balance of energy consumption and the environment.
Reaching for New Heights
by David Hale, PE, LEED AP; Robin Hyman, EIT; Michaella Wright, PE, LEED AP;Curt Parde, RA, LEED AP
Green@Work Magazine, September/October, 2005"The McKinney Office Building, a green project in McKinney, Texas, near Dallas, is attempting to reach new heights in sustainable design. In fact, developers and designers hope it will become the first privately developed Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum-rated building in the country.
"Only about 15 platinum-rated buildings exist in the world today. The half-dozen in this country are operated by public entities, such as the Audubon Society, that traditionally are focused on the environment. The thought of using alternative energy sources to power office space has remained, for the most part, just a thought."
Web Link - Visit Green@Work Magazine
Products Made of "Eco-Effective" Components - complete CE article
by Nancy B. Solomon, AIA
Architectural Record, December, 2005
"In 1995, determined to counteract the environmental, economic, and social injustices that are so often the unintentional by-products of conventional manufacturing and distribution processes, architect William McDonough, FAIA, and chemist Michael Braungart established McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC; www.mbdc.org). The Charlottesville, Virginiabased company applies what McDonough and Braungart have termed cradle-to-cradle principles in order to help product manufacturers rethink the way they do business. The two visionaries subsequently expounded on their approach in the book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, which was published in 2002 by North Point Press. Their revolutionary ideas, like so many significant concepts in history, are profoundly simple: Industrial production should take its cues from nature to create healthy and abundant cycles that continually and effectively reuse our finite resources."
"To achieve this truly sustainable state, products must be made from either biological nutrients, which can decompose naturally without poisoning our habitats, or technical nutrients, which must be recaptured at the end of the products' useful lives so that they can be remade into the same products or ones of equal value. When substances of different chemical makeup are combined, as typically occurs in conventional recycling programs, the resulting material becomes what McDonough and Braungart dub a "monstrous hybrid." Such a concoction cannot easily be returned to its basic constituent parts and, therefore, is on its way to becoming an ineffective resource, if not an outright pollutant. For this reason, McDonough and Braungart argue that most recycling programs today are really "downcycling" initiatives: The subsequent generation of products formed from the previous one is typically of lower value."
