EnvironmentLA - The City's official site for information about projects and programs that are making Los Angeles more sustainable and environmentally friendly.
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power - LADWP offers environmental Green LA programs, including Trees for a Green LA, Energy Efficiency for a Green LA, Solar Energy for a Green LA, Electric Vehicles for a Green LA, Green Power for a Green LA, Recycling for a Green LA and Educational Services for a Green LA.
Green LA Action Plan - The City's official plan to improve energy conservation, transition to renewable power sources, and change the ways citizens commute to work and school.
US Green Building Council-LA - A resource for agencies, municipalities, professionals and companies interested in sustainable, green buildings.
West Coast Green, a gathering that‘s part expo, part trade show and part thought conference, will be showcasing leading edge green projects when it opens at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco this coming weekend.
One of the largest conferences devoted to the “built environment,” the event attracts speakers with architectural, design and construction expertise from around the nation.
Visitors to the 2009 conference, Oct. 1-3, will be able to see demos of hundreds of products, as well as examples of green design, such as a large hanging garden constructed on a bamboo framework that will be suspended over the bay. The installation aims to show how green can be beautiful and useful, using vegetation to mitigate heat, sequester carbon and improve water and air quality.
The US Green Building Council has pronounced New Orleans home to the biggest green neighborhood in the world, thanks to the efforts of Brad Pitt and the group Make It Right who have built 13 LEED Platinum certified, storm-resistant homes and are planning another 150 more in the Lower 9th Ward .
The neighborhood, already impoverished, was among those hardest hit by post-Katrina flooding when New Orleans levees failed after the 2005 hurricane.
Pitt and Make It Right Executive Director Tom Darden accepted an award for their accomplishments at the Clinton Global Iniative meeting in New York on Thursday.
How do you turn a 100-year-old Philadelphia row-house into a green house? Better question: How do you make that row-house green enough to potentially forego HVAC half of the year?
With lots of love, forethought and green savoir faire, says David Krupp, a Philadelphia-based LEED Accredited Professional (LEED AP) Realtor and developer. Krupp is selling what he and his architectural designer-owner clients hope will be the first LEED Platinum residence in Philly’sCenter City neighborhood, a converted row home at 1500 Montrose Street.
“As it stands, there are no LEED-Platinum certified homes in the Center City area,” Krupp says. “Right now, we’re ‘racing’ with another one.”
The U.S. Green Building Council, started 16 years ago, has 20,200 members and more than 50,000 LEED registered and certified projects around the world (80 percent are in the US).
And the group plans to get even bigger as it turns its attention to college campuses and enlists the help of students.
The USGBC is helping universities across the country to establish sustainability courses and USGBC student organizations, and of course, to build green. The Washington-based NGO estimates that there will be 4,300 LEED projects registered (underway) and certified (completed) on college campuses at the end of 2009.
While people scurry to devise new green components for homes, Don Blalock is in the enviable position of launching one that he’s been nursing along for the last six years.
His Aeonian brick will build houses that aresignificantly more energy efficient than conventional homes; help them qualify for LEED platinum certification and withstand hurricane force winds up to 240 mph. They’ll also resist heat, mold, mildew and termites, says Blalock whose goal is to build “the most structurally sound house that’s livable that will last for a very long time.”
It’s not always easy being green. Lourdes Rodriguez learned that the hard way. Earlier this year, the Round Rock, Texas, resident decided to replace a rickety cedar fence with a stylish new bamboo one.
Attracted by its eco-friendly qualities (only three to four years between harvests vs. cedar trees, which take up to 30 years to grow back), its durability and its ability to withstand the high winds and intense heat typical in her town, Rodriguez researched the project and eventually purchased the bamboo from Backyard X-scapes, a San Diego outfit. She paid approximately $3,000 for the bamboo, posts, stain and other materials needed for her 150-foot-long structure. She and her significant other, Doyce Jones, were excited by the prospect of an elegant-looking fence that was good for the environment, would last at least five times longer than a traditional wood fence and was significantly less expensive than cedar (those bids came in around $7,000).
Chet Shank, age 38, owner of Thinking Green Systems, LLC, Shippensburg, Penn.
What I do:
I’ve been building houses for 20 years and began Thinking Green Systems a little over a year ago. The company is a dealer and installer of “BioBased 501″, a spray-in soybean oil-based polyurethane foam insulation, which does not contain formaldehyde and does not emit CFCs or HFCs.
How it helps:
This insulation is made without petroleum products which are fossil fuels. BioBased 501 is made from soybeans, an annually renewable resource.
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
The National Audubon Society headquarters in New York City has distinguished itself as a builder not just of avian habitats, but of green, sustainable office spaces too, earning a LEED Platinum rating from the U.S. Green Building Council.
In fact, the society’s 27,500-square-foot headquarters at 225 Varick Street received the highest [...]
Unless you avoided the conventional gift-buying routine entirely this holiday season, odds are good that you spent much of December in some retail environments whose construction and operation involved a lamentable level of waste.
Outdoor-gear merchant R.E.I. is a few years into an effort to chip away at waste in its stores. This September the chain opened a store in Round Rock, Texas (just north of Austin) that is phase two in its development of a long-term eco-friendly model. Most of its innovations have been tested for over a year in a Boulder, Colorado location, but that store, which opened in October 2007, was a renovation of an existing space. This one, situated in a cluster of stores whose heavy traffic is generated by the area’s only IKEA, was built from scratch to accommodate its green agenda.
Everyone knows that shade from the sun keeps you cooler, but a new study has quantified the benefit in a way homeowners might want to note. The right kind of shade, it turns out, can easily shave ten percent off your summertime electric bill.
Once again, California is leading the way toward greener cities. Today, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation that addresses sprawl concretely (and one hopes that’s concrete mixed with recycled fly ash).
Many states and cities have talked about the need to shorten commutes and to connect work centers with fuel-saving public transportation. These talks have sometimes yielded more commuter rail lines, bike paths and awards for urban renewal projects. But just as often, they’ve produced more talk.
Dealing holistically with sprawl has seemed beyond the grip of many large cities where the citizenry and leadership have long equated bigger with better. (Need we name these Sunbelt perpetrators?)
Now California may help break the impasse. The bill, SB 375, signed today puts some green on the table – to push the issue beyond talk. It will link federal transportation funding to climate change goals, offering incentives to builders to keep their projects closer to city hubs and to build more affordable housing projects within major metro areas.
Denser urban population growth will mean shorter, fewer commutes, translating to lower fuel consumption, preserved agricultural land and cleaner air. Neat how those things all go hand in hand, huh? The re-direct will help the state meet its goal of reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
Critics were miffed that during machinations, the building lobby won some exemptions from some other environmental requirements for those pursuing these incentives. But as we’ve seen in Congress, even crisis legislation can crack and falter if compromises aren’t made.
Ryan Morton did not have a vision of a home he aspired to own until he saw the highly stylized, three-story, loft-style sustainable “green” home replete with bamboo floors, radiant heat, bathroom tiles made of recycled glass bottles, skylights and walls of glass.
“Until I saw this, I didn’t have an idea of a home I aspired to own,’’ Morton said of the house, the basis of the Museum of Science and Industry’s exhibit, Smart Home: Green + Wired, which is open in Chicago through Jan. 4, 2009. “This is it. It’s essentially zero maintenance.’’
Morton happens to know the 11-room house, including a master bed and bath, a child’s room, two baths and a powder room, inside and out. He is a tour guide. “It’s really a great job,’’ he said.
The house highlights ways—big and small—that people can make green living an all-important part of their lifestyle. Built to celebrate the museum’s 75th anniversary, the energy efficient house was designed by Michelle Kaufmann Designs, a leader in green design community, and built by All American Homes.
