Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Green Noise: How being Green is missing the mark

Cynthetiq · 06-22-2008, 10:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hain

I too have wondered about all this confusion, and am quite surprised that there aren't scores of college hippies researching this.

My eco-conscious goals within the next ten years are to have:

energy star appliances
solar power be the main energy source for my home
a solar heater installed to again utilize solar energy
grown my own garden, supplying me with most of my fruits and vegetables (which is not a stretch since my father has been gardening many different things every year of my life)

The actual outcome is to become as self sufficient as possible.

I didn't realize that Energy Star was promoted outside of the US.

I just read about a new certification called LEED

Its rating was built into that price. LEED — an acronym for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is the hot designer label, and platinum is the badge of honor — the top classification given by the U.S. Green Building Council. “There’s kind of a green pride, like driving a Prius,” said Brenden McEneaney, a green building adviser to the city of Santa Monica, adding, “It’s spreading all over the place.” click to show

Quote:

View: The New Trophy Home, Small and Ecological
Source: NYTimes
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The New Trophy Home, Small and Ecological
June 22, 2008
The New Trophy Home, Small and Ecological
By FELICITY BARRINGER
For the high-profile crowd that turned out to celebrate a new home in Venice, Calif., the attraction wasn’t just the company and the architectural detail. The house boasted the builders’ equivalent of a three-star Michelin rating: a LEED platinum certificate.

The actors John Cusack and Pierce Brosnan, with his wife, Keely Shaye Smith, a journalist, came last fall to see a house that the builders promised would “emit no harmful gases into the atmosphere,” “produce its own energy” and incorporate recycled materials, from concrete to countertops.

Behind the scenes were Tom Schey, a homebuilder in Santa Monica, and his business partner, Kelly Meyer, an environmentalist whose husband, Ron, is the president of Universal Studios. Ms. Meyer said their goal was to show that something energy-conscious “doesn’t have to look as if you got it off the bottom shelf of a health-food store.”

“It doesn’t have to smell like hemp,” she said.

That was probably a good thing. The four-bedroom house was for sale, with a $2.8 million asking price.

Its rating was built into that price. LEED — an acronym for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is the hot designer label, and platinum is the badge of honor — the top classification given by the U.S. Green Building Council. “There’s kind of a green pride, like driving a Prius,” said Brenden McEneaney, a green building adviser to the city of Santa Monica, adding, “It’s spreading all over the place.”

Devised eight years ago for the commercial arena, the ratings now cover many things, including schools and retail interiors. But homes are the new frontier.

While other ratings are widely recognized, like the federal Energy Star for appliances, the LEED brand stands apart because of its four-level rankings — certified, silver, gold and platinum — and third-party verification. So far this year, 10,250 new home projects have registered for the council’s consideration, compared with 3,100 in 2006, the first year of the pilot home-rating system. Custom-built homes dominate the first batch of certified dwellings. Today, dinner-party bragging rights are likely to include: “Let me tell you about my tankless hot water heater.” Or “what’s the R value of your insulation?”

But if a platinum ranking is a Prada label for some, for others, it is a prickly hair shirt. Try asking buyers used to conspicuous consumption (a 12,000-square-foot house) to embrace conspicuous nonconsumption (say, 2,400 square feet for a small family). Or to earn points by recycling and weighing all their construction debris (be warned: a bathroom scale probably won’t cut it). The imperatives of comfort and eco-friendliness are not always in sync.

For instance, the Brosnans, environmental advocates who admired Ms. Meyer’s house, are now building a home of their own and “really want to do it green,” said David Hertz, their architect. Mr. Brosnan may adopt many environmentally sound building techniques, but he “is not going to live in a 2,400-square-foot home,” the architect said.

Mr. Hertz’s complaint goes beyond size. He says the rating system is rigid and cumbersome, something that has been heard across the country as green building slowly ceases to be a do-gooder’s hobby. The ratings are now woven into building codes in Los Angeles, Boston and Dallas. The federal government and many states and cities use LEED standards or the equivalent for their own buildings. The system is based on points earned for a variety of eco-friendly practices; builders choose among them, balancing the goals of cost control, design and high point totals.

Nevada, North Carolina and Virginia, not to mention Chicago, Cincinnati and Bar Harbor, Me., give tax incentives or other concessions, like expedited permitting or utility hookups, for construction that is up to the nonprofit council’s standards.

And “LEED-accredited professional” is a new occupational status.

Worries about climate change and rising energy costs are part of the equation: roughly 21 percent of heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions come from homes; nearly 40 percent come from residential and commercial structures combined. As energy prices rise, the long-range economic value and short-range social cachet of green building are converging.

More than 1,500 commercial buildings and 684 homes have been certified but just 48 homes have received the platinum ranking, among them a four-bedroom home in Freeport, Me., as well as homes in Minneapolis; Callaway, Fla.; Dexter, Mich.; and Paterson, N.J. The checklist for certification can be more daunting than a private-school application, which prompts many to abandon the quest. Mr. Schey is not seeking LEED certification on his next home (though the project’s architect, Melinda Gray, is seeking it for hers).

Randy Udall, a builder in Colorado who wrote a piece critical of the process after building two accredited ski resort additions, said, “You’re happy when you’re released from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Abu Ghraib,” though he added, “You typically end up with a delightful building.”

One requirement for getting a home certified is hiring an on-site inspector approved by the council to test the new systems and help fill out the huge amount of paperwork, which is reviewed by the nonprofit council. The organization charges from $400 for a home to $22,500 for the largest buildings to register and certify costs.

Joel McKellar, a researcher with LS3P Associates, an architecture firm in Charleston, S.C., said that to earn credit for adequate natural light, “you have to calculate the area of the room, the area of the windows, how much visible transmittance of light there is.”

Michael Lehrer, who designed the platinum-rated Water + Life Museum complex in Hemet, outside Los Angeles, said, “They have mundane things in there that are pretty nonsensical and others things that are pretty profound.” He added, “At a time when everybody and their sister and brother are saying ‘We are green,’ it’s very important that these things be vetted in a credible way.”

To cope with the growing appetite for accreditation, the council this spring asked other agencies to help make LEED certifications. A new code, which addresses some of the criticisms, is at www.usgbc.org/DisplayPage.aspx?CMSPageID=1849.

Is LEED a useful selling tool? Offered with great fanfare last fall on eBay for $2.8 million, the Meyer/Schey home in Venice, which can be seen on their Web site, www.Project7ten.com got no bids at the time; it recently found a potential buyer, for $2.5 million.

But Maria Chao, an architect in Amherst, Mass., said her new home’s certification rating had meant instant recognition. “This is a small town,” Ms. Chao said. “When I mention I live in the house on Snell St., people say, ‘Oh, the green home.’ ”

Frances Anderton, a KCRW radio host and Los Angeles editor of Dwell magazine, longs for the day when LEED recognition is irrelevant. “Architects should be offering a green building service,” Ms. Anderton said, “without needing a badge of pride.”

Quote:

View: Eco-trendiness is in the bag
Source: DailyNews
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Eco-trendiness is in the bag
By Melissa Heckscher, Staff Writer
Article Last Updated: 06/17/2008 01:16:50 PM PDT
It's an everyday conundrum, a question we're all asked once, twice, maybe several times a week:

"Paper or plastic?"

How about, "Neither, I've got my own."?

Turns out, what was once the token accouterment of a Birkenstock-wearing few has become the latest fashion accessory.

"There's an enormous amount of trendiness around the reusable shopping bag phenomenon," said Vincent Cobb, CEO and founder of www.reusablebags.com, a Web site dedicated to reducing over-consumption of plastic shopping bags. "It's one of those easy feel-good things. It's like, `I can't do those big things like buy a hybrid car, but I can do these sorts of little green things so I'm doing something positive and not wasting resources.' "

Cobb's site, which has been around since 2003, sells more than 150 different kinds of reusable grocery bags, because studies have shown both paper and plastic take their toll on the environment.

Paper bags, for instance, often thought to be the "right" choice, actually require 40 percent more energy to manufacture than plastic bags, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; they also require 91 percent more energy to recycle, pound for pound.

As for plastic bags, 500 billion to 1 trillion are consumed annually worldwide. Consequently, they rank as one of the 10 most common trash items along the American coast and pose serious health hazards to sea animals who accidentally ingest them, mistaking them for jellyfish.

In an effort to soften its environmental footprint, Whole Foods has banned plastic bags at all its stores nationwide. Whole Foods customers must either use the store's paper bags or bring their own bags (for which they get a 5 cent credit per bag).

The no-plastic policy has saved an estimated 100 million bags since it was instituted in April. Whole Foods marketing manager Ashley Gibbons called it "the first step in what we see as a long evolution in becoming as green as we can.

"This is shifting us away from a consume-and-dispose mentality," Gibbons said.

Last year, the city of San Francisco banned nonbiodegradable plastic bags from being distributed at all large supermarkets, as well as smaller chain stores (including Rite Aid and Longs). The stores can now only offer recyclable paper bags, reusable bags or compostable "bio-plastic" bags made of cornstarch or potato starch.

Good intentions, sure. But some experts say banning plastic bags may be doing more harm than good.

"We don't think bans are the right approach," said Keith Christman, senior director of packaging for the Plastics Division of the American Chemistry Council, an organization representing plastic-

bag manufacturers. "Bans will result in a switch to alternative materials; the likely switch is to paper. If you switch to paper, it doubles energy use, doubles greenhouse gas emissions and water use."

Furthermore, he said, surveys have shown that 92 percent of Americans reuse their plastic bags as trash can liners, lunch bags and for pet waste pickup - which saves new bags from being made for those purposes.

But Cobb maintains that the problem isn't using disposable bags; it's wasting them.

"It doesn't matter that it's paper or plastic; it matters that you use it and you toss it," Cobb said. "The problem is the mindless overconsumption of use-and-toss items."

The fashion world is on his side. In the past couple of years, reusable shopping bags have earned a celebrity chic status.

British designer Anya Hindmarch's "I'm Not A Plastic Bag" unbleached cotton bag, for instance, sold out on the day of its release last year, with some shoppers lining up as early as 4 a.m. to get their hands on the $15 tote.

"I hate the idea of making the environment trendy," Hindmarch told The New York Times, "but you need to make it cool, and then it becomes a habit."

If you don't mind shelling out $960, Hermes has its Silky Pop grocery bag made of hand-wrought silk. The bag collapses into a wallet-size calfskin pouch.

Other designer shopping bags include Castiglioni's foldable nylon bag, which retails for $843, and Stella McCartney's organic canvas shopper, $495.

Of course, you don't have to spend a lot to get a good shopping bag.

Trader Joe's sells a variety of reusable bags for less than $3. Upping the incentive to reuse: Customers who use any reusable grocery bag at Trader Joe's can enter the store's monthly lottery to win $50 worth of free groceries.

Some bags have double do-gooding incentives.

The West Los Angeles clothing boutique Intuition (www.shopintuiton.com) donates $35 from the sale of every $85-$100 Market bag to the International Rescue Committee.

And, proceeds from the natural burlap and canvas FEED (The Children of the World) bag, designed by presidential niece Lauren Bush, benefit the U.N.'s World Food Program.

"We tried to make it a dual purpose in helping the kids who are hungry and also using fewer plastic bags," said Ellen Gustafson, Bush's partner in FEED Projects. "If we sell 500,000 bags, we'll be able to feed all the kids in Rwanda's school feeding program in 2008."

And really: You can't get that with a disposable bag.

Melissa Heckscher, (310) 540-5511

melissa.heckscher@dailybreeze.com

PAPER OR PLASTIC?
Plastic

An estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year.

Plastics do not biodegrade. Rather, they photodegrade, a process in which sunlight breaks down plastic into smaller and smaller pieces.

It can take up to 1,000 years for a high-density polyethylene plastic bag to break down in the environment.

Plastic bags are on the top 10 list of most common trash items along the American coastline (both on land and in the water).

About 100,000 whales, seals, turtles and other marine animals are killed by plastic bags each year worldwide.

Paper

Paper bags generate 70 percent more air pollutants and 50 times more water pollutants than plastic bags.

2,000 plastic bags weigh 30 pounds; 2,000 paper bags weigh 280 pounds. The latter takes up a lot more landfill space.

It takes 91 percent less energy to recycle a pound of plastic than it takes to recycle a pound of paper.

Sources: reusablebags.com, Planet Ark (an international environmental group), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Here is another conundrum.

I get plastic. I could easily purchase one of these reusable bags. I don't have any interest in getting any since I don't leave my house to go to the grocery. I go to the grocery on the way home. This would mean that I would have to bring the bag or bags with me in order to shop.

I also use the plastic bags as trash bags. If I didn't reuse those bags, I'd be purchasing garbage bags.

So I reuse something that is useful or I just outright purchase something that will be thrown away directly. Which is really better for the environment? Which is better for my wallet?