Category: News

You are probably already aware that recycling and composting provide many environmental benefits. But did you know that diverting recyclable and compostable materials from the waste stream can lead to significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions? In fact, within California, Oregon, and Washington, recycling or composting many of the commonly found items in the disposed waste stream could reduce GHG emissions by more than 32 MMTCO2e, (million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent), the equivalent of taking 6.3 million cars off the road for a year.

We are pleased to share this finding from a new report, “Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions through Recycling and Composting,” produced by the West Coast Climate and Materials Management Forum, an EPA-led partnership of western city, county, state, and tribal governments.

Recycling and Composting from a Climate Perspective

This landmark study identifies the top ten materials in California, Oregon, and Washington with the greatest potential for reducing GHG emissions if diverted from landfill disposal through recycling and composting. The analysis, carried out using EPA’s Waste Reduction Model (WARM) and statewide disposal characterization data, reveals that there are common materials in all three states that promise the greatest emissions reduction potential. These four priority material categories include: carpet, core recyclables, dimensional lumber, and food scraps.

Although recycling is an established practice in many West Coast communities, this report shows that further progress can be made by diverting greater quantities of materials currently recycled or composted, and by establishing new programs for materials such as carpet and dimensional lumber. The report offers current information about successful and innovative local programs, and resources to help you reach your goals. Approaching recycling and composting from a climate perspective challenges many of our assumptions.  We hope that the report stimulates new thinking and help you find new directions in your work.

This report shows that recycling and composting also contributes significantly to the green economy. Recycling or composting just half of core recyclables (corrugated containers, office paper, aluminum cans, newspaper, magazines, PET and HDPE containers, and steel cans) and food scraps currently in the three-state waste streams would yield almost $1.6 billion in additional salaries and wages, $818 million in additional goods and services produced, and $309 million in additional sales across the West Coast.

At a time when limited resources are available for meeting multiple urgent policy goals, programs that focus on recycling and composting these priority material types can deliver emissions reductions and contribute to climate action goals, while producing other more widely accepted benefits such as resource conservation, cost savings, job creation and economic development.

We hope you find this report interesting.  Please share it with your colleagues and tweet about your favorite facts. For more information, or to learn about how to become involved in the Forum, contact call or email Ashley Zanolli at EPA Region 10, 206-553-4425.

Thank you for your support and for your positive contribution to climate change mitigation and the green economy through recycling and composting.

>> Read the Full Report

Oversized AC, Screwed-up Manual J, ENERGY STAR HVAC Tirade!

By: The Green Building Inspector

I was checking some REM/Rate files for our HERS raters yesterday, mostly submitted for ENERGY STAR homes. I’ve come to expect Manual J heating and cooling load calculations submitted along with the files to be less than perfect. Mostly, I accept them because they’re close enough.

Yesterday, though, I received a Manual J to go along with a file for an ENERGY STAR home that was beyond the pale. It was egregiously horrific. It was spectacularly sordid. It did come close to meeting the ENERGY STAR Version 2 requirements for Manual J (tight or semi-tight infiltration and correct design temperatures), but whoever put this one together was singularly devious in his efforts to justify the oversized air conditioning systems he wanted to install.

Yeah, he did the usual things to fabricate extra cooling load, but when that wasn’t enough, he resorted to one trick that’s not used nearly as often as it might be. Keep reading, my friend, and I’ll let you in on his secret.

One of the first things I do when checking to see if a cooling system might be oversized is to look at the ratio of conditioned floor area (in square feet) to the cooling capacity (in tons). ENERGY STAR and other high performance homes usually come in at about 1000 square feet per ton or more. The house I built was about 2000 square feet per ton.

A lot of HVAC contractors, though, don’t do Manual J sizing calculations but instead rely on rules of thumb. Mostly they use 500 to 600 square feet per ton. This house came in at 368 square feet per ton! That’s ridiculous, especially for a house in Charlotte, NC.

When I went into the reports, here are the problems I found that are typical of bad Manual J’s:

• They put 6 people in the calculation when this house should have had 4. (It should be the number of bedrooms plus one.)
• The HERS rater calculated that the house had 184 square feet of window area; the Manual J had 383 sf.
• The HERS rater used a window U-value of 0.32; the Manual J had 0.53. (Lower is better.)

Those three items alone inflated the cooling load sigificantly. Not enough for this contractor, though. Evidently he really wanted to install a 2.5 ton air conditioner for the upstairs zone, yet after all those shenanigans, the Manual J result was only 1.5 tons. So, what did he do to get that extra ton to show up in the Manual J? He could have gone in changed wall insulation or duct leakage or any number of other parameters, but there was an easier way.

Manual J calculates the sensible and latent loads separately and adds them together for the total load in Btu/hour. The sensible load is how much cooling you need to do to bring the temperature down, and the latent load is how much cooling you have to do to bring the humidity down. If you take the sensible load and divide it by the total load (stick with me here – we’re almost there), you get what’s called the Sensible Heat Ratio, or SHR.

The Manual J report often submitted shows the total load (sensible plus latent), but it also shows what they call the required total capacity of the equipment at a particular SHR. Whoever does the Manual J can override the default SHR of 0.75, and that changes the required capacity. Most air conditioning equipment comes with an SHR in the 0.7 to 0.75 range.

The crafty calculator who completed this Manual J figured out that by adusting the SHR, he could get the required capacity to equal what he wanted to install. In this case, he needed 0.53 SHR to get his 2.5 tons. Can you even get an air conditioner with 0.53 SHR?

Come on, HVAC guys! Do it right! If you can’t do this for ENERGY STAR Version 2, you don’t have a chance with ENERGY STAR Version 3, which is much harder.

Gwen Migita, Las Vegas Sun

The Public Utilities Commission of Nevada will decide this month if NV Energy’s proposed energy efficiency projects will be approved. State lawmakers will also be considering a bill that would establish energy efficiency standards for appliances.

Caesars Entertainment’s sustainable practices show that investments in energy efficiency are worth it for the environment and for everyone’s bottom line.

In 2003, Caesars Entertainment created a companywide program dedicated to energy efficiency and resource conservation. Over the years, the company has invested more than $62 million in various energy-saving strategies, which altogether have reduced energy use of the company’s operations by 170 million kilowatt-hours, enough to power 16,000 average homes each year.

This reduction in energy use is also saving the company $20 million a year on utility bills. This is money that is now being invested in making our business stronger and more competitive, rather than being spent on unnecessarily higher energy bills. On top of the savings, our efforts have also earned us numerous environmental leadership awards and industry recognition.

Read the complete article at Las Vegas Sun

 

Agency to host webinar to show how to use the public health data

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today announced improvements to the availability and usability of drinking water data in the Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) tool. ECHO now allows the public to search to see whether drinking water in their community met the standards required under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), which is designed to safeguard the nation’s drinking water and protect people’s health. SDWA requires states to report drinking water information periodically to EPA. ECHO also includes a new feature identifying drinking water systems that have had serious noncompliance.

“Today’s improvements to EPA’s ECHO tool support President Obama’s directive to make it easier for the public to search for and use the information we collect,” said Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. “Improved access to information about our nation’s drinking water is critical for communities, nonprofit organizations, public water suppliers, regulators and industry that all have a stake in ensuring the water in our communities is safe and healthy to drink.”

The new Safe Drinking Water Act information on EPA’s website provides:

– Users with information about whether their drinking water has exceeded drinking water standards.
– A serious violators report that lists all water suppliers with serious noncompliance.
– EPA’s 2009 National Public Water Systems Compliance Report, which is a national summary of compliance and enforcement at public drinking water systems.

The serious violators list identifies water systems that have had serious noncompliance due to a combination of unresolved violations. The data in ECHO shows that overall, the number of systems identified as serious violators continues to decrease due to lead agencies, in most cases the states, more efficiently addressing serious noncompliance. Currently, approximately 4 percent of all public water systems are considered serious violators. Through increased oversight and enforcement efforts, EPA will continue to work to reduce the rate of noncompliance and the number of public water systems that are serious violators.

Under the SDWA, water suppliers are required to promptly inform customers if drinking water has been contaminated by something that could cause immediate illness or impact people’s health. If such a violation occurs, the water system will announce the violation and provide information about the potential health effects, steps the system is taking to correct the violation, and the need to use alternative water supplies (such as boiled or bottled water) until the problem is corrected. Systems inform customers about violations of less immediate concern in the first water bill sent after the violation, in a Consumer Confidence Report, or by mail.

EPA’s enforcement goals for clean water include working with states and tribes to ensure clean drinking water for all communities and improving transparency by making facility compliance data available to the public. The release of drinking water violations data in ECHO advances these goals and creates additional incentives for government agencies to improve their reporting of drinking water violations and increase efforts to address those violations.

EPA will host a webinar demonstrating how to use the Safe Drinking Water Act violation information in ECHO on Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 2 p.m. EDT. The demonstration will show users how to search for information about local water quality, how to compare data by state, and highlight other features of the tool.

Reserve webinar seat: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/787466401
Safe Drinking Water Act search page:  http://www.epa-echo.gov/echo/compliance_report_sdwa.html

The U.S. Department of Energy has released the first in a series of design guide aiming to cut the energy consumption of commercial buildings in half.

The first of the 50% Advanced Energy Design Guides focuses on small and medium-sized office buildings, and is available for free download. The DOE says the guides provide a practical approach to help architects and engineers design buildings that achieve 50 percent energy savings compared to the commercial building energy code used in many areas of the country.

The guidance also supports President Obama’s goal to reduce energy use in commercial buildings 20 percent by 2020, and will help drive demand for energy-saving products made in the United States, the department says.

The guides recommend ways that designers can choose energy efficient designs for daylighting, building envelope assemblies, and heating and cooling systems, among other technologies. They also recommend commonly available equipment.

Read the complete article at Environmental Leader

 

By: Jonathan Hiskes; Sustainable Industries Magazine

We may need to ditch that aphorism about throwing stones at glass houses.

Two engineering graduate students at the University of Washington have found a way to make bricks out of recycled glass that they say are stronger, lighter and better insulators than conventional building blocks.

Renuka Prabhakar and Grant Marchelli claim their VitroBricks require 80 percent less energy to produce because they’re fired at a much lower temperature for a shorter time. Most promising of all, according to the engineers, their invention can put to work the millions of tons of discarded glass that end up in landfills each year.

Sound too good to be true? It’s still an early-stage technology, and Prabhakar and Marchelli need to prove they can manufacture consistently and cheaply enough to break into the masonry industry.

But the students’ startup, EnVitrum (Latin for “out of glass”), has already drawn interest from UW research funders, brick makers and architects like Perkins+Will. Waste Management says it’ll pay them to take mixed-color waste glass off its hands.

Prabhakar and Marchelli say they were inspired by the surprisingly low level of glass recycling: Only 26 percent of the glass waste stream is actually reused, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency.  Bottle makers can use only 10 percent to 35 percent recycled material and any impurity, including mixed colors, can render their products useless.

The grad students first tried using finely crushed glass for 3D printing – essentially stacking thin layers of glass– but found that the results resembled a Jell-O salad more than a brick. Then they experimented with sintering, a technique for fusing powderized materials. Prabhakar and Marchelli mixed in a binding agent they developed (they will say only that it’s not toxic or petroleum-based) and created a process for  heating the bricks at multiple temperatures.

“It’s not as simple as making a brick and putting it in the oven,” says Prabhakar.

The resulting product, though, has the heft and gritty texture of a clay brick. A glass brick can be designed to be highly porous, drawing water through capillary action. In hot climates, running water through a wall would produce evaporation, cooling a building.

The glass bricks’ unique porosity may also be useful for so-called living walls. The two engineers have developed prototypes with special cavities for plants, since many living walls so far have relied on felt or plastic containers with limited durability.

Gregg Borchelt, president of the Brick Industry Association, says plenty of would-be inventors try alternative materials for brick before running into, well, a brick wall when it comes to cost or durability.

He says cheap waste glass and lower energy costs for firing could be advantages for Prabhakar and Marchelli – if they can show their products are reliable and they can obtain a lot of glass.

“A typical plant will turn out 40 million bricks per year, so that’s a pretty big pile of material,”  notes Borchelt.

The next hurdles for Prabhakar and Marchelli are verifying their bricks can meet international standards for building materials and gaining independent verification of their manufacturing process. They hope to license the technology rather than go into the brick-making business themselves.

“We don’t really want to be masonry manufacturers,” says Prabhakar. “We’re both engineers and that’s what we love to do. We want to develop and scale and be problem-solvers.”

(New York, N.Y. – May 11, 2011) U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Regional Administrator Judith Enck today traveled to New York’s Great Swamp in Brewster, N.Y. to discuss the importance of clean water and a draft guidance developed by EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to clarify which waters are subject to protection under the Clean Water Act.

The future status and condition of the Great Swamp is dependent not only on what happens directly within the swamp, but also on activities within its nearly 100-square-mile watershed, which includes the headwaters of the Housatonic River, the Croton River, Long Island Sound and New York Harbor. Part of the Great Swamp lies within the New York City watershed, and the Croton watershed provides about 10 percent of New York City’s drinking water, about 140 million gallons per day. Headwater streams and their adjacent wetlands are where our larger streams, rivers and lakes originate.

“Clean water is our most vital natural resource and its protection is directly tied to preserving wetlands and other bodies of water,” said EPA Regional Administrator Judith Enck. “The new federal guidance will help restore protection to critical waters and provide clearer guidelines for determining which water bodies we can keep safe from pollution and other pressures.”

“Water flows down hill, and you cannot protect one portion of a watershed without protecting all the interconnected waters,” said Joseph Martens, Commissioner of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. “For nearly 25 years, it was settled policy that wetlands and streams, including smaller and intermittent streams and wetlands, were protected by the Clean Water Act.  I am glad to see that draft federal guidance now seeks to restore clarity concerning that protection.  The Clean Water Act should be interpreted in a manner that protects water quality and habitats, and to mitigate floods by protecting the wetlands that work to absorb flood waters.”

On April 27, EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers released “Draft Guidance on Identifying Waters Protected by the Clean Water Act” for a 60-day public comment period. This draft guidance clarifies how EPA and the Corps will identify “Waters of the United States” under the Clean Water Act. It implements the Supreme Court’s decisions in Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Rapanos v. United States.

Headwater streams comprise 20 percent of the 3,800 miles of streams in the New York City watershed. Roughly 15 percent of the watershed’s nearly 25,000 acres of wetlands and ponds are linked to downstream reservoirs by streams that flow only part of the year and, as such, are potentially unprotected based on current Clean Water Act guidance. EPA anticipates that the new guidance will enhance protection of these wetlands and headwater streams in most watersheds.

Headwater streams and wetlands feed our rivers and lakes both water and nourishing materials such as aquatic insects and organic matter. Ultimately, this assists biological diversity in these water systems. Headwater streams and their nearby wetlands also play an important role in maintaining the water quality of our streams, lakes and rivers, and the ability of wetlands to store flood water reduces the risk of costly property damage and loss of life. These areas assist in reducing sediment and nutrient loads entering the nation’s waters. They also contribute to the supply of drinking water available to the residents of New York State.

For nearly 40 years, the Clean Water Act, along with other important federal measures, has been a cornerstone of our effort to ensure that Americans have clean and healthy waters. The draft guidance is part of the Obama administration’s national clean water framework, which emphasizes the importance of partnerships and coordination with states, local communities and the public to protect public health and water quality, and promote the nation’s energy and economic security.

The administration’s framework outlines a series of actions underway and planned across federal agencies to ensure the integrity of the waters Americans rely on every day for drinking, swimming, and fishing, and that support farming, recreation, tourism and economic growth. It includes draft federal guidance to clarify which waters are protected by the Clean Water Act nationwide; innovative partnerships and programs to improve water quality and water efficiency; and initiatives to revitalize communities and economies by restoring rivers and critical watersheds.

To read the draft guidance and for information on how to submit a comment, visit http://water.epa.gov/lawsregs/guidance/wetlands/CWAwaters.cfm.

 

By: Jonathan Hiskes; Sustainable Industries Magazine

Anthony Ravitz, Google’s project coordinator for real estate and workplace services, opened his talk in Vancouver, B.C., Thursday with an impressive fact: the world’s largest software company is opening 40,000 square feet of office space a week. Talk about fast growth.

And none of those workplaces, he said, would use any of the materials on the red list developed by the Living Building Challenge, which include mercury, asbestos, PVC, formaldehyde and lead. That second fact explained why Ravitz’s was one of the most crowded sessions at Cascadia Green Building Council’s Living Future conference. The conference attracts hundreds of architects, contractors, planners, vendors and others with a say in the materials that make up our homes and workplaces.

And they know that when one of the West Coast’s hottest companies swears off unhealthy products, the effect is sure to ripple outward through their industries.

Ravitz said Google’s decision stems from two principles: “focus on health and vitality” of its employees and “healthcare is costly.” In other words, the company wants to avoid illness from potentially dangerous materials. Sounds simple enough, but it’s difficult to know everything that’s in materials like carpet and paint.

“We need better transparency,” Ravitz said. “We don’t have complete information about what’s in our products. It’s not readily available. Until we have that, it will be difficult to make the best decisions.”

That’s not for a lack of programs addressing building materials. Ravitz spoke alongside Tom Lent of the Health Building Network, which works to promote healthier materials. “There are a lot of product certifications,  Ravitz said. “A whole lot. It’s really confusing, even when you know a lot about this topic.”

He pointed out that the U.S. Toxic Substances Control Act hasn’t substantially changed since 1976. “I used to think that maybe the government was taking care of us,” he said. “I think the EPA would like to, but they don’t have the regulatory authority.”

That’s created the need for other groups to step in. Ravitz said Google relied on the International Living Building Institute and the Healthy Building Network to advise it on what chemicals and materials to avoid. It also drew several off the EPA’s Chemicals of Concern list.

“I don’t want to go out there and say ‘Google thinks these chemicals are bad and we don’t want them in our buildings,” he said. “I’m not a chemist.”

Hence the reliance on the other groups. One of the presenters wrote up a handy list of rules for choosing building materials, inspired by writer Michael Pollan’s food rules:

If they won’t tell you what’s in it, you probably don’t want what’s in it.
Consult your nose – if it stinks, don’t use it.
Just because almost anything can kill you doesn’t mean our building products should.
If it starts as hazardous waste, you probably don’t want it in your house.
If it is cheap it probably has hidden costs.
Question the generation of hazardous waste rather than where to put it your building.
Use materials made from substances you can imagine in their raw or natural state.
Avoid materials that are pretending to be something they are not.
Question materials that make health claims.
Use carbohydrate-based materials when you can.
Pay more, use less.
Regard space-age materials with skepticism.

And here’s the Living Building Challenge’s list of red list materials and chemicals:

Asbestos
Cadmium
Chlorinated Polyethylene and Chlorosulfonated Polyethlene
Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)
Chloroprene (Neoprene)
Formaldehyde
Halogenated Flame Retardants
Hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs)
Lead
Mercury
Petrochemical Fertilizers and Pesticides
Phthalates
Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC)
Wood treatments containing creosote, arsenic or pentachlorophenol