We will be hosting an open house demonstrating how we transformed a 1,700 square foot office warehouse into ten executive suites.  The space you will be viewing is that of a property leasing company (Suites Pro, Inc.) that offers IT integrated and eco-friendly business suites.  By implementing AEF’s eco-friendly construction and design principals, Suites Pro, Inc. has developed a green technology driven workplace that not only helps the environment, but provides one of the healthiest and most efficient working spaces to its tenants.

Feel free to stop by and witness the merging of technology, sustainability and property leasing.

Join us for beverages and hors d’oeuvres
March 9th and 10th, 4pm-8pm
1260 N. Hancock Street #104, Anaheim, CA 92807

Click on to the flier link below for more details.

LEED-CI Open House Flier

On Wednesday February 2nd, 2011, AEF Consulting, Engineering & Construction, Inc. CEO, Moe Fakih, served as a panelist at the County of Orange Public Works: 2010 Green Building Code Forum.  Approximately 180 Building Inspectors, City Planners, and General Contractors attended the event.

California has released the CalGreen Building Code (2011), which covers new construction projects.  The mandatory requirements of the code were discussed at length in the forum, and some of those requirements are:

• Energy efficiency 15% above current California standards, which are the toughest in the nation.
• Water use reduction of 20%
• 50% waste diversion from landfills
• All materials such as paints, sealants, glues, etc. must contain low amounts of volatile organic compounds (VOCs)
• Smart controllers are attached to sprinkler systems, which detect moisture content in the soil and delivers water based on dryness of the soil.  If it happens to rain the day watering is scheduled, sprinklers should not turn on.
• Buildings must be commissioned, which means a commissioning agent must verify if the completed building is operating based on the owner’s requirements – or is running efficiently.

The goal of the forum was to demonstrate actual green building code implementation measures and how to inspect them.  A common theme of the morning was that municipalities have flexibility in applying most green building inspection measures as long as the intent of the code is being met.

For example, all new buildings must have an operations guide describing how to service building systems and maintain  environmentally friendly characteristics.  (After all, once a home or office building is built “green”  it must be managed or operated properly – a good analogy is one may purchase a sports car, but if not serviced well, performance will drop.)  The operations guide is required to stay with the property for the life of the unit.  The operations guide may be in hard copy, CD or other electronic format.

A City may require to have copies of the operations guide be present as a condition of final inspection or elect to have the operations guide be recorded with the County as part of the final map.  The intent here is, how to ensure the operations guide is validated, how can it be easily accessible, and how can it be improved/modified over time?  Appropriate verification will be based on what’s best suited for the City in this example.

Other code requirements are not as flexible such as the requirement for commissioning.  In the business as usual method of the pre CalGren era, many buildings did not receive official commissioning services for various reasons.  Now ownerhip must draft an owner’s project requirements (OPR) document, have it validated by the architects and engineers through the Basis of Design (BOD) process, and when some systems are installed or at the end of construction, the OPR and BOD is verified through functional performance testing – Do the lights turn on? Is enough air being delivered to occupied spaces? Are water sensors functioning properly? etc.  Basically commissioning should ensure “green” measures are met; however, CalGreen does not set what kind of professional background or experience a commissioning agent is required to have.  Each municipality must determine this threshold on its own.

These issues and others were discussed in a two hour question & answer session that was helpful to those seeking information on how to implement, inspect and verify green code measures.  The Q&A was moderated by Dr, Saum Nour of Absolute Engineering and the panelists included key authors of CalGreen Dave Walls, Executive Director, Building Standard Commission and Doug Hensel, Assistant Deputy Director, Department of Housing and Community Development, Architect Justin Brectel, Orange County Senior Building Official Hadi Tabatabaee and as mentioned earlier, CEO of AEF Consulting Engineering & Construction, Moe Fakih.

For more questions pertaining to CalGreen you may contact Moe Fakih at mfakih@aefincusa.com

I was walking down CVS Pharmacy the other evening and saw toilet paper labeled as 100% recycled.  We all use those white, soft rolls daily, which means plenty of resources must go into producing them, right?  So I felt a  need to get to the bottom line.

Since we are not equipped with feline cleaning equipment, we need to use the next best tools

You may not have made the connection, but toilet paper is made from paper, and about 98% of toilet paper is made from virgin sources.  In fact about 7 million trees are consumed annually to take care of our #2 duties.  Sure a sick person may use toilet paper to blow his or her nose, mom or dad may use it to clean up a spill, or teenagers may dress in black and under the cover of darkness layer a victim’s home with TP (In America this is a prank called TPing someone’s home…I must admit, it’s kind of fun), but for the most part those bleached white rolls are used in the lavatory setting.

It’s kind of strange that we use living organisms as majestic as trees to ensure adequate levels of posterior hygiene.

• Europe flushes approximately 60 million rolls of toilet paper daily.
• The United States uses 36.5 billions rolls of toilet paper annually, which represents at least 15 million trees pulped  (www.treehugger.com)
• US production also consumes 473,587,500,000 (473.5 billion) gallons of water
• 253,000 tons of chlorine is used for bleaching purposes.

Add on the resource costs to transfer TP tolls across the globe and one can see the asinine amounts of resources used to produce an item that’s used once and disposed of forever.  Yeah we can’t really reuse toilet paper too effectively.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) reports that approximately 400,000 trees would be saved annually if each American household replaced  only one roll of TP made from virgin, pulped trees with TP made from 100 percent recycled products.  That’s significant.

So after grabbing a roll of 100% recycled toilet paper from CVS I inspected it, and just as I thought it was rougher than some of the softer virgin products.  It was also 1-ply, so you may use more to maintain that comfortable hand to bum barrier.  You do sacrifice quality for the environment in this case, but a 2 ply 100% recycled content product is available in the market. Check your stores, buy a single roll if possible and give it a test run. You can also do a web search and purchase online.  For commercial applications, ask your vendor to supply you with a sample of 100% recycled TP.  Other alternative, base products such as hemp will be coming online, but in the short term, this solution is less bad.