How a Passive Building Aggressively Saves Energy outlines the definition of passive energy and the importance of utilizing it in creating new buildings.

Link: How a Passive Building Aggressively Saves Energy

Lane Burt
Technical Policy Director
U.S. Green Building Council

Today USGBC, with our partners at the Real Estate Roundtable and the Natural Resources Defense Council, released an analysis conducted by the Political Economy Research Institute that concludes that President Obama’s Better Buildings Initiative (BBI) will create over 114,000 jobs.

As background, the Better Buildings Initiative is a collection of legislative proposals and federal agency actions designed to encourage the efficiency improvement of commercial buildings. The President has recommended tax incentives, grant and challenge programs, and increasing the availability of financing for the improvements. The analysis covers the major components of the initiative: the tax incentives, the financing programs, and the grant programs.

The full report is available at http://www.USGBC.org/advocacy/BBIJobs. Here’s what you need to know:

• The Better Buildings Initiative would create more than 114,000 jobs.
• The greatest jobs-creating impact – over 77,000 new jobs – would derive from a revised tax incentive to encourage building retrofits.
• New job creation would ripple throughout the economy. New jobs would be created directly at construction sites, which in turn would spur more jobs in the manufacturing and service sectors.
• The Better Buildings Initiative’s federal incentives are an investment to trigger private sector spending, which in turn produces widespread benefits. For example, tax incentives would encourage at least three times as much private investment to make buildings more efficient.
• Businesses would save over $1.4 billion in energy bills as a result of retrofit projects spurred by the tax incentive, which would in turn be re-injected into the economy.

The most significant job creator considered is the revision of the existing tax deduction for energy efficient commercial buildings, section 179D. These are the same revisions supported by 86 diverse organizations and the subject of the recent letter to the Senate written about last week. The proposal with its unique structure would create 77,000 jobs while achieving real quantifiable energy efficiency improvements. Actual measured performance is required to take full advantage of the redesigned incentive.

The report also outlines how these jobs would be created in engineering and in performing the retrofits, manufacturing the new efficient equipment and materials, operating, commissioning, and servicing the buildings, and finally in the re-spending of the significant energy savings.

The conclusion that commercial building energy efficiency creates jobs, and a staggering number of new jobs is not new. This report joins and supports the conclusion of a host of others on the topic.

• McKinsey found 600,000 to 900,000 new jobs in energy efficiency over all sectors.
• ACEEE found 333,000 new jobs in proposed energy efficiency legislation last year. Over 150,000 of these jobs were from the bi-partisan yet now politically infeasible HomeStar program for home retrofits.
• UC Berkeley found that California’s energy efficiency policies on the books will create 200,000 jobs by 2020, with more jobs of higher quality possible with some additional measures.

With this new analysis we now know how much of the huge opportunity for job creation through energy efficiency may be achieved through implementation of the Better Buildings Initiative. USGBC and its member companies will continue to support the agencies moving forward with the administrative components of the BBI while working with our many allies to convince Congress to move forward with the changes to the tax code that could potentially unlock a huge number of jobs in commercial energy efficiency. Stay tuned to this blog for opportunities to get involved.

Greenwashing is claiming that a product is environmentally friendly when in reality it is not.   One can argue that copy paper with 10% post-consumer recycled content is not too eco-friendly since 90% of the product is still virgin material.  Is this product “greener” than paper that has no recycled content?  The answer depends on the amount of energy it takes to create virgin products and the amount needed to recycle products. In the interest of labeling green items more accurately, AEF would like to propose the term,“Pretty Much Environmentally Friendly, Almost”(PMEFA).

Another product that can be considered PMEFA is paint containing low volatile organic compounds rated at 50 grams per liter or less of toxic stuff.  So now substance-abusing individuals will have to sniff paint for up to 15 minutes longer before lightheadedness ensues, which may deter them from the practice altogether or force them to experiment with another product.

(Environmentally Friendly, Almost)

Pictured here is a plastic bottle that is not completely claiming to be an environmentally-friendly product; however, it is still alluding to the idea that it is essentially “less bad” because its bottle cap uses less plastic!  The caps are still plastic, and so is the bottle, but that’s beside the point.  The point is that there is a green leaf on the label before the statement, “Smaller Cap = Less Plastic”. Yay!

Now we’ll feel much better when smaller pieces of plastic end up in our streams and oceans.  Not only can nature take thousands of years to break down plastic, it also breaks it down into smaller, toxic pieces that can more readily enter the digestive tracts of wildlife. For instance, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the North Pacific Ocean, where trash collects in a manner similar to how bubbles collect in the middle of a Jacuzzi, is a sea of plastic pieces and other materiels, and the Patch’s very existence contributes to the disastrous dietary mistakes of wildlife.

(Thinking they are collecting food, wildlife consume plastics floating in the Ocean)

Perhaps another slogan may read “Smaller Cap = Laxative for Wildlife”.

Although the “less bad” approach towards environmentalism may be a step in the right direction and may save companies money by reducing material costs, it falls short in delivering real benefits for the long- term health and vitality of our planet.

Discounting the energy used to create the products, some examples of eco-friendly products include:

• Stainless steel water bottles (take the time to refill in order to avoid using plastic)
• Hemp or bamboo clothing using soy-based ink (hemp and bamboo are rapidly renewable resources)
• Solar cell phone chargers (hopefully made from recycled plastic)
• Reclaimed wood flooring
• Reusable grocery bags
• Anything that does not contain plastics, petrol chemicals, VOCs, virgin non-renewables, etc. (finding such products is easier said than done)

The green economy is still in its infancy, and finding quality products with no negative environmental impacts is difficult given that many inedible products, unlike processed food, do not have ingredient lists; however, when assessing a product that claims to be eco-friendly, one must ask, is this truly environmentally friendly, or is it “pretty much environmentally-friendly, almost”?

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.

The youngest SF Mayor in we can’t remember how long.

San Francisco pulled into the lead for most progressive energy policy last week when Mayor Gavin Newsom (at 42, the youngest San Francisco mayor in over a century) submitted his nine-months-in-the-making proposed legislation on existing commercial buildings to the city’s Board of Supervisors.

The proposed legislation would require the owners of commercial buildings over 5,000 square feet to conduct an energy-efficiency audit every five years, and to supply annual updates – all of which would be available in a public database, according to the SF Gate.

And guess what? These required audits would come back with helpful suggestions on how to increase the property’s energy efficiency, say by sealing windows, or upgrading the HVAC system. Kind of like what BuildingAdvice does. Tenants would also have access to an estimate of resulting energy savings from taking those steps, the cost of implementing them, and their economic value.

In a post on City Insider, an SF Gate blog on “the people, politics and places of San Francisco,” John Coté wrote that Newsom likened the commercial building audits to fuel efficiency ratings listed on car windows at an auto dealership.

The local branch of the Building Owners and Managers Association (part of nationwide BOMA), the commercial real estate industry’s heavy-hitting advocacy group, supports the legislation, although there are still skeptics in the business community, the mayor said. Berkeley, Sonoma County, Palm Desert and Boulder, Colo. have similar programs going.  Once approved, the legislation sets a staggered, three-year schedule for compliance, starting in April.

(This article re-blogged from http://airadvice.com/buildingblog/?p=1059)

By Moe Fakih
AEF Consulting, Engineering & Construction, Inc.

It felt like one point I was suffocating from all the daily junk mail that hit my snail mailbox.  I stopped opening up those credit card offers that looked like official business or looked like a bill I forgot to pay, and I wasn’t sure I was getting pissed at all the paper being wasted or if they were simply insulting my intelligence?  Sometimes these companies try to entice or scare you into opening their mail.  It got to a point where those letters were removed from my mail box, looked at for one second, ripped in two and then dumped into the recycle bin.

Entertain me on this quick junk mail journey – somewhere a native ecosystem or a native rain forest was removed, a tree farm was planted in its place, that tree took years or decades to grow, it got chopped down by gas powered equipment in seconds, was processed into pulp using chemicals, turned into paper by using bleaches and other chemicals, got oil based ink sprayed all over, was transported across the globe only to make into my hands and then into the waste bin.  Yay, what a great use of resources!

Even if you do recycle the paper not 100% makes it back as other paper.  In fact up to 70% of recycled paper is virgin material.  But lets face it, when you take a look at trash bins (yes I have done this) you see lots of paper and other items that are headed to landfills and buried forever.

And what informational blog post would be a good post without statistics to make you say, “dang”?

Junk Mail Stats that Make you Say, “Dang”!

• It takes more than 100 million trees to produce the total volume of junk mail that arrives in American mailboxes each year—that’s the equivalent of clearcutting the entire Rocky Mountain National Park every 4 months.
• Junk mail in the U.S. accounts for over 100,000,000,000 pieces of mail each year¹—about 30% of all the mail delivered in the world
• Almost 50% of the solid mass that makes up our landfills is expected to be paper and paperboard waste
• Every year American households receive a total of 104.7 billion pieces of junk mail or 848 pieces of junk mail per household, which requires 6.5 million tons of paper.
• A response rate of less than 0.25% is considered acceptable for the 500 million U.S. credit card solicitations that are mailed monthly.
• Animal species in places such as Indonesian rain forests are losing their habitat due to deforestation and human paper farm encroachment. Indonesia is home to 12% of Earth’s mammal species, and 17% of all bird species.
• A national poll by Zogby International found that 92% of respondents discard or recycle at least some of their junk mail without reading it.
  (Stat Source: http://www.donotmail.org)

Where do we go from here?

There is a solution to end this madness.  I was able to completely stop credit card advertisements and greatly reduce the amount of junk entering my home.  It wasn’t that tough and here’s how:

End Credit Card Mailers

To opt put of credit card mailings go here and fill out the online form at https://www.optoutprescreen.com

Direct Marketers

Telemarketing

The federal government has created the National Do Not Call Registry — a free, easy way to reduce the telemarketing calls you get at home. To register your phone number or to get information about the registry, visit www.donotcall.gov, or call 1-888-3821-222 from the phone number you want to register. You will get fewer telemarketing calls within 31 days of registering your number. Telephone numbers on the registry will only be removed when they are disconnected and reassigned, or when you choose to remove a number from the registry.

Mail

The Direct Marketing Association’s (DMA) Mail Preference Service lets you opt out of receiving unsolicited commercial mail from many national companies for five years. When you register with this service (for a $1 fee), your name will be put on a “delete” file and made available to direct-mail marketers. However, your registration will not stop mailings from organizations that do not use the DMA’s Mail Preference Service. To register with DMA’s Mail Preference Service, go to www.dmachoice.org.

Email

The DMA also has an Email Preference Service to help you reduce unsolicited commercial emails. To opt out of receiving unsolicited commercial email from DMA members, visit www.dmachoice.org/EMPS. Your online request will be effective for five years.

That’s it, good luck, and please help reduce the junkfest.