The Yudelson Associates Blog: What's New

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Yudelson Illuminates Green Building in Entrepreneur Magazine

In the Entrepreneur magazine article, Yudelson says contractors who want to go green need to educate themselves about the latest trends in the market and get the word out. He suggests these tactics for marketing your green construction business:
* Name it and claim it. Find something you can make your own.
* Hit the green scene. Be visible to people who care about green buildings.
* Green your own business. Green builders need to walk their talk. Consider hybrid cars and biodiesel trucks for transportation. The more sustainable vehicles will reinforce your green brand as you drive them around town.

Posted by Jerry on 11/15/2008 at 06:15 AM

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Tuesday, February 19, 2008

The Green Building Revolution Accelerates

According to U.S. Green Building Council statistics, in 2007, there was nearly an 80 percent growth in cumulative Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)-registered and certified projects, on top of more than 50 percent cumulative growth in 2006. Essentially, the cumulative number of LEED registered and certified projects has increased 270 percent since the end of 2005! What does this mean for you? If you’re not doing LEED projects today, your competitors are, and they’re gaining the experience and expertise to get those projects in the future. See the balance of my article in February issue of Environmental Design & Construction.

Posted by Jerry on 02/19/2008 at 10:41 AM

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Friday, February 01, 2008

Zen:  An Excerpt from Jerry Yudelson’s “Green Building A to Z”

My wife and I have an ongoing discussion about how “perfect” things need to be around the home. She likes to have everything “just right.” I keep telling her to consider instead the Zen concept of “wabisabi,” which appeals more to me. Wabisabi acknowledges three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished and nothing is perfect. It implies that how one chooses to look at things is the most important determinant of how satisfied one is with the world. To quote a well known phrase from yoga philosophy, “The world is as you see it.”

Zen is about being satisfied with little things, finding reflections of the cosmos in a bed of sand and gravel, a few well placed boulders and a sprinkling of natural elements such as grasses. As William Blake wrote in “Auguries of Innocence” more than two centuries ago, you approach the sacred when you manage “to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.”

What does this have to do with green buildings? It is this: we need to celebrate what we have achieved, even while we remain insistent on getting better in the future. We need to be aware that each green building is going to have imperfections: things attempted but not achieved, things not at tempted that in retrospect could have been accomplished, but didn’t fit with the design team’s vision or the owner’s conception of the project. A Zen approach to green buildings would celebrate also what’s special about the place, its particular location on the planet. Perhaps to further this approach, each building could be gifted with a simple haiku, an epigraph at the entrance.

As for a Zen inspired building, a good example might be the Green Gulch Zen Center Guest House, in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in Muir Beach, north of San Francisco. According to the project designer, architect Sim van der Ryn:

The guest house serving the Green Gulch Zen Center is sensitively designed to minimize its visibility and physical impact on site. The octagonal plan and simple elegance of the 12room guest house reflect the Asian origins of Zen Buddhism. The building’s centering geometry is further articulated by a two story central core, used as a gathering and meeting space.

The design of the guest house supports and respects the human search for beauty. Handcrafted Japanese joinery is used throughout the house with strict attention to detail. The building incorporates recycled timbers and a passive solar heating system designed to meet human needs without destroying the fabric of the living world. [This] is a truly peaceful place.

This is an excerpt from Jerry Yudelson’s book, Green Building A to Z: Understanding the Language of Green Building.

Click here to download the PDF version.

Posted by Sky on 02/01/2008 at 06:02 PM

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Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Water-free Urinals:  An Excerpt from Jerry Yudelson’s “Green Building A to Z”

Urinals waste more than 150 billion gallons of fresh water per year, equivalent to the water use of 1,500,000 homes, at an average use of 300 gallons per day per home.157 The average urinal installed since 1992 uses 1 gallon per flush, which is the code requirement, based on the 1992 federal Energy Policy Act. (Overall, the average might be closer to 2 gallons per flush for all urinals now installed.) Think of more than 78 million men at work,158 making an average of three flushes per day, five days a week, most of them older urinals using 2 to 3 gallons per flush, just to flush away a liquid that’s sterile and more than 99% water.

The design of water-free urinals includes an oil seal below the drain, which prevents sewer gases from rising up (one of the purposes of the flush and the drain) into a bathroom. The seal has to be changed periodically. According to one manufacturer:

This pleasant-smelling sealant liquid trap provides an airtight barrier between urine and the restroom to prevent odors from escaping the drain, but allows urine to pass through because it is lighter than water. Urine immediately penetrates the sealant liquid and flows to the drain. Uric sediment is collected by the cartridge, leaving an odor-free environment, clean pipes and absolutely no water waste.159

Basically, water-free urinals work just fine in situations where there is a large, often anonymous population of users, such as office buildings, restaurants, airports, schools, stadiums and theaters. With proper design and installation, routine maintenance (including quarterly treatment-cartridge replacements) and a little signage to tell users what’s going on, water-free urinals work just fine, reducing overall water consumption in buildings by up to 40,000 gallons per year per urinal.

Water-free urinals are used in such places as the Jackie Gleason Theater in Miami Beach; the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington; the Harold Washington Social Security Center in Chicago; the twin Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, in Atlanta, Georgia. Over the long run, widespread adoption of water-free urinals will also help reduce future infrastructure development costs by reducing water demand and sewage generation. From the standpoint of economics, water-free urinals, either in new buildings or in renovations, pay for themselves in water savings in a relatively short period of time.

This is an excerpt from Jerry Yudelson’s book, Green Building A to Z: Understanding the Language of Green Building.

Click here to download the PDF version.

Posted by Sky on 01/15/2008 at 05:45 PM

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