GreenBuild Blog
Time to Put Rainwater Harvesting into Every Green Building Project?
Monday, August 09, 2010One of my favorite green building technologies is rainwater harvesting: the capture, treatment and use of rainwater for uses inside the building such as toilet flushing and cooling-tower makeup water (to replace water lost by evaporation and back-flushing). This is such a simple and obvious thing to do in much of the country that one wonders why it has taken so long to be considered as a viable new water supply. Why harvest rainwater? There are many good reasons, starting with the fact that rainwater is high-quality water. Shouldn’t every green building project harvest rainwater? See Chapter 9 of my new book, Dry Run: Preventing the Next Urban Water Crisis, for a fuller discussion of using water that nature gives us for free.
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Avoiding Future Urban Water Management Crises
Monday, August 09, 2010Expected global warming in this century will cause significant problems for urban water management unless more water agencies begin to incorporate conservation and water use efficiency as integral parts of their future supply planning. In my book, Dry Run: Preventing the Next Urban Water Crisis, Chapter 4, I explore methods by which cities have addressed these crises in the past decade.
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The Water/Energy Nexus: Saving Water Saves Energy & Reduces Emissions
Monday, August 02, 2010Water and energy are inextricably linked, now and forever. Water is required to supply energy and energy is required to supply of water. This dynamic is called “the water/energy nexus.”
It takes electric power to move water from one place to another, to pump it from rivers and groundwater, to treat it before use and to treat it (as wastewater) after use. Today, an estimated 1 kWh of electricity is required to treat and distribute 1,000 gallons of potable water. Multiply that by tens of billions of gallons, and you have a lot of energy use!
The New Normal in Building Construction? Redirect your Marketing Focus!
Monday, August 02, 2010With everyone hoping for a speedy recovery in building construction, there is disturbing new evidence that the New Normal is far less construction that we’ve been used to and, with that, less business for design and construction firms. The ENR report on US construction through the end of May shows disturbing trends. Top that with the expected disaster in refinancing commercial office loans coming due through 2012 and you have a distressed situation that won’t go away anytime soon. (See you again in 2015?)
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New opportunities abound for water technologies
Saturday, July 31, 2010My latest article in HPAC Engineering magazine highlights some of the major opportunities in the water technology field. Water likely will be the next big environmental crisis in the United States, probably first in the West/Southwest, then extending to rapidly growing metropolitan areas throughout the nation. The crisis likely will come as a result of drought and/or lack of funds for infrastructure upgrades to provide new supply sources.
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Exciting new video for my new book Dry Run: Preventing the Next Urban Water Crisis
Friday, July 30, 2010My production team at Combridges has gone all out and produced a great new video about my new book, Dry Run. Take a look for yourself and see why “Blue is the New Green” and why you need to be informed about the coming wter crises and what we can do to forestall them.
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No Climate Bill? No Problem! Time for a New “Standard of Care” in Building Design
Friday, July 30, 2010While everyone is wringing their hands about the failure of national “cap and trade” legislation, perhaps this is a golden opportunity to put responsibility for CO2 emissions where it belongs: in the hands of building designers, builders and operators, along with homeowners. After all, 75% of all electricity produced goes to buildings, so why shouldn’t buildings rather than power plants bear the burden of climate change mitigation?
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Designing a Water Efficient Community in Central Washington State
Wednesday, July 07, 2010My friend Robin Rogers of Kirkland, WA, checks in with a report on her efforts to design a new water-efficiency community, Rocky Top Living, near Yakima, Washington. Robin is a longtime green housing advocate well suited for this type of missionary work. Here’s her report of a work in progress:
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EcoBroker in Colorado spearheads MLS listing of green features of homes
Wednesday, July 07, 2010Angela Ashby, an EcoBroker in Steamboat Springs has led the charge to fill in one of the missing links in selling green homes, getting the green features in the the Multiple Listing System (MLS) used by every Realtor(R) to find homes for prospective buyers.
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Best Water Conservation Ideas - Smart Irrigation Controllers
Wednesday, July 07, 2010In my latest newsletter, I invited readers to share best practices in water conservation. Here’s a suggestion from Brian Maloney, formerly of Tucson, not in Northern California, that involves irrigation controllers, a technology which I describe in detail in Chapter 7 of my new book Dry Run: Preventing the Next Urban Water Crisis.
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Omega Center for Sustainable Living: The First to Achieve Living Building Status?
Monday, July 05, 2010In the research for my book, Dry Run: Preventing the Next Urban Water Crisis, I came across many innovative examples of water efficiency and conservation. One of the more interesting projects is the Omega Center for Sustainable Living (OCSL). Designed by BNIM Architects of Kansas City, MO, the $2.8-million project is located on the 195-acre campus of the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, an education and retreat center.
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Finding the Payoff in Rainwater Harvesting
Monday, July 05, 2010Most of the water used in commercial buildings – as much as 89 percent – doesn’t require drinking-quality (potable) water, making rainwater an ideal substitute for uses such as irrigation, toilet flushing, cooling-tower make-up and vehicle washing. What could be simpler? Nothing, except that you might pay $20,000 to $50,000 for such a system, an amount that’s not included in most new construction budgets.
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Sewer Mining: Extreme Measure or Viable Solution?
Friday, July 02, 2010A practice first developed in Australia, sewer mining is the process of extracting wastewater from urban sewers and treating it inside a building for reuse as recycled water. Developing additional non-potable water supplies through sewer mining reduces the demand for potable water, reduces the burden on municipal wastewater treatment systems and reduces the amount of energy used to transport wastewater and treated water, a rare “triple play” in the world of integrated/sustainable design.
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Ocean Water Desalination: Our Next Source of Drinking Water?
Friday, July 02, 2010If global warming consequences are as severe as many fear, the ocean may become part of mainstream water supply planning over the next few decades. Desalination represents one of the few drought-proof water resources, outside of wastewater reclamation and recycling. However, there are also environmental consequences related to the disposal of concentrated brine (process water) back into the ocean, so great care needs to be taken with its dispersal into the marine environment.
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Nega-gallons and Aqua-vores: New Approaches to Water Conservation
Tuesday, June 29, 2010More than 20 years ago, the energy expert Amory Lovins introduced the term “negawatts” to indicate that conservation of energy would be a reliable alternative way to supply “megawatts” of projected electricity demand. This “least-cost, end-use” approach distinguishes between supply (of energy) and usage (energy end-use demand). Lovins showed that it’s a lot cheaper (and faster) to conserve energy and use energy-efficient appliances than it is to buy more kilowatt-hours of electricity. This is because infrastructure investments (supply) usually cost a lot more (and take a lot longer) than investments in efficiency (demand reduction).
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