2013 Trends in Sustainable Construction

A noteworthy event is occurring in 2013, the 15th anniversary of the U.S. Green Building Council  (USGBC) building rating system known as LEED, which first appeared and was offered for beta testing in 1998.   Clearly much has changed in the building industry as a consequence of the uptake of green building rating systems in the U.S. and it is interesting to consider what has changed, what has not changed, and what will have to change.  This week I will discuss the first point, what has changed and over the next few weeks I will cover the other two important issues.

So, What has changed?

The advent of LEED and other building rating systems such as Green Globes in the U.S. created a shock wave that is most definitely affecting owners, designers, builders, the materials industry, other supporting industries (e.g. building design software), academia, and the government.  Mc-Graw Hill Construction forecasted that, as of 2015, the majority of all new non-residential buildings in the U.S. will be certified green buildings. The value of green construction as measured in LEED registrations will likely have grown from $3 billion in 2005 and $58 billion in 2011 to $122 billion in 2015.  A vast array of new products from paints and concrete additives, to carpeting and high tech windows has emerged to assist in earning some of the LEED points so badly needed for certification.  Regarding change, being a professor affords me the opportunity to occasionally bore my students with stories of the challenges facing Rinker Hall, the first LEED Gold certified building in Florida, which was designed and built in the period 2000 - 2002. As the then Director of the Rinker School of Building Construction I attempted to sell the University of Florida administration on using Rinker Hall as a test bed for green certification.  I had a vested interest in my sales pitch because I had committed my academic life to sustainability in the built environment and had a small role in some of the early efforts to develop what eventually emerged as LEED. The convergence of LEED's emergence as a useful product in 2000 and the go ahead to design and build Rinker Hall was the golden opportunity and my sales pitch was successful.  I immediately threw myself into the nuts and bolts of the project, particularly in developing its green features in collaboration with our architect, Randy Croxton.


Rinker Hall at the University of Florida

As part of the certification process we needed to determine the recycled content of the aluminum materials being used in Rinker Hall.  One day I asked the subcontractor installing the aluminum storefront on the north side of the building how much recycled aluminum was in the frame supporting the glass in the storefront.  His shocked response was, "Oh my, no sir, we don't give you used aluminum, we give you new aluminum!"  Through diligent research we eventually figured it out, but it illustrates what has changed.  Today the recycled content of products, location of materials extraction and product fabrication, the volatile organic chemical content of finishes,  and a myriad of other information are a mouse click away. In 2000 there were just a handful of LEED Accredited Professionals (LEED-APs) designated by the USGBC as having specialized knowledge of the certification process. Under 100 buildings had been registered for LEED certification and perhaps 30 had achieved certification.  According to the USGBC, as of December 2012 there are over 162,000 LEED APs and over 125,000 registered or certified buildings and homes. In 2000 there were very few architecture or engineering firms with even the slightest hint of experience with green buildings.  Today it would be rare to find a design or construction firm without extensive knowledge of the nuts and bolts of green building certification.

The economics of green building are also helping maintain the momentum of this shift, in spite of the 2008-2010 economic downturn.  There is some evidence that  certified green office buildings command on the order of 7% higher rent, 3% higher occupancy rates, and 11-15% higher resale value compared to conventional buildings (HSB Architects and Engineers). In late 2012, the FTSE Group, NAREIT, and the USGBC announced a jointly developed green property index for both institutional and retail investors to assist in assessing the risks and rewards of investing in green properties (Forbes, 12 Nov 2012).  Both LEED certified and Energy Star projects are included in this index with 5 billion square feet under roof from notable REITs such as Douglas Emmett (DEI), Government Properties Income Trust (GOV), and Piedmont Office Realty Trust (PDM).  New standards and codes such as ASHRAE Standard 189-2010 (Standard for the Design of High- Performance, Green Buildings) and the International Green Construction code (IgCC) have been developed that in essence codify LEED.  These standards and codes, if adopted, would mandate green buildings as standard practice, making environmentally responsible construction truly mainstream.  It is clear that green buildings mark a sea change in U.S. construction history and have deeply affected every stakeholder involved in their development.  However, as with most successful movements, the road is not smooth but marked by bumps and dark clouds overhead.  The challenge now is to learn from past missteps and reshape and reinvent a movement that is sorely in need of new thinking and direction. Stay tuned!

NEXT TIME: What has not changed?

Uncertified Green Building Claims

About 18 months ago Auden Schendler and Randy Udall wrote a piece in Grist, “LEED is Broken; Let’s Fix It.” The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) did, at least in part, respond to the complaints about its bureaucracy by creating LEED Online, a paperless submission system that is relatively easy to use and which does ease some of the paperwork nightmares associated with LEED. It remains to be seen whether once the LEED submissions actually reach the evaluators, the process moves any faster. Many of the other issues cited by Schendler and Udall remain irritants to project teams involved in the LEED process ... more about this in a future blog.

Although there has been progress with respect to bureaucracy there is another problem that has not been addressed at all, namely the growing and dangerous trend of green building advocates making increaslingly outlandish and unsupportable claims about green buildings. Equally alarming is the uncritical acceptance of reports touting the benefits of going ‘green’ in the design and construction of buildings. A relatively recent October 2006 report by Capital E, “Greening America’s Schools: Costs and Benefits” is widely accepted as gospel by the green building community. Indeed the CEO of the USGBC, Rick Fedrizzi, gave it effusive praise at the annual GreenBuild Conference held in Denver, November 2006. Here is a quick summary of what this report claims are the costs and benefits of green schools:

Financial Benefits of Green Schools ($/ft2)

Energy $ 9

Emissions $ 1

Water and Wastewater $ 1

Increased Earnings $49

Asthma Reduction $ 3

Cold and Flu Reduction $ 5

Teacher Retention $ 4

Employment Impact $ 2

TOTAL $74

COST OF GREENING ($3)

NET FINANCIAL BENEFITS $71

The results are based on a life cycle costing analysis over a period of 20 years with a discount rate of 7%, a general inflation rate of 2%, and an energy inflation rate of 5%. In the table above the results are expressed as the present value of costs and savings per square foot over the 20 year analysis.

What struck me immediately was that the claimed savings of $71 per square foot were based almost entirely on soft costs. The Increased Earnings claim of $49 per square foot was clearly the dominant source of the savings, with $13 dollars of additional per square foot savings for other soft costs (asthma reduction, cold and flu reduction, teacher retention, and employment impact). Thus the soft costs totaled $62 of the claimed $74 worth of savings. I found this quite an extraordinary way to compute green building savings and I decided to finally sit down and read the Capital-E report word for word. I also did a critique of this report as a classroom exercise with graduate students in BCN 6586, Construction Ecology and Metabolism, a course that I teach each spring semester at University of FLorida. The following critique is based on this exercise and my personal experience with green buildings, life cycle costing, and a wide array of other subject matter connected to high performance buildings.

The Increased Earnings Claim

A good place to start in reviewing the Capital-E report is to look at the big ticket savings claimed for green schools, the Increased Earnings claim of $49. The authors state, and rightfully so, that “Faster learning and higher test scores are significantly and positively associated with higher earnings.” They cite an International Monetary Fund (IMF) study that states that one standard deviation improvement in average math scores, which would put a student in the 84^th percentile, results in an average 12% higher annual earnings throughout the student's lifetime. Based on a study of Chicago and Washington, DC schools it was found that “…better school facilities can add 3 to 4 percentage points to a school’s standard test scores, even controlling for demographic factors.” Note that the study was about better facilities, not green schools. In fact any new school is almost certainly going to be classified as a “better facility.” Not satisfied with connecting the dots in this incredible manner, the authors then take this improvement in test scores and translate it to “…an earnings increase of $532 per year for each graduate of a green school.” Green schools were not mentioned in the IMF report nor in the Chicago/Washington, DC reports. The authors of the Capital-E report simply substituted the word green for the words better facilities in the report on Chicago and Washington, DC schools. Thus the authors imply that only green schools are better facilities, but do not acknowledge that new schools that are not green are certainly better facilities and may also improve test scores. The earning increase of $532 per graduate was further translated into a present value of increased earnings of $6,800 per student, and further to $49 per square foot. Even my graduate students immediately recognized this badly flawed methodology and results that should not have seen the light of day. The actual result should have been stated as: "We have no idea what the actual increase in earnings of students attending green schools versus non-green or non-LEED schools is." The USGBC should immediately repudiate this and all other similar claims that are based on unsupported assumptions, interpolations, and extrapolations and not on a dispassionate, rigorous and scientific analysis with well-structured protocols.

The Energy Savings Claim

The methodology for determining energy savings, claimed as $9 per square foot, is similarly flawed. Table B in the report summarized key information for 30 schools used as a baseline for parts of the report. It showed energy and water savings, the cost premium for the green schools, and dates of completion. I was initially struck by the claims for energy savings for several schools completed in 2006 because the Capital-E report was dated October 2006 and thus it would not have been possible to gather useful data about energy consumption in just a few months. It appears that the energy and water savings are not based on actual data but on the models used by the design teams to forecast energy and water consumption. It is well-known, particularly in the era of LEED-NC 2.1, which all of the schools probably followed for certification, that energy modeling using ASHRAE Standard 90.1-1999 produced very inaccurate results. The modeled energy savings of the 30 schools were compared to the average energy use for all operating schools during 2005-2006, which was stated as $1.15 per square foot. Note that the comparisons were not with non-LEED or non-green schools built at the same time, which would have been a far more useful comparison, but with all operating schools. This is a consistent analytical flaw in the Capital-E report on green schools, their comparison of new green schools to the existing stock of all schools when it would have been far more useful to use real data from both green and non-green schools built in the same time frame. Note that a school can be LEED certified even with zero energy savings depending on the project team’s strategy for getting points.

The authors, in spite of these obvious major flaws in methodology claim direct energy cost present value savings of $6 per square foot. But even more flawed is the claim of $3 per square foot of indirect savings. In determing the indirect energy savings, the authors cite a 2005 report by a national laboratory which found a 1% reduction in demand for natural gas results in a 0.75% to 2.5% reduction in average wellhead prices for natural gas. Through an unclear methodology, they translate this into indirect present value cost savings of $3 per square foot for schools. However neither the $6 direct cost savings nor the $3 indirect cost savings can be proven using the assumptions, interpolations, and abstractions contained in the report. To claim that green schools are going to result in reductions in natural gas prices is absurd. Natural gas prices are likely to increase over time because of increasing demand by a wide variety of actors. In short, the energy savings claimed in the report are not the least bit reliable. Again, the USGBC should reject these findings and either perform or support the performance of research that will produce outcomes in an unbiased, scientific manner. I will address the probable energy savings of green schools at the end of this critique.

The Asthma Reduction and Cold/Flu Reduction Claims

The savings for asthma reduction ($3 per square foot) and cold/flu reduction ($5 per square foot) are about the same as energy savings, a red flag that yet another flawed methodology was used for determining these figures.

A Carnegie Mellon University review of five separate studies stated that the annual health care costs for a student with asthma were $1,650 higher than for a student without asthma. The author, with no evidence at all, ASSUMES that the incidence of asthma will be reduced 25% in moving from unhealthy conventional schools to healthy schools. He also cites an American Lung Association (ALA) report that American school children miss more than 14 million school days a year due to asthma exacerbated by poor indoor air quality. The implication is that this lost school time is caused by schools themselves. No mention is made of the many other causes of asthma attacks that can occur outside the school, for example, at home. In fact, there is no such connection made in the ALA report cited by the authors. Indeed the ALA report is not the primary source for this information; rather the American Academy for Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology (AAAAI) is the primary source. See the ALA report at http://www.aaaai.org/patients/advocate/2004/fall/costs.stm to view the results of their research. The ALA report also notes 14.5 million lost workdays due to asthma attacks but does not attribute these attacks to the workplace. The ALA report states that childhood asthma is a disorder with strong genetic predispositions and strong allergic components. The triggers for asthma include: exercise, infections, allergy, irritants, weather, and emotions. All of these triggers can be experienced at home or in a wide variety of other locations. Perhaps one can point to possible mold problems in schools as a cause of allergies, but the authors present no evidence supporting this connection. And as is the case for other sections of their report, they compare new green schools to the existing school stock. It is probable that new non-LEED schools that follow current building codes will not have significant mold problems. It is equally probable that poor design and construction of green or LEED schools will result in mold problems. The authors' determination that there is a $3 per square foot savings due to asthma reduction in green schools has no basis in fact and the analysis is badly flawed.

Moving on to cold/flu reductions, the author relies on CMU and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory studies. The CMU study found an average 51% reduction in cold/flu occurrences due to improved air quality. The LBNL study states that better ventilation and air quality could reduce these occurrences by 9-20% in the general population with annual savings of $6-14 billion. Again the author calculates the savings due to green schools reducing these occurrences by extrapolating $10 billion of savings per the LBNL study, spreading the savings over the entire U.S. population to produce annual savings of $45 per person per year, further producing a remarkable $5 per square foot of savings for green schools. He does not address the fact that green schools and non-green schools use the same design standards for ventilation systems. The outcome of these assumptions and extrapolations is more highly questionable results. In fact the differences in cold/flu occurrences in green versus non-green schools are unknown. This is what the Capital-E report should have stated.

The Teacher Retention Claim

The report claims that green schools reduce teacher turnover based on a report by Paladino and Company. The Capital-E report states: “A recent report on green schools in Washington State estimated a 5% reduction in turnover.” However a closer reading of the Paladino report reveals that the Paladino report also relies on the earlier mentioned reports on Chicago and Washington DC schools as the basis for this statement. The report on Chicago and Washington, DC schools states that teacher turnover is rooted in health problems and poor environmental conditions and that higher quality facilities result in better teacher morale, probably an obvious outcome. The report on the Chicago and Washingon, DC schools used a method whereby teachers ranked their school facilities with a grade of A to F where A was for the highest level of satisfaction and F was for the lowest level of satisfaction. This report concluded that there was a 5% increase in the probability of teachers remaining at the same school when comparing A-rated schools to F-rated schools. Consequently the Capital-E report misstates the outcomes of the report that rated schools in which there was absolutely no mention of green schools, just better facilities. It seems that the Capital-E report authors do not acknowledge that a reasonably well-designed new conventional school would also be a “better facility.” This attribute is not exclusive to green schools. The Capital-E report somehow computes these mythical savings due to teacher retention as $4 per square foot savings. The truth is they have no idea if green schools increase teacher retention compared to contemporary non-green schools.

The Employment Impacts Claim

The Capital-E report states that the employment impacts of green schools are a benefit of $2 per square foot. This result is based on a 2004 report by the Massachusetts Division of Energy Resources and the Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation Agencies that states that each $10 million investment in energy efficiency improvements contributes 160 short-term and 30 long-term jobs. Capital-E extrapolates this information to somehow attribute 3 short-tem and ½ long-term job per green school based on $200,000 of additional investments in energy efficiency compared to a conventional school. There are several serious flaws in this line of thinking. First, taking the results of the 2004 Massachusetts report and extrapolating the result proportionately to green schools is a real stretch. Capital-E again cites the earlier debunked 33% energy savings of green schools compared to ‘conventional schools.’ There is no information provided about the energy conserving features of contemporary non-LEED schools which are substantial and growing in importance with rising energy prices. In fact a recent 2006 report from the Lexington, Massachusetts Superintendent of Schools indicates that they, like other school districts, are investing significant financial resources in upgrading the energy efficiency of existing schools. Using the Capital-E logic, each existing school being upgraded should also take credit for new short-term and long-term jobs. And indeed, except in fast growing regions such as Florida and Nevada, the number of new schools being built compared to existing schools is very small. In summary, the Capital-E claim of $2 per square foot savings is totally unsupportabe.

Revisiting the Summary Table

In reviewing the criticisms of the Capital-E report on the financial benefits of green schools, few of their claims stand up to scrutiny. It is laced with unfounded assumptions, interpolations, and extrapolations that are not supported by the evidence. The table below was derived by setting aside the Capital-E claims that cannot be supported. The water savings and emissions savings were simply retained. The direct energy savings were recalculated using a more reasonable 20% savings and based on inflating the Capital-E assumption of annual average energy costs of $1.15 per square foot to $1.25 per square foot. This is a better comparison of potential energy savings for new green schools versus new conventional schools where there are probably significant energy conservation measures being implemented. The 20% reduction results in a $4 present value savings per square foot. If the $3 increase in construction cost is maintained, the net present value of savings over a 20 year period is about $3 per square foot, a far cry from the $71 per square foot claimed in the Capital-E report.

The Provable Financial Benefits of Green Schools ($/ft2)

Energy $ 4

Emissions $ 1

Water and Wastewater $ 1

Increased Earnings $ 0

Asthma Reduction $ 0

Cold and Flu Reduction $ 0

Teacher Retention $ 0

Employment Impact $ 0

TOTAL $ 6

COST OF GREENING ($3)

NET FINANCIAL BENEFITS $ 3

Conclusions

The U.S. green building movement is plagued by hyperbolic claims that must be challenged if the movement is to have any integrity. There is a critical lack of methodologies and protocols, not to mention a severe shortage of pertinent research about high performance buildings. The Capital-E report critiqued here is just one of a number of similar reports that are badly flawed and which the USGBC, instead of embracing, should repudiate. Otherwise similar pseudo-scientific reports will become the norm. This approach to research and the repeating of green building benefits that cannot be substantiated will ultimately result in serious negative impacts on the green building movement. Reports that make unsupportable claims about the benefits of green building simply reinforce the countervailing forces that argue green building is too expensive.

I challenge the USGBC to address these inaccurate and unsupportable claims, to cease supporting and repeating them, and to organize a rigorous research agenda that finds the truth. The Capital-E report is but one of many that need to be scrutinized and criticized to set the record straight. It is not only the intergity of the USGBC that is at stake, it is also the integrity of every one of us associated with the high performance green building movement.

Green Building Myths that Need Exploding!

The movement that is greening the built environment is accelerating and according to some estimates, as much as 3% of total commercial and institutional construction in the U.S. is now using green building rating systems to assess how green these projects are. Most of this greening is taking place based on the U.S. Green Building Council’s (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) suite of green building rating systems which are used to determine if the resulting construction is green or not, and just how green it is. Simply put, LEED is a points system and the more points the project earns, the higher its rating. A building can have a platinum, gold, silver, or certified rating depending on how many of the 69 maximum points the project achieves. Within the LEED suite of building rating systems, the LEED standard for new construction, version 2.2 (LEED-NC 2.2), is the tip of the spear promoting this shift. By many accounts the green building movement is the most successful contemporary environmental movement in the U.S. So we should be celebrating? Well, yes and no.

In spite of the apparent success of this movement in the U.S., what I find particularly disturbing are the enormous myths, sort of urban legends, that have emerged from this movement. These myths, of which there are many, degrade this movement because they serve as a sort of ad hoc foundation for the green building movement and they are often cited as rationale for the approaches being taken to green building. Myths have only so much staying power and once compromised, only fuel the demise of the structures built upon them. A foundation based on myth is a very weak foundation indeed.

In this edition I will address the fundamental myths being passed around in the USGBC community. The most grating of these fundamental myths violate the laws of physics, common sense, or both. Below are three examples of these myths which are circulated at large in the green building community and which address the issue of design and its relationship to nature. The italics are my rendition of these commonly accepted myths, followed by a brief explanation of why they are indeed myths and deserve to be made part of a concrete mix and buried forever.

1. Humans should rely on nature as the model for design. The subtext accompanying this is that nature has done the hard work. “Nature's ecosystems have nearly four billion years experience developing efficient, adaptive, resilient systems. Why reinvent the wheel, when the R & D has already been done? (from Gil Friend’s August 7, 2006 blog, http://radio.weblogs.com/0109157/)” Well the problem here is that nature’s designs are based on evolution and history whereas humans are the single species that is forward-looking, that creates new materials, products and processes based on discovering the laws of physics and applying them to solve problems. We are a risk taking species, it is our nature and we invent and explore for the sake of invention and exploration. Certainly nature is a significant input, but far from the only one. I would guesstimate that we use and can use only a limited range of mostly metaphors from nature and very few models. I have written more extensively about this in a draft paper you can find at http://www.treeo.ufl.edu/rsc06/Refining%20Ecological%20Design-Kibert-29%20March%202006.pdf The green building design community is also deeply smitten by the concept of biomimicry which is many consider to be the foundation of so-called ecological design and which relies entirely on nature as the model. With all due respect to Janine Benyus, the author of “Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature” (1997, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc.), biomimicry likely has very limited play in how humans design systems. Yes, pharmaceutical companies have made some progress in developing new drugs, there are some interesting shapes and forms that can be found in nature and adapted into human design but most adaptations of nature into human systems are trivial. So let’s respect humans as well, and the fact that most of what we create does not exist in nature. What we should address are the ethics of our production and consumption and the risks associated with our inventions.

2. Nature has closed loop behavior, biological waste is always food for other organisms, and we should mimic nature’s behavior. This myth, like the others, is well-intended and meant to inform us that we need to minimize waste and reuse and recycle materials. However this statement is related to the Myth #1 above and is equally off target. In fact there are numerous examples of ‘waste’ in nature: coal, petroleum, elemental sulfur, chalk, limestone, iron ore and phosphate rock are all examples of geochemically transformed biological waste. In other words nature produces significant waste which is simply degraded matter and is not food for other organisms. Thus designing our industrial system based on industries using the waste of other industries is purely Imagineering and nothing more. (See “On the life cycle metaphor: Where ecology and economics diverge,” a working paper by Robert Ayres of INSEAD, 2002/119/EPS/CMER). Also note that complete cradle-to-cradle behavior (as laid out in “Crade-to-Cradle” by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, 2002, New York: North Point Press) is impossible because it violates the second law of thermodynamics (entropy), the nasty one which designers seem to find intellectually insurmountable. In every recycling loop, matter is lost due to dissipative forces. Recycle a kilogram of steel several times and only a few grams will remain, the rest having dispersed into the background. The same law applies to nature and nature’s attempts at recycling result in similar dissipation. The second law should as a warning that recycling certain materials can indeed be hazardous to our health because they will become part of our environment. Should we recycle? Of course! There are indeed limited resources and we have an ethical responsibility to future generations to protect their quality of life. But let’s be clear: nature does not exhibit closed loop behavior and recycling has consequences. Let’s at least get the facts straight!

3. Nature runs off current solar income. This myth is meant to tell us that we need to shift off our diet of non-renewable fossil fuels to a solar diet. It is like the other myths just that, a myth. It begs the obvious question which is: what happens when the sun goes down? Clearly much of nature runs off both current AND stored solar income. And indeed, there are natural systems that run of geochemical energy or other energy sources totally disconnected from solar inputs. Yes we should use renewables to the maximum extent possible for our energy systems. However, they are generally very expensive and take enormous quantities of land, whether it be biomass, wind energy, or photovoltaics. If one scours the literature about how we will derive our energy for the future, the credible prognosticators tell us it is far more likely to be a nuclear-hydrogen based system rather than one based on renewables. Certainly they will be part of the mix but hardly the dominant source of energy, at least for the coming centuries. A recent analysis of Florida’s energy needs concluded that to replace current gasoline consumption with ethanol would require an area four times the state’s land area. Talk about ecological footprint! The bottom line is that nature does not run off current solar income and it is also highly unlikely that humans will either. Well, until we have consumed every other energy source!

This is just one set of green building movement myths, the “nature as model” set, that need to be exploded. Please feel free to post your favorite myths here. In the next edition I will address even more dangerous myths that are directly in the green building development process.

A Vision of Future Green Building: RSC06

Like many others committed to environmentally responsible building, I believe the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has done a remarkable job of promoting green building in the U.S. Over 200 million square feet of buildings have been certified, are registered, or are in the certification process using the USGBC's LEED (Leadership in Energy and Enviromental Design) building assessment tools. With a relatively small staff augmented by hundreds of volunteer professionals who serve on committees that are overseeing the evolution of existing standards and the development of new standards, the USGBC has had enormous impact in just a short period of time. At present there are LEED variants for new construction (LEED-NC), existing buildings (LEED-EB), core and commercial interiors (LEED-CI). LEED for core and shell (LEED-CS) is undergoing pilot testing by 75 project teams. LEED for homes (LEED-H) is under development as is LEED for neighborhood development (LEED-ND). See http://www.usgbc.org for more information.

In spite of the success of the USGBC and the LEED suite of standards, the green building movement is at risk for several reasons. First and foremost is the lack of a vision of future green buildings. The LEED standards are building assessment tools, not design guides, that is, they score how well the project team approached the green building requirements in LEED, but they only indirectly assist in green building design. The LEED standards certainly hint at the attributes of a green building per USGBC doctrine, but they provide little in the way of defining what exactly comprises a green building, either today or in the future. Essential green building attributes such as integration with natural systems, deconstructability, closed materials loops, hyper-efficient buildings, and many other key qualities are not covered to any significant depth. Additionally, due to the proliferation of LEED standards, the USGBC has had its hands full dealing with developing and maintaining the current suite, with the result that attention to a vision of future green buildings has been minimal. This vision is a critical need, however, because without it, like any other endeavor, the odds of failure increase dramatically.

As a consequence of these shortcomings, the Powell Center for Construction & Environment at the University of Florida is organizing Rethinking Sustainable Construction 2006 (RSC06), an international conference to address the future of green building. RSC06 will be held in September 2006 in Sarasota, Florida and will focus on the cutting edge and beyond for high performance green buildings and assist in the development of a roadmap for designing and producing future high performance facilities. When I say 'future', I am referring to the time frame 10 to 50 years from the present. As noted above, with all the excellent work being done by the USGBC to promote green building in the U.S., there is a significant vacuum when it comes to a future vision for high performance buildings. The same holds true in many other countries with green building strategies. RSC06 is being designed specifically to remedy this situation. We anticipate a collaboration of designers, developers, builders, manufacturers, primary materials suppliers, policymakers, and researchers to create a sorely needed vision of the future. The RSC06 website can be found at http://www.treeo.ufl.edu/rsc06 It will be a relatively small conference with the emphasis being on interaction and the development of this roadmap. We look forward to your participation in this groundbreaking event!

As an aside, the Powell Center organized the First International Conference on Sustainable Construction, held in Tampa, Florida in November 1994. We have been engaged in green building activities since 1990, with materials cycles, building deconstruction, materials recycling, and component reuse being our main areas of interest. Currently we are working on optimizing hydrologic cycles for green buildings, developing economic and financial models for high performance buildings, and developing decision systems for indoor environmental quality (IEQ) strategies. You can find our website at http://www.cce.ufl.edu

The Top Green Building Conferences 2005-2006

Many of us are rapidly coming up to speed by attending conferences on green building or sustainable construction and I thought it would be useful to mention a few upcoming ones that can increase your knowledge about the world of green building. If you teach courses about green buildings or are an academic engaged in scholarly work and research, attendance at these conferences can be especially helpful.

May 25-27, 2005 Green Trends 2005 Sarasota, Florida

The Florida Green Building Coalition (FGBC) organizes this annual conference that address the state of green building specifically in Florida where a high rate of penetration is occurring in both residential and larger building arenas. One of the major points of the conference will be discussions about the FGBC’s Florida Green Building Program, consisting of Green Building Standards for Florida Homes, Developments, Commercial Buildings , and Counties and Cities.

June 20-23 2005 Ecobuild America Orlando, Florida

Organized by the Sustainable Buildings Industry Council, this combination conference/exhibition is an outgrowth of successful Ecobuild conferences in Asia. Ecobuild America will address the estimated $15 billion worth of green buildings currently in design or under construction in the US, representing 12-15% of total public construction and 2% of private sector construction. It covers the breadth of commercial, industrial, institutional and residential green building techniques, construction products, renewable energy resources, and sustainable growth design and planning processes. Ecobuild America will be accompanied by product educational sessions for design and construction professionals will feature the latest innovations in green building materials and energy and technology, with particular emphasis on sustainable growth, green building, and environmental design. This gathering promises to feature the most comprehensive congregation of green building programs and technologies ever assembled — a showcase for this rapidly expanding and dynamic industry.

September 2005 Sustainable Building 2005 Tokyo, Japan

SB05 is a truly international conference whose central theme is the Green Building Challenge, a competition among countries with green buildings to produce facilities with the lowest possible impacts. Although distant from the U.S., this conference is a remarkable gathering of professionals and researchers from around the world, covering all aspects of green building. It also provides the opportunity for the attendee to learn about green building assessment tools such as LEED that are employed in other countries as well as energy and materials strategies that go well beyond U.S. practices.

November 9-11, 2005 Greenbuild Atlanta, Georgia

The Greenbuild International Conference & Expo is the annual convention of the U.S. Green Building Council USGBC) and is a truly enormous undertaking, with over 8,100 people and 380 exhibitors having attended the 2004 version of Greenbuild in Portland, Oregon. Greenbuild’s focus is on the green building doctrine articulated by the USGBC, especially in the form of the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) suite of standards that is their central product. A wide variety of educational sessions, primarily about LEED, are available to attendees.

September 19-22, 2006 Rethinking Sustainable Construction Sarasota, Florida

This unique conference will attempt to address a long-standing problem in the green building arena, the long range vision of green buildings. RSC06 will be a collaboration of people and organizations who are committed to the advancement of high-performance or next-generation green buildings and the development of design approaches, tools, products, techniques, and policies needed to produce the next-generations of high-performance green buildings. Because it is intended to produce a strategic work product, attendance will be limited to under 400 people. Instead of relying solely on academic papers or powerpoint presentations as the focus of information exchange, RSC06 is encouraging submittals of a wide variety of information to include models, drawings, mock-ups of products, and other innovative approaches to stimulating the discussion of the long range future of green building.

Sustainable Construction book is available!

John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is now publishing Sustainable Construction: Green Building Design and Delivery and it is available through Wiley, Amazon.com, and a wide variety of other outlets.

A companion website for the book containing a sample syllabus, teaching strategies, and other information is at http://he-cda.wiley.com/WileyCDA/HigherEdTitle/productCd-0471661139.html Instructors can contact their John Wiley representative to obtain a desk copy and access to the site. To find your Wiley representative, go to http://www.wiley.com, click on the button at left that says FIND THE RIGHT TITLE FOR YOUR COLLEGE COURSE and then click on the WHO'S MY REP link at the top of the Wiley Higher Education site, in order to get contact information about your rep.

If you are teaching or intending to teach a course about green building design and delivery, please feel free to send me materials to post to the website. I have a fairly deep library of papers related to green building written by my students over the past ten years and am considering posting these to illustrate the types of issues they have tackled, sometimes with remarkable results! If you would like to post student work and projects on this site, please let me know. I hope to develop a resource base for teaching green building courses that will permit instructors to focus on the creative aspects of teaching.

There is also a student website at same location as the instructor site. The student site contains useful information such as the various websites mentioned in the Notes and References of Sustainable Construction. These are all hyperlinked for easy use and access for both instructor and student versions of the companion site.

Your comments and suggestions are very much appreciated!

Charles J. Kibert, author of "Sustainable Construction: Green Building Design and Delivery," John Wiley & Sons, 2005 

New Sustainable Construction book

I recently completed the final edits for what is probably the first professional reference and textbook covering high-performance green buildings. The book, Sustainable Construction: Green Building Design and Delivery, will be available from John Wiley & Sons in early February 2005 and the ISBN number is 0-471-66113-9. The purpose of the book is to provide theory, history, state of the art and best practices for this rapidly emerging new class of buildings. It is also the first book to integrate in the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED standards. John Wiley & Sons has a companion website at http://www.wiley.com/go/sustainableconstruction that will soon have a wide range of materials to assist both professors teaching classes, and professionals seeking additional materials for consumption.

If you are a professor or lecturer and would like to adopt the book for classes starting in January 2005, Wiley will provide you with copies of the first few chapters to get underway. To find your Wiley representative, go to http://www.wiley.com, click on the button at left that says FIND THE RIGHT TITLE FOR YOUR COLLEGE COURSE and then click on the WHO'S MY REP link at the top of the Wiley Higher Education site, in order to get contact information about your rep.

The companion website at John Wiley will include syllabi, lectures, teaching materials, supplementary readings, student exercises, links to notes and references in the book, and other materials to assist you in teaching the course. In the spirit of the green building movement, I invite you to submit materials to be posted on the Wiley website for use in teaching about this important new trend in design and construction. Please also feel free to contact me at anytime. My email address is ckibert@ufl.edu and my office number is +1-352-273-1189.