Originally posted at: KBB Collective

I met today with Jared Asch, the National Director of Efficiency First.

They are a nonprofit that connects together people seeking green jobs with product manufacturers to promote energy efficiency. Jared and I will both be speaking at the upcoming West Coast Green Conference at the end of September and I have have been talking with all of my fellow speakers about their efforts.

http://www.efficiencyfirst.org

For 30-plus years, the modern environmental movement has been preaching energy efficiency, but it has only been recently we’ve seen it being taken seriously. Why the change? Surely rising fuel prices, instability of oil imports and our growing dependance on those imports factors into it – but these issues have persisted for decades.

I asked Jared about what has changed recently. He pointed out how the business case for energy efficiency now has a proven track record of success. “We didn’t have that just ten years ago,” he added. Jared has worked for 6 Senators, 3 presidential campaigns and several Members of Congress, and understands how policy can affect positive change. He mentioned the power of simply having an Administration supportive of these ideas. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu is an admitted “energy efficiency nut.”

Back in December, President Obama told a group of businesspeople at a Home Depot in Virginia that energy efficiency was a “win-win,” because it saves energy, helps our environment and create jobs. “Here’s what’s sexy about it,” the President added, “saving money.” Jared quotes this on the cover of their brochure.

Simple tasks, such as weatherstripping around your doors, caulking around your windows and insulating your attic can easily cut your home energy use by 30%. If American households saved just 10% of the energy used to heat and cool their homes, it would amount to 8.2 billion kW saved, equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions from over a million passenger vehicles.

Not only do these things reduce energy use and cut your monthly utility bills, they do much more. As it turns out, energy efficiency retrofitting of our existing buildings is also a job creator.

Jared pointed to their Home Star Program, a piece of proposed legislation that would give homeowners rebates for energy efficiency retrofits. Home Star would create about 168,000 jobs, help homeowners save money and move us toward energy independence. He told me they are only a couple of votes shy of the 60 needed to pass it in the Senate.

Energy efficiency is at the core of every climate solution. We cannot reach the goals we need to reach (350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere) without an aggressive policy of energy efficiency retrofits for our existing buildings. Every Architect, Contractor and Designer needs to take notice and push this as part of their remodeling projects.

Just this week, the Center for American Progress released a report showing how a national energy efficiency program could create 625,000 sustained jobs over 10 years, ignite $500 billion in investment, and save people over $64 billion off their utility bills. Money in their pockets they could use to move the economy forward.

Making every drop count
Water efficiency is more important now than ever before

I spoke last week at the PCBC Conference in San Francisco about water efficiency. Although buildings only account for about 15 percent of water use (in California, as per the USGS), conserving water in our buildings is becoming increasingly important. Global-warming-fueled droughts, changing weather and water pollution are pushing our finite water supply to its limit.

It’s important for architects and designers to take responsibility for this water use. Water-efficient faucets, toilets and showerheads should be standard practice (and are standard in states like California, by code).

This illustration (pictured above) best demonstrates how fragile our water supply really is. The blue marble (shown) represents all of the water on Earth. After all, we don’t make water. There is no new water. All of the water on the planet is all of the water we’ve ever had on the planet. The water in your glass may have been sipped by Thomas Jefferson, or in your case, peed out by a dinosaur!

Water is one of the most abundant resources on Earth, yet also one of the most scarce. Although water covers 70 percent of the planet, we cannot drink most of it. A whopping 97 percent of the water on Earth is in the ocean and undrinkable, and another 2 percent sits frozen in the polar icecaps (though not for long with global warming), leaving the remaining one percent for us to drink. Unfortunately, 70 percent of that remaining water is polluted. We are running out of fresh drinking water at an alarming rate.

Currently, some 20 percent of the world’s population (over a billion people) lack access to fresh water. Someone in the world dies of thirst every 8 seconds. A child dies of thirst every 15 seconds. Conserving water is more important now than ever before.

In the United States, we consume more water per person than any other country. The average American uses more water per day than someone in Brazil, Germany, China, Honduras and the United Kingdom combined. More so than anywhere else, conserving water here in the U.S. is not only important, but also necessary as we are consuming more than our share of clean water.

It requires an enormous amount of energy. Some 50 billion kW of energy are used each year to pump, process, clean, filter and transport all of this water. This equates to about a half pound of carbon dioxide for every gallon of water we consume. We can’t solve the energy crisis or climate crisis without addressing our relationship with water.

Our homes consume an incredible amount of fresh drinking water, and most of it is used in places it does not need to be so drinkable. You could easily cut household water use by 30 percent through water-efficient fixtures. I wanted to share some of my recent finds that have me excited about water savings:

More than a third of all of the water used inside your home is being flushed down the toilet, literally. We don’t need to flush with clean drinking water. We can use some of the soapy water (called graywater) that gets dumped by your laundry and shower. A dual-flush toilet (pictured) lets you choose a half or full flush, depending on your needs.

Then of course, we don’t need to use water at all. A waterless urinal (pictured) doesn’t need flushing and saves thousands of gallons of water a year, paying for itself in about three years. The Kohler urinal is a work of art.

Showers add up to nearly 20% of all indoor water usage and are the largest users of hot water. By simply installing an ultra low-flow showerhead, you can save up to 4,000 gallons of water annually, and for every gallon of hot water you can save, that’s gas or electricity you don’t need to use to heat it. You can beat the federally required 2.5 gallons per minute (gpm) with models that use 1.75 gpm.

Foot pedal controls are a nice design feature that also happen to save an incredible amount of water. While your hands are full with food or dishes, you simply tap the controls to release water only when needed.

Although dishwashers use only 2 percent of the water in your home, they do use nearly 20 percent of the energy. The new Bosch dishwasher is water- and energy-efficient in an incredibly attractive design.

Of course, there are a dozen simple things you can specify to cut water use and not sacrifice design quality. For the complete list of suggestions, you can download my slides from the lecture here.

—Eric Corey Freed is an architect and author of four books, including Green$ense for the Home.

On April 14th, 2010, I gave the closing keynote at the Municipal Green Building Conference and Expo, help by the US Green Building Council’s LA Chapter, and SoCal Gas Company. You can watch the full hour-long video here. Continue Reading

This article originally appeared: http://kbbcollective.com/greening-restaurants.html

Greening restaurants
Restaurants will have to do more than change light bulbs; they need to grow their own food on site

Last month I spoke at the CHART Conference. Also known as the Council for Hotel and Restaurant Trainers, their annual gathering includes restaurant operators from around the country. Their impressive list of members include every family chain restaurant you’ve ever heard of, including Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Rubio’s, Chuck E. Cheese, Perkins, et al. The room was packed with a “who’s who” of lifestyle eateries.

Continue Reading

This was the first interview I have ever done via video chat, and I love the results (except for my unshaven face and t-shirt). That is my office wall behind me and it was great to do an interview without leaving the house!
Continue Reading

The Bigger Apple is a wonderful discussion of ways to increase the size of Manhattan Island. The author, the former chief executive of the Battery Park City Authority, gets into details of how to develop these areas.

Very clever and something we could do in every city, even in our suburbs.

I was interviewed in the New York Times to discuss my top things everyone should do to green their home. Rather than talk about adding solar panels, I thought it best to choose things everyone (including renters) can do to save money and our environment at the same time.

Five Beginners’ Steps to a Greener Home:
FULL STORY HERE

www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/garden/12greenhome.html

In the New York Times is this item as to whether the environment suffers during hard ecomonic times.

An excerpt:

The environment is actually hurt in hard economic times. Companies will reduce their investments into research and development and green programs…

The Greener Side of Recession

This story on carbon offsets is a great intro into understanding something I find myseterious.

Corporations spent more than $54 million last year on carbon credits toward tree planting, wind farms, solar plants and other projects to balance the emissions created by their work.

But where exactly is that money going?

F.T.C. Asks if Carbon-Offset Money Is Well Spent

From our friends at TriplePundit comes this story about the true costs of green building.

Cost the biggest misconception have about green building, and the one I seem to be fighting to change in peoples minds the most. I have said for years now there is no discernable difference in cost. In fact, we only encounter three items with any cost increase:
* solar panels: but have a 5-10 year payback.
* FSC Certified Wood costs 20% more than the bad wood, and with no return on its investment (other than being the right thing to do.
* Graywater systems: water is still so subsidized that the return on investment is LONG, but that will change as the future wars on water begin.

from Triple Pundit:
Well, according to WBSBD those tangible, financial costs may be over-stated by as much as 300%! That should be more than enough to get most construction projects thinking a little harder about engaging in at least some basic green practices.

The full report is available here. The bottom line suggest that the 17% premium originally suggested for “green” projects is really more like 5%.