Archive for February, 2011
We Are Getting There
Monday, February 28th, 2011From where I sit, it sometimes seems like little is happening. There are always so many excuses to not do things greener; to take the environment into account as we charge forward into the next project. It’s not just companies, it’s people too. Maybe it’s mostly people. Green repairs or renovations are often seen as expensive, troublesome, time consuming. (At least, that’s what I hear from a lot of customers and prospects.) Sometimes those preconceptions can be changed; often they’re etched in stone.
But there is hope. Slowly things are changing. I recently ran across a list of signs of change. Some of them are small, others a bit more agressive.
- In five years all new homes built in the UK will have to be net zero, according to this CNN article.
- According to their PR website, Chevron’s new office complex in Lousianna is to be a LEED Gold certified building.
- The LA Times reports that a slew of new environmental laws are slated to hit the books in California this year, many of them promoted and operated by the very industries that will be regulated.
- Proctor & Gamble is now committed to “pursu[ing] LEED certification for all new sites,” according to Sustainable Business.com.
- According to Construction Law Signal, the State of Maryland has awarded $11.1 million for sustainable building on 10 different projects (so far).
- Annarbor.com reports that Mike Mahon, over at Adaptive Building Solutions in Ann Arbor Michigan, has taken his expertise in sustainable building to Haiti.
- Florida Green Building just reported that it certified 74 homes in the first 45 days of 2011!
U.S. House Holds Hearings on RRP
Thursday, February 24th, 2011On February 10th the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held hearings on the Federal RRP law as administered by the EPA. For those who don’t know, about the RRP law (called LRRP in the Committee Report):
In 2008, EPA promulgated the Lead Renovation, Repair and Painting Rule (LRRP) pursuant to section 402(c)(3) of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to address lead-based paint hazards in housing and child-occupied facilities built before 1978. The rule requires that any renovation work that disturbs an area more than six square feet in size on the interior of a pre-1978 home to follow certain lead work practices supervised by an EPA-certified renovator and performed by an EPA-certified firm. In May 2010, EPA removed the “opt-out” provision from the LRRP that exempted the renovating firm from certain requirements of the rule where the firm retains certification that no child under the age of six resides in the renovated home.
In the same Federal Register Notice, EPA also required renovation firms to provide copies of compliance documentation along with training and work practice requirements of the LRRP rule to residence owners. Also in May 2010, in settling petitions by environmental and children’s groups, EPA issued an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking regarding renovations to public and commercial buildings other than those that were child-occupied under the same guidelines as the residential programs. That month, EPA also proposed a rule under LRRP for the cleanup of projects that generate lead dust, requiring testing on the completion of these renovations.
The Committee took comments from several different quarters of the building industry:
The American Architectural Manufacturers Association (AAMA), a trade association that represents over 250 window, door, and skylight manufacturers and industry related suppliers, maintains that “[a]s renovators began to inform homeowners of the additional remodeling costs now associated with renovations, window sales in some parts of the country plunged by 20 percent.” AAMA, along with other groups, urged EPA to reconsider the changes to the “opt-out” provisions and cited a Small Business Advocacy letter arguing that EPA “…failed to perform needed outreach and failed to examine seriously several regulatory alternatives…” Furthermore, a coalition of construction and renovation related industry groups (coalition) asserts that the increased cost of hiring certified contractors “means that legitimate businesses that are complying with the LRRP Rule cannot compete for much-needed work against non-compliant contractors that…lack the training [sic] to actually perform lead-safe renovations and prevent lead hazard exposures.”
The coalition cites a number of costs that befell renovators and their surrounding industries upon implementation of the LRRP. First, the LRRP did not present enough opportunities for renovators to become EPA-certified by the start of implementation. Second, lead test kits produced over 60 percent false positive readings, causing an EPA estimated $200 million in unnecessary compliance costs for firms. Finally, EPA’s failure to accurately gauge the cost of this rule on small business detrimentally impacted that business sector.
The Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) also came to the hearing. They also raised concerns about the opt-out provision:
Their issue regards the one-size-fits all approach to the advance notice of proposed rulemaking extending the LRRP rule to commercial and public building renovations. The trade group feels that “simply taking residential rules and applying them to commercial buildings will mean a never-ending cycle of lead paint testing, contractor certification, worker training, and comprehensive management practices – all increasing the cost of construction.” The coalition is concerned that the EPA stepped outside of the framework of TSCA by considering a new rule without conducting a separate study of lead paint hazards in public and commercial buildings instead of relying on the residential data.
EPA’s latest proposed rule change to add “clearance testing” to materials came under fire from the National Lumber and Building Material Dealers Association (NLBMDA):
“These regulations immediately threaten the recovery of our residential construction and renovation markets and the many jobs associated with construction and renovation.” Furthermore, this association calls for “[a] more narrow and tailored approach…” to this regulating scheme.
The American Architectural Manufacturers Association, representing window, door, and skylight manufacturers was concerned that:
The LRRP removed “opt-out” provisions for those renovating homes built prior to 1978, thus subjecting such construction projects, and the inputs required to complete those jobs, to regulation under the rule. The changes to this rule increase the costs of projects carried out on pre-1978 structures, discouraging the purchase of new inputs, such as windows or doors, as well as the undertaking of the entire construction project.
While small business owners voiced their own concerns:
Contractors and homebuilders are worried about the LRRP as well. Remodelers predict lost business and even unintended negative health effects because the rule does not apply to homeowners. Because of increased costs, these homeowners may elect to forgo professional services and do remodeling themselves, thus increasing the risk to the population who own older homes. Contractors also have concerns about the rule’s application to commercial buildings, when the law was originally intended for residential buildings. The industry feels that this rule would create a perpetual state of testing, training, and certification due to the necessity for “continuous maintenance” at commercial sites – leading to unnecessary costs and project delays.
All quotes are from the Committee report (link below); I have removed the footnotes leading to testimony transcripts and submissions.
The Committee’s page on this hearing can be found here. A PDF copy of the Committee’s full report can be found on this page.
How Long Should Buildings Last?
Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011 |
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The Parthenon, circa 2008
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You’ve probably been involved in the discussions – or heard about them: Buildings should be built to last thousands of years (or some similar very long period of time). It conjures up images of the Parthenon, or the Roman arenas, one of which is still used to host events today.
The concept here is that, since all building is in some sense or other not green, that the not-greenness can be offset by constructing buildings that last for a very, very long time. If portland cement is on its own a not green product, its longevity might make it not only green, but a preferred product to other less not green building materials with a shorter life span. In fact, in a guest post on his Construction Law Blog, Christopher Hill’s guest writer Kelly McGinnis, from the Portland Cement Association, opens with that very point:
Because of environmental concerns, some dismiss cement products as sustainable building materials. These naysayers, however, are missing the ability of concrete building systems to actually negate the initial impact of cement manufacturing through concrete’s incredible durability and the long-term energy efficiency it provides.
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| Verona Arena Images under the Creative Commons license |
It’s a valid point. And so is the concept of building longevity. Compare the construction quality of ‘tract home with that of a home built even a hundred years ago. Here in Northern California we have hundreds of homes that have gone through floods, hurricanes (though they don’t call hurricane force wind that here), and 7.0+ earthquakes. Most manage with, at worst, minor damage. And it was all somehow managed without permits, building codes, and inspectors. Most “tract-shacks”, by comparison, will be lucky to even be standing in fifty years. The materials they are built with are the cheapest the bid winning contractor could find; speed of construction is valued over quality (it has to be in order to win the contract), therefore every corner that can be cut usually is.
But it’s possible to carry any good idea too far. Just how usable is a Roman arena for today’s sports? Can you even imagine a professional sports team trying to host a game in the arena above? Oh, with the modifications that have already been made the game itself could probably be played there. But how would you support the technology modern sports events require, the vending, the platoons of reporters and broadcasters and their equipment? Even a major retrofit likely couldn’t do it; or if it could, it would cost more than simply building a new stadium and would destroy everything historical about the old building.
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| Cowboy Stadium Image under the Creative Commons license |
Consider this: Cowboy’s Stadium, a marvel of modern building science, replaced Texas Stadium, which was completed only 40 years ago, in 1971. But the economic and technological requirements of a modern stadium venue are so different today than they were forty years ago that even the people of Arlington agreed that a new stadium made sense. Fiber optic conduit the size of steam lines run through the building. The stadium is designed to be modular so that not only can the Cowboys play there, but the venue can also host basketball games, speaking events, and concerts with equal facility. Seating capacity can be varied from 80,000 to a maximum of 110,000 for events like the Super Bowl. Given these necessary changes for such a building to be economically viable, what a waste it would have been for Texas Stadium to have been built to have a serviceable life span of even a hundred years, never mind a thousand.
Even homes are subject to technological obsolescence, and updating their technology can be quite expensive. Forty years ago the idea of double paned “storm windows” was a new and novel idea. Blown in insulation meant something like “popcorn” insulation. Energy saving meant turning the thermostat down to 68 degrees from the normal 70, or up to 74, for the air conditioner. The PC was a novelty, home networking of PCs, the Internet, and home theater systems were still the stuff of science fiction. Microwaves were still a novelty, weighed ten thousand pounds (yes, I’m deliberately exaggerating), and dimmed the lights when you turned them on. Smashing a vent hood and a microwave together to put over the stove would have been a technological nightmare and required the strength of Atlas to install.
So while it only makes sense to maximize a building’s useful life span, at the rate technology is changing, building the modern equivalent of the Parthenon or Verona Arena really doesn’t make a great deal of sense. Rather, we should be asking how long we expect a building to be capable of providing useful service, and then choosing our construction techniques and materials on that basis. Doing so not only allows us to get to the same place on the sustainability scale, but perhaps a little further down that road. Because by picking materials that fit the expected useful service life, we won’t be over building or choosing materials that require a much longer period of time to “pay back” their environmental cost.
Those are my thoughts, what are yours?
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VIDEO: Green Renovations Save Money?
Tuesday, February 15th, 2011
