GreenClips.196 07.17.02 CALIF. PROJECT PUSHES FURNITURE MAKERS TO MEET TOUGH GREEN SPECS When the state of California set out in 1999 to build one of the largest green office complexes in the country, at the eastern end of the capitol mall in Sacramento, some companies were outraged by the project's bidding requirements. Makers of furniture and carpet, for example, had to meet strict limits on gases emitted by 21 chemicals, such as benzene, that are considered unsafe. "When California issued its green specs, it was scary," says Scott Lesnet, environmental manager for All Steel Inc., a furniture company and subsidiary of Hon Industries Inc., Muscatine, Iowa. "They're nuts," he recalls thinking. "There's no way any company can deliver all that." The Business and Institutional Furniture Manufacturer's Association said that the bidding requests were "impractical, if not impossible, to achieve in the near future." But with a nearly $60 million contract on the line, All Steel submitted a bid and landed the contract. The furniture-makers association has since backed off its stance. All Steel spent a year and paid between $15,000 to $20,000 to test its cubicle-like workstations. When a station didn't pass the test, the company retested each part until it identified which was emitting unacceptable levels of fumes. The company then went back to the vendor and asked it to find a solution. Now, all customers ordering the same model workstation get one that meets the tougher standards of the California complex. The Wall Street Journal, 15 July 2002, p B1, by Queena Sook Kim. [More about California's modular office furniture specification: www.ciwmb.ca.gov/GreenBuilding/Specs/Furniture ] COMBINING ARCHITECTURE AND THE NATURAL WORLD Architects seem to have lost interest in the subtle and powerful ways in which nature -- plants and trees and water -- can become elements in architectural experience. We save nature for the country, where we indulge it to excess, and then we forget all about it in the city. An exception to this in recent years is Jean Nouvel's Fondation Cartier, in Paris, with its freestanding wall of glass on the Boulevard Raspail, behind which is a lush and slightly unkempt landscape. But there is still a feeling in the architecture world that if you pay too much attention to nature you couldn't possibly have serious architectural issues as your priority. The gap between cutting-edge architects and environmentalists is a revealing one. When architects say that the environmental movement has no aesthetic, what they're really saying is that its aesthetics are conventional, weak, and middle of the road. True enough. But the gap is narrowing, and as technological advances make it increasingly possible to produce a wider range of green building materials it will narrow further. Whether it comes through collaboration with landscape architects or through more enlightenment on the part of architects, we need to think more about the possibilities inherent in seeing nature as an architectural element and not as a thing apart. Metropolis, Aug-Sep 2002, p 88, by Paul Goldberger. NEW LABELING SCHEME FOR BUILDING PRODUCTS INTRODUCED IN EUROPE WWF-Switzerland and other organizations last month launched an environmental quality label for building materials. Products displaying the Natureplus seal come from seven European countries: Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Products bearing the Natureplus label are made from at least 85 percent minerals or renewable material; aren't manufactured with chemicals that damage the environment or human health; and don't cause high levels of pollution in their production, processing and disposal. The first products carrying the Natureplus seal are insulation materials, wood products, and roof tiles. The product line will be expanded to include linoleum and wood flooring, paint, lacquer, mortar and putty. For more information, email felix.meier@wwf.ch. The Green Business Letter, July 2002, p 2. DRAMATIC GREEN ADDITION TO LONDON'S SKYLINE London's newest landmark, the 40-story Swiss Re building currently under construction, was designed by architects Foster and Partners to be beautiful, efficient, environmentally sustainable and a pleasant place to work. The 590-foot-tall cigar-shaped building widens as it rises from the ground and then tapers toward the top. The narrowing profile at the base increases daylight penetration at the lower levels, while the aerodynamic form allows wind to flow around it, making the pedestrian plaza less windy. The building's double-glazed skin limits the amount of solar radiation that reaches the office spaces, thereby reducing the need for heavy air-conditioning. The building uses natural ventilation in addition to air-conditioning, so that much of the mechanical energy systems can be switched off up to 40 percent of the year. Six triangular incisions are cut into the building for light wells, which make use of wind-pressure differentials across the building to drive natural ventilation. Each story is rotated slightly so the voids create spirals around the tower's periphery. The light wells and operable windows also allow daylight to penetrate, reducing the need for artificial lighting. Metropolis, Aug-Sep 2002, p 110, by Paul Makovsky. PROTOTYPE LCA TOOL AIMS FOR TRANSPARENCY AND ACCESSIBILITY Life-cycle assessment (LCA) tools can be used to help select environmentally preferable building materials, but a number of uncertainties limit their usefulness. How a building material is used, for example, is often context specific, and a building material's service life is often unknown. A prototype software tool, Life Cycle Explorer (LCE), has been developed to help assess the relative importance of influential parameters such as these. All underlying aspects of the model are designed to be transparent, so that the data, results and details are accessible to a wide audience. LCE can help decision makers identify the factors that matter the most in a life-cycle comparison of alternatives. The software has four main areas for analysis and exploration: 1) the "Cockpit" for summary results and multivariate sensitivity analysis; 2) the "Line-up" for creating and comparing specific scenario alternatives; 3) "Monte Carlo" for probabilistic uncertainty analysis; and 4) "Nuts and Bolts" for investigating the data sources and equations underlying all results. LCE is currently a proof-of-concept prototype, not a finished tool. Rather than using LCE in place of traditional LCA software tools, LCE's developers recommend incorporating some of its primary features into existing LCA databases, LCA modeling tools, and LCA-based decision support tools. "A Transparent, Interactive Software Environment for Communicating Life-Cycle Assessment Results," Journal of Industrial Ecology, Vol. 5, No. 4, p 15, by Gregory A. Norris and Peter Yost. [Download full text: http://mitpress.mit.edu/JIE ] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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