GreenClips.201 09.25.02 TOYOTA'S ECO-AWARENESS DRIVES VENDORS TO CHANGE PRACTICES With more than 32,000 North American employees and a 624,000-square-foot campus being built this year, Toyota can insist that the vendors who build, furnish and service its offices and factories move toward greener methods. "We're able to go out to some of our key vendors and say, 'You know what? Being green-conscious is really important to us, and if you want to continue to work with us, it will be important to you too,'" says Sandy Smith, who heads Toyota's suburban Los Angeles-based real estate division. Besides motivating existing vendors to change their practices, "we also were able to seek out and support people who were already conscious of the environment," says Smith's assistant Michele Diener. Interface, for example, currently supplies all of Toyota's carpeting. And Interface helped another company keep Toyota as a client. Though Knoll had been a Toyota supplier for years, when the furniture-maker wasn't immediately responsive to a new environmental mandate, Smith's real estate division invited competing firms to present their lines. In the end, Knoll won the contract back by developing a new fabric using Terratex, Interface's recycled polyester yarn. Toyota's interest in sustainability signaled to Knoll that other big firms would follow suit, and it inspired new Knoll lines such as LIFE (Light, Intuitive, Flexible, Environmental), a line of office furniture that is almost 100 percent recyclable. Metropolis, Oct 2002, p 74, by Jade Chang. INNOVATIVE FEDERAL BUILDING UNDER CONSTRUCTION IN SAN FRANCISCO A $141 million Class A federal office building under construction in San Francisco should reduce the government's office energy consumption there by 50 percent. The 600,000-square-foot project, designed by Thom Mayne's Santa Monica-based architectural firm, Morphosis, consists of two buildings, an 18-story glass tower with an unconventional heating and cooling system and an adjacent four-story, 100,000-square-foot building with conventional systems. The signature tower is just 65 feet wide to allow daylight in from both sides. The tower will be sheathed in a stainless steel screen that hangs over its south side to create a "natural circulation engine." A building management system will monitor interior temperatures and automatically open and close floor-level vents. Breezes will enter the building on the northwest facade and vent through the southeast wall. The system has been tested and partially designed by the scientists at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. To further save energy, elevators only stop on every third floor, although there is a backup elevator for the handicapped. The high-tech designs added 5 percent to the building's cost, but not putting in standard air conditioning units saved $11 million and additional money will be saved through energy efficiency. San Francisco Business Times, 9 Sep 2002, by Steve Ginsberg. [Full text: http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2002/09/09/focus1.html ] MUTUAL OF OMAHA TAKES CARPET RECYCLING FULL CIRCLE Known for their Wild Kingdom television show and Wildlife Heritage Center, Mutual of Omaha has invested considerable time and money in promoting wildlife preservation and environmental causes. So it was only natural that the insurance firm would want an environmentally friendly floorcovering when it came time to replace 1.2 million square feet of worn carpet in their headquarters offices. After considering a number of options, they chose Collins & Aikman Powerbond RS with ER3, the industry's only 100 percent-recycled vinyl backing. The Powerbond RS "peel and stick" installation method resulted in virtually no downtime for the insurance company. Unlike other floorcoverings, the tackifier for Powerbond RS is applied during the manufacturing process. To install, the protective sheet is peeled away, and the carpet tiles adhere to the floor. This quick and easy application results in no significant VOC emissions and no unpleasant odors. Mutual of Omaha closed the recycling loop by returning their worn carpet to Collins & Aikman for recycling. At its completion, the reclaiming and recycling of Mutual of Omaha's carpet became the world's largest carpet recycling project. Environmental Design and Construction, Sep-Oct 2002, p 22, by Lee Schilling. [Full text: http://www.edcmag.com ] SACRAMENTO SOLAR PROGRAM IN DISARRAY The showpiece of Sacramento's electric utility, an internationally known solar power program, has fallen short of its goals, leaving Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) directors scrambling to salvage their commitment to renewable energy. SMUD had planned to spend $3.2 million in 2002 to help homeowners, businesses, government offices and nonprofit groups install photovoltaic panels on their rooftops or their grounds. Instead, SMUD's board recently authorized spending more than twice that, at least $7.6 million. And that money will buy much less than SMUD planned. The utility will get only 60 percent of the way to its 2002 goal of putting up another 2 megawatts of photovoltaic systems. The financial problems of one solar panel manufacturer, higher prices from other manufacturers and delayed purchases, drove 2002 materials' costs $2.4 million over projections. The controversy means SMUD has to re-assess its goal of getting up to 20 percent of its power from non-hydroelectric sources of renewable energy by 2011. It had been considering increasing its current 10 megawatts of solar power by as much as 30 to 40 megawatts over the next nine years. But that goal counted on far lower costs than SMUD now faces. Still, with a $1 billion annual budget and the public's interest in solar power, several SMUD board members say they support a continued solar program even it costs more. Sacramento Bee, 6 Sep 2002, by Carrie Peyton Dahlberg. UK POSTGRAD DEGREE PROMOTES SUSTAINABLE PRODUCTS AND ENTERPRISES Falmouth College of Arts (FCA) in Cornwall, UK, launched a new postgraduate course in 2001 called the Postgraduate Diploma in Creative Enterprise. A key aim of this program is to train designer-makers, design graduates, designers, design managers and entrepreneurs to develop marketable products using the latest techniques of Design for Sustainability (DfS). FCA's design research focuses on DfS, creative craft/design enterprises, and new materials development. FCA contributed to the development of demi, a web resource developed specifically for the UK Center of Higher Education design sector (http://www.demi.org.uk <http://www.demi.org.uk/> ). EcoDesign, Vol 7 No 4, Summer 2002, p 8, by Alastair Fuad-Luke. [More: http://www.falmouth.ac.uk/showpage.asp?PageID=10 ] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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