GreenClips.59 11.06.96 SANTA MONICA DRAFTS SUSTAINABLE GUIDELINES The City of Santa Monica, California hopes its Sustainable Development Guidelines will be a model for environmentally sound communities. Sheltair Scientific Limited of Vancouver and its team of Southern California and Vancouver based designers, researchers, and engineers completed a draft in September and presented it to the planning commission and the public for comment. The guidelines apply to office, retail, hotel, and multi-family residential buildings and address these issues - efficient and renewable energy; resource conservation including water, land, and materials; healthy indoor environments; local urban ecology; soil, air, and water pollution; and renewable resource use and reuse. Final guidelines are due in the spring of 1997. For more information, email Dean Kubani at the City of Santa Monica, dkubani@pen.ci.santa-monica.ca.us. - Advanced Buildings Newsletter, July/August 1996, p. 2, and Environmental Building News, September/October1996, p. 3. GREENPEACE URGES ELIMINATING PVC The plastics industry has reacted angrily to a Greenpeace report that urges eliminating PVC in pipes, flooring, cable sheathing, windows, and membranes. Greenpeace claims that PVC "creates environmental and human health problems" and presents PVC alternatives including sources for the materials in its report titled Building the Future - A Guide to Building Without PVC. "Rather than being hoodwinked by anti-PVC brochures of little substance," replies the British Plastics Federation, "specifiers in the construction and building industry should continue to work with PVC in order to exploit its manifest environmental, technical, and commercial benefits." The Berlin Museum of Jewish Culture now under construction has no PVC, and a leading Swedish construction company has begun phasing it out. For a copy of the report, call Greenpeace in the UK at 0171 865 8228. - The Architects' Journal, October17, 1996, p. 22. SAVE WATER, SAVE ENERGY Regional water shortages and rising water treatment costs make reducing water use a design priority. Saving water can also save energy. Power to pump, treat, and heat water can approach ten percent of an electric utility's output. These design suggestions can improve energy efficiency: Specify more efficient equipment like heat pumps, heat recovery systems, condensing water heaters, tankless water heaters, and combination space and water heating systems. Reduce hot water standby losses with tank insulation, anti-convection valves, and heat traps. Use localized heating equipment for specific applications. Reduce hot water service temperature. Use hot water system controls, like time-of-day equipment scheduling. Consider solar water heating. Include low-flow plumbing fixtures. And specify water booster pumps, like packaged pumping systems with staged pump operation, to serve after-hour part loads better. - Consulting-Specifying Engineer, October 1996, p. 52, by Clark C. Bisel and Robert Sedlack. FLEXIBLE REGULATIONS ENCOURAGE GREENER DEVELOPMENT Rigid land use regulations and one-issue-at-a-time regulators often stymie innovative developers who would otherwise protect the environment. But flexible regulations that holistically consider land use issues can benefit the environment, reduce costs, and help create compact, mixed use, pedestrian friendly communities. So argues land use planner and attorney Edward McMahon who suggests these changes to land use regulations - Street standards: Allow narrower residential streets. Oversized streets mean more paving, runoff, and tree removal. Wetlands: Permit common sense mitigation measures. Destroying a lot of one natural feature to save a little of another often doesn't make sense. Parking lots: Allow them to meet typical flow instead of peak demand. Smaller parking lots reduce storm water runoff, soil erosion, non point source pollution, and impact on wildlife habitat. Storm water management: Allow natural methods like grassy swales or gravel packed trenches instead of higher-cost systems with curbs, gutters, and storm sewers. Zoning: Devise flexible ordinances that allow clustering of open space. A new report titled Achieving Environmentally Sensitive Design Through Flexible and Innovative Regulations is available for $2 from Barbara Wise, Maryland Office of Planning, 301 W. Preston Street, Baltimore MD 21201. – Planning Commissioners Journal, Fall 1996, p. 6, by Edward T. McMahon. NO PROOF OF EMF HEALTH HAZARD A committee of the National Research Council (NRC) finds no convincing evidence that exposure to electromagnetic fields, or EMF, from power lines and home appliances is a hazard to health. The NRC, an arm of the US National Academy of Sciences, issued its report last month. More than 500 studies over the last 17 years have produced no proof that EMFs common in households caused leukemia or other cancers, or harmed human health in other ways. Industry representatives say the issue needs more research and they encourage the US Government to continue supporting the five-year joint research program with industry begun in 1994. The $65 million program involves extensive laboratory work on EMF effects on cells and biological processes and engineering research on EMFs in homes. - The New York Times, November 1, 1996, p. 1, by Warren E. Leary. GREEN HOUSE ON THE GO Over one million people have toured the GreenHouse since Timberland Custom Modular Homes of Auburn, Washington built it four years ago with funding from the Pierce County Solid Waste Division. Stafford architects and B.J. Harris, who publishes the Harris Guide to recycled materials, designed the traveling modular demonstration home using over 130 recycled materials. [For more information on the Harris Directory of Recycled Content Building Materials, email bjharris@igc.apc.org.] - BioCycle, October 1996, p. 72, by Robert Steuteville.