GreenClips.72 05.21.97 BRE'S OFFICE OF THE FUTURE The new Environmental Building at Building Research Establishment's Garston site provides a large-scale experimental facility for evaluating environmentally advanced technologies and operations. The design brief for the 2,000 square-meter, three-story office building included a demanding low-energy performance specification drafted by the Energy Efficient Office of the Future project. The EOF project is a partnership between BRE and manufacturers, designers, utilities, and other building professionals to investigate low-energy, comfortable, and healthy workplaces for the 21st century. BRE expects its £2.5 million Environmental Building designed by Feilden Clegg Architects to use 30 percent less energy than the best current buildings. One of the building's innovative passive design features is its concrete floor-ceiling assembly with a sinusoidal-shaped ceiling. Tension in the troughs of the wave structure and compression in its crests make a stiff floor using minimal concrete. Still, the assembly's mass helps limit peak summer temperature of the ground and first-floor offices. Hollow sections of the wave troughs provide space for fresh air delivery to the room below. Raised access flooring for the floor above tops the troughs and alternates with underfloor heating and cooling slabs riding the crests. The building is the first in the UK to use recycled aggregate in ready-mixed concrete. Recyclers crushed, screened, and graded demolished concrete from a London building to supply 20-5 mm coarse aggregate for 1,500 cubic meters of concrete. — Building for a Future, Spring 1997, p. 28, and Building Services Journal, March 1997, p. 18, by Roderic Bunn. FRAMINGHAM RECYCLES LANDFILL National Development of New England has developed a 140-acre office park called 990 Crossing in Framingham, Massachusetts over an abandoned 40-acre landfill. For 17 years no other developer has built on the property partly due to the $4.5 million needed to cap the landfill. But now the tight Boston market makes the site worth cleaning up. The park's first tenants — office supplier Staples and telecommunications software maker Natural MicroSystems Corporation — will pay for the clean up, relieving the town of the state-imposed burden of capping the landfill by the end of 1998. In exchange, the tenants' local real estate tax bills will be about half the usual rate under a plan called tax increment financing. "The success of this development sends a strong message," says the state's Secretary of Environmental Affairs Trudy Coxe, "that we can recycle our old industrial areas to direct growth there, help create jobs and improve the quality of life." — The New York Times, May 11, 1997, p. 29, by Susan Diesenhouse. ECOVER PUTS PEOPLE AND ENVIRONMENT FIRST A six-point management code guides Ecover in choosing raw materials for its products and in designing its working environment for people. The Belgian company manufactured the first phosphate-free washing and cleaning products in 1979 and makes its products from renewable raw materials like coconut, sugar cane, lemon, and spices. To avoid unnecessary packaging, Ecover encourages consumers to refill bottles from 25-liter stock containers in stores that return them for factory refilling. In the early 1990s, Ecover built a 5,300 square-meter addition to its Oostmalle factory. Skylights on top of the factory's multiple-ridge grass roof provide natural light for a friendly working environment. An ecological grading system created at the University of Eindhoven helped select the building's materials. Ecover uses factory wastewater to irrigate the grass roof, flush toilets, and wash floors. A closed water cycle system purifies it in two stages — a biorotor removes 80 percent of the pollution and three reed beds next to the factory finish the job. — EcoDesign, Vol V No 1, p. 16, by Katy Stanley. FROM ECOVER TO ZERI Ecover founder and former CEO Gunter Pauli now focuses on industrial processes that turn waste products into valuable inputs for other manufacturing processes. He founded and directs the Zero Emissions Research Institute [sic] at Tokyo's UN University. ZERI has organized over 4,000 scientists into 60 Internet discussion groups on the scientific and technical issues in making zero waste systems work. For more information on the Zero Emissions Research Initiative, visit http://www.zeri.org. — Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures, Spring 1997, p. 43, by Sarah van Gelder. DCC SETS C&D WASTE PROCEDURES Defense Construction Canada applied bidding procedures called Best Value Tendering in 1995 to managing construction and demolition (C&D) waste generated from the Canadian Department of National Defense's decommissioning programs. DCC intends the procedures to deliver "best value" in terms of energy conservation, social benefit, and waste reduction. DCC prequalifies contractors — only those with reduce-reuse-recycle experience, corporate financial strength, and environmental stewardship receive a request for a proposal. DCC uses standard demolition specifications but stipulates that the contractor reuse and recycle at least 90 percent of materials removed from the site following C&D waste recycling and reuse methods specified in two new National Master Specification sections, NMS 02061 and 02062. To evaluate bids, DCC converts contractors' proposed reuse and recycling percentages to ordinal scores. DCC has extended demolition schedules by as much as 100 percent to encourage alternative strategies. — The Construction Specifier, May 1997, p. 109, by Mike Gordon and Margot Huddart. HOME DEPOT SAYS NO TO OLD-GROWTH REDWOOD... Home Depot announced earlier this month that it will join Sears, Orchard Supply Hardware, Home Base, and Hechingers in a boycott of ancient redwood trees, bringing the total number of boycotting stores in the US to 900. Bolstering an environmental campaign to save Humboldt County, California's Headwaters forest, Home Depot's 536 stores will not sell redwood from trees older than 300 years. Home Depot informed supplier Louisiana Pacific that it will take only second- and third-growth redwood. So now LP will supply Home Depot with timber only from its Fort Bragg and new Ukiah mills that aren't equipped to take the larger ancient trees. "It was better for the environment, and we were very easily able to provide for our customers the kind and quality of wood that they wanted without having to use any old-growth redwood," says Home Depot's Amy Friend. "This made perfect sense, and it was an easy decision." — San Francisco Examiner, May 8, 1997, p. D1, by Jane Kay. ... AND RAINFOREST RELIEF PLANS TEAK WEEK Meanwhile, Rainforest Relief asks consumers to boycott Scandinavian furniture stores that carry teak products from Myanmar to protest that country's human rights and forest practices. For more information about Rainforest Relief's July 1-7 Teak Week campaign, email relief@igc.apc.org. — The Green Business Letter, May 1997, p. 3.