How to make green building grow

Bring on the bulldogs

Posted by Grist at 11:31 AM on 08 Jun 2006

Today we bring you Auden Schendler's thoughts on the state of green building -- and, below, his suggestions for making things a whole lot better.

Ultimately, we need to find a way to make green building more accessible. I once had a construction manager ask me, "What's the process we go through to make a green building?" I should have been able to hand him a one-pager, but I didn't have one. Each project manager needs to be able to articulate the process clearly and quickly.

Here's how it should work, from an owner's perspective:

Hire a talented architect, engineer, and contractor who are all committed to the cause. They don't have to be green. But they do have to understand that they work for you, and you are paying them to build a green building within budget.
Provide a road map that describes the process and goals for building green.
Make sure there is a project champion, preferably a bulldog, to hound people. Stay vigilant throughout the whole process.
When the project is finished, share your successes, but also share the inevitable pitfalls with others -- at conferences and through other outlets.
Make your next building even better.

But how do you get to that point?

Green building is hard to pull off, because building is a deeply evolved social phenomenon -- it's one of the oldest human endeavors. Changing building practices, like adopting civil rights or democracy, is a long-term process.

Looking around the table at a recent design meeting, I noticed that the contractors were friends, the engineer was a local, the architect had known somebody in the hiring group for years. That's why they got selected. They are not green experts, and that fact won't substantially change over time. Owners need to learn to work with contractors who may not have green experience, but do have a willingness to change. The challenge is to insinuate greenness into what is really, ultimately, a family -- not a business. The way to do that is not with a consultant.

What we're dealing with is a habit -- the habit of business as usual -- and any habit is hard to break. The most successful programs (think AA's 12 steps) break the process into manageable bites. At Aspen Skiing Company, partly in response to that contractor's question, we developed a "Green Building Process" that shows our project managers and contractors exactly what steps they must follow. A similar set of guidelines could become part of LEED or an independent aspect of the U.S. Green Building Council's work.

In a perfect world, you'd have the process, then you'd have the prescription (highly energy efficient building codes, or aggressive internal green goals), and then you'd have the certification system.

There are other ways to bring green construction to the masses. One is to change green building conferences so that they're useful. Right now, they're an aggregation of consultants, architects, planners, builders, or engineers trying to get work by showcasing their projects. They are incentivized against admitting mistakes. Instead, organizers should theme conferences around reality, not dreamed utopias, and invite speakers willing to get into the nitty-gritty of the process, willing to expose their faults and teach people how to avoid them. We need honest discussions, not sales jobs.

Changing codes -- by lobbying elected officials to require better insulation, windows, and heating equipment -- can, in one sweep of the pen, do more good than centuries of piecemeal green building. This is already happening in many progressive municipalities. Aspen and Crested Butte are two Colorado examples. The U.S. Green Building Council is currently moving its power and spotlight toward greening codes, probably the single most important step it can take to get the big-picture change we need now.

Ultimately, the success or failure of the green-building movement may hinge on how good we are at being teachers, not builders. In the classroom, it's much easier to go through a checklist than to show how to build a green building. But it's much more interesting and valuable (and fun!) when designers or builders tell war stories.

A man named Jack Aley used to guest lecture to environmental studies classes at Bowdoin College. He talked about the house he built in coastal Maine, and he always returned to one theme: "Passive solar! Face it south! Superinsulation! Thermal mass. It's simple, it's elegant." Jack heated his house with a small woodstove, but he said it was so tight you could heat the place by making love.

Jack is something of a Maine redneck, and maybe that's what we most need to complement our integrated processes and biomimicry and LEED and lifecycle analysis: a redneck 10 commandments of green building that works for residential and commercial spaces alike:

Don't bother, unless you have a committed owner, sufficient time, the best goddam engineer, a willing architect, and a construction company that believes.
Be a bulldog! Establish clear expectations repeatedly enunciated, making it unmistakable what you care about and what you want.
Have a good bullshit detector: accept no compromises or excuses.
Use consultants in response to specific issues, as a way to help the design and construction team, not in a "Green God" capacity.
Forget the fruit salad (certification) until you're done, then use it to see how you did.
Don't forget the subcontractors; they are the ground troops.
Keep your eye on the ball -- which is energy efficiency, not bamboo floors. Don't fall in love with funky eco-products, and save biomimicry for tomorrow. For today, just get 'er done right.
Superinsulate, caulk, and, for residential construction, face it south.
Be paranoid: have a third-party engineer inspect the heating and cooling systems in design and after construction. It's common sense, like sending along a chaperone to your daughter's prom.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. At the end, go through all your mistakes and figure out how to avoid them next time.

And finally, the way to check your work, at least for residential construction: if you can make love and heat the house, you done good.

Auden Schendler is director of environmental affairs at Aspen Skiing Company.

For story: How to make green building grow
5 Comments | Post a Comment

If it's so great how come everyone's not doing it?

Auden--

Excellent points and I really like your redneck top 10. I would like to add a couple wrinkles to the question of "If green building is so great, how come everyone's not doing it?"

The quick answer is habits and incentive. First, let's say John Green wants to build a green home and has done his research, bought the land, gets a good artichoke and enginerd who design a great solar oriented well insulated home and get the big stuff right. Then he goes to hire a general contractor. These guys are the bulldogs, in the trenches, and experts in their field with years of experience. Most tell me they think green building is great and they'll do whatever the owner wants, but when it comes down to it, my experience has been that they'll talk you out of just about everything you want to do outside conventional construction. Oh yeah, and enginerds and architightwads are the butts of all their jokes.

Mr. Green: "We want to use ICFs for the foundation."

Mr. Contractor: "Those things are crap, can't get `em straight, you'll blow `em out, better not do it. You don't need to insulate your foundation here, it's the banana belt"

Green: "We want to do shallow frost protected foundation with fly-ash concrete"

Mr. C: "Huh? (spit)"

Green: "We want to use SIP panels for the exterior walls."

Mr. C: "Those are too expensive, takes too long to order, what if there's a mistake, the electrician won't like it, stud framing good enough anything beyond r-19 won't pay for itself....." It goes on from there.

Green: "We want a solar hot water system."

Mr. C: "I know a guy who put one in that totally broke after a few years and didn't work worth a shit. It would be a complete waste of money and you'd be an idiot."

Green: "We want a radon mitigation system"

Mr. C: "That stuff is a bunch of hogwash you don't need to and we never put anything like that in."

Green: "Please recycle your beer cans and wood while drinking and working on our jobsite."

"Yeah, cool, ok. Bottles and cans, clap your hands." Actually everyone's on board with that one.

OK so my point is that I see the contractors as a huge piece in the equation who in my opinion have the most control in implementing this stuff (Other than code pricks and DRB Nazis). Who am I to argue with them? They're the experts in the field, they know what they're doing. So you get talked out of it. What started out as a green structure turns into something status quo and maybe you get lucky and use a little trex on the deck.

Contractors have little if any incentive to build any differently than they do now. They don't live in these houses or pay for the heating bills. They've made good money doing what they do, they do it well, and anything that changes or threatens that throws in a level of uncertainty and concern. Hey building houses is hard work, dealing with bitchy homeowners who want they're frikkin travertine slab counters and endless pool system in before Christmas, DRBs, code zealots, sub-standard subs, and climate change-induced chaotic weather patterns.

Educating homeowners is key but the hard part is we're programmed to buy the chrome package instead of paying attention to what's under the hood. Even if you did there's no sticker on the window when you move in that tells you your miles per gallon. When I talk to folks about R-values, thermal mass, boiler efficiencies and air infiltration, their eyes glaze over like Al Gore talking about global warming. Dumb it down too much and you come up with some crappy pie chart in USA Today that says I can save the planet by turning down my thermostat and having someone look at my furnace to make sure it's running right. I have to admit that even though on our project we're stoked to be able to do some good stuff, when I drive by a home built wrong but reasonably priced (is that possible?) it would be nice to just be able to move into something and not go through all the brain damage.

So anyway that's where a green building code works and comes in as a win-win. Just raise the bar and make it required. Contractors then would know how to build to code and know what to expect and how to do it. Homeowners get a code-certified green building with better indoor air and saves them money with little additional upfront costs or headaches. The community and environment benefit collectively from improved material use and reduced emissions. Egotects are happy because there's still plenty of innovation and creativity built in to the code so they can come up with the latest eco-design and get written up in all the fancy magazines even if in the real world their design sucks.

Adam

by apalmer918 at 3:04 PM on 09 Jun 2006

Do not use contractors

I designed and constructed a green passive solar home with air-to-air heat exchangers, thermal mass, southern solar gain, hot water preheat, wood heat, and (very important) thick window shutters. My one suggestion is to build the green building yourself. Do not use contractors. You save money, interest on the money, payroll, payroll taxes, IRS taxes on the money saved, and money using recycled materials.

The home will last many centuries. I hope the survivors of global warming enjoy the shelter.

by sunflower at 3:32 PM on 09 Jun 2006

location, location, location

No menion was made of where to build. This has a large impact. If you need to build a road into the woods to get to your new green house you might want to consider the impact of habitat fragmentation and edge effect. While everyone is off fighting the loggers sprawl is the leading cause of forest loss in the United States

by Moxiehead at 10:22 AM on 10 Jun 2006

Impediments to Residential Green Building

Material Supply Chain. Lots of new technologies, products, applications and innovation hitting the market, little third party verification of product quality and reliability claims, and insufficient pull from consumers to create enough volume to drive manufacturing costs down. Result: 10%-25% premium for building green. You really have to want this!
Builders vs. Architects. Any self-respecting architect these days is LEED certified or at least associated with those who are. Finding builders who have the knowledge and experience with sustainable building materials (tough in many locations) is the critical piece. Many want to learn, but if they haven't done it before, you'll be paying for their education, and risking the outcome of your project! Opportunity: There's a desperate need to educate builders, who smell cost increases when they hear the word green, about sustainable construction and materials.
Lagging Financial Infrastructure. Lenders don't know how to assess value or risk of sustainable designs and materials (they're risk averse to begin with), and are therefore reluctant to embrace such projects. Appraisers don't know how to place value on green building. Realtors are clue-less and have been slow to respond to the rise in interest in the marketplace...in most locations, you can't sort the MLS for green-certified homes.
Competing Standards. There are multiple and often confuisng and competing standards of what constitutes a green house." Governmental organizations could clear the air by establishing building codes and standards that clarify and simplify. This would get a lot of builders on board, not to mention homeowners.
Accessible Standards. When LEED released the Home standards, I called my architect, who designed our sustainable home currently under construction, and asked if the design would have achieved LEED status. His response was, "ABsolutely YES...but you couldn't afford it!" LEED, Green Globes, and all the other standards run the risk of burgeoning bureaucracy and complexity...reminds me of the Quality movement of the '80's...companies became so obsessed with chasing the Malcom Baldridge Award, they forgot why they were doing quality improvements in the first place! Solution: Make the standards affordable and reasonably simple.

by dthopwood at 4:25 PM on 27 Sep 2006

Green Snowmaking

Hey Auden, I was hoping you could enlighten us as to how the Aspen Ski Company justifies making snow during an unseasonably warm and dry early winter?
Could it be that wasting energy to make snow is indeed part of the problem?

Jeff Maus

by draftanimal at 7:33 AM on 06 Nov 2007

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