James Vallette | March 15, 2013 | Materials
Flying over the Great Salt Lake, en route to last year’s Greenbuild, I spied a massive industrial facility above the lake’s southern flank. It was a surreal mix of briny discharge ponds and bronze stacks of smoke and slag. Of course, I wondered what this was. This week, I came upon this plant again, in the normal course of doi...
Bill Walsh | March 12, 2013 | Materials
March 17th marks the 10th anniversary of the EPA order that made it illegal to use the arsenic-based pesticide CCA (chromated copper arsenate) to treat wood intended for most residential uses, including wood destined for decks, picnic tables, landscaping timbers, gazebos, residential fencing, patios, walkways and play structures. This is also a hap...
James Vallette | March 01, 2013 | Materials
In previous Pharos Signal articles and Healthy Building Network newsletters, we have examined the use of coal power plant waste in building materials. Over the past dozen years, fly ash became a low-cost way for building product manufacturers to incorporate LEED recycled content credit-friendly filler in a range of materials, like carpet ba...
James Vallette | February 25, 2013 | Materials
An exhaustive study by the World Health Organization / United Nations Environment Programme fingers building materials as major sources of endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), and calls for the disclosure of chemical contents in products: “(O)ver the past decade it has become clear that humans, in particular small children, are… expo...
James Vallette | February 21, 2013 | Materials
A brand new report by global authorities fingers building materials as major sources of endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs). The exhaustive World Health Organization/United Nations Environment Programme study notes that few of these chemicals have been studied adequately. “Many sources of EDCs are not known because of a lack of chemical...
James Vallette | February 01, 2013 | Materials
Today, the Pharos Project released a new “common ingredients” record, this one for silicone adhesives and sealants. Silicones affix and seal many materials to buildings, from carpet backing to window framing. In the course of this research, we identified two ingredients of particular concern: cyclosiloxanes and organotin catalysts....
James Vallette | January 30, 2013 | Policies
A new voice you might be hearing in green building policy debates should sound familiar to the careful listener. An examination of comments and actions authored by an organization called the Taxpayer Protection Alliance (TPA) finds close parallels to testimony from the American Chemistry Council (ACC), which has been working hard, behind-the-scenes...
Bill Walsh | January 24, 2013 | Policies
For the fourth year in a row Fortune magazine has named Google the best company in America to work for. Slate technology columnist Fahrad Manjoo attributes this success to a relentless data-driven campaign to attract and retain the best employees in the ultra-competitive field of software engineering.[1] He calls this: The Google Happiness Machine....
Bill Walsh | December 11, 2012 | Policies
Last month at the Greenbuild Conference and Expo, my colleague Tom Lent and I were honored to accept the 2012 Leadership in Advocacy Award from the US Green Building Council on behalf of the incredibly dedicated staff at the Healthy Building Network.
HBN is a non-profit organization that receives the vast majority of its income through grant...
Tom Lent | December 02, 2012 | Policies
(updated 12/09/12) The USGBC has taken a huge step forward to address toxics in building materials in the most recent draft LEED standard that is now in public comment. The credit called “MRc4 - Building product disclosure and optimization - material ingredients” rewards product transparency to inform product selection and enc...