When heavy products are unloaded from ships at the Port of Portland, OR, the rough wood 4x4s used in packing the goods are discarded in a landfill. Joe Michoff and Pierce Henley saw opportunity in the waste and their company, Viridian Wood Products, now reclaims and markets the wood to build beautiful decks, flooring, and […]

Landscape architect Anna Peltier brings her passion for living sustainably into her own yard by creating an edible oasis. Fruit trees bloom in the backyard. Grape vines provide fruit, and provide shade for an outdoor dining area. Peltier celebrates the local plants that have nourished humans for centuries. Native edibles from the surrounding desert include […]

The Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel in San Diego hosted the Commercial Real Estate Development Association’s (NAIOP) Development ‘13 conference in early October, where an expert panel discussed sustainable buildings and the return on investment possible from them. Included among the things discussed during the panel, was the fact that sustainable buildings mean more than just […]

This article from GreenBuildingAdvisor.com shows why calculating the payback cost on a green home does not give you a complete or reliable picture on the benefits of green appliances and technology. The first reason why payback is distracting is the fact that it tends to take the total cost of the item divided over how […]

The FluxHome marks another entry into the Solar Decathlon competition, this entry by a group of students from the University of Southern California. The FluxHome is a 1,000 square foot house that takes advantage of the California climate to run on solar energy. Additionally, all of the home systems are controlled by a single iPad […]

Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) fellow Jerry Yudelson has recently published a book on green building titled The World’s Greenest Building: Promise vs. Performance in Sustainable Design. Some of the lessons he seeks to impart in that text can be found here, beginning with the lesson that any building project should be able […]

The message from Joe Lstiburek’s fifth annual “Twitterview”  that got the most retweets was his statement that, “Passivhaus is the only place where real innovation is happening.” Considering that statement caught the most attention, GreenBuildingAdvisor.com investigated the claim. To begin with, it’s worth noting that the Passivhaus program has not certified many projects and only […]

Serenbe is a community created by Steve Nygren, located thirty miles to the southwest of Atlanta, Georgia. Made to be an example of what green development can accomplish, the Serenbe town development spans 1000 acres. Nygren and other developers took about 62 square miles of that space and created a municipality, the City of Chattahoochee […]

This article was inspired by a letter to GreenBuildingAdvisor.com in which a person complained that their contractor had purposefully left holes open to the outside amidst a spray foam installation in the attic. Some investigation revealed that the holes were left in order to provide air to the atmospheric combustion furnaces that warmed the house, […]

The latest report from U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), LEED in Motion, shows that green building might represent more than half of all residential and commercial construction as soon as 2016. This report, the first of three planned reports in the LEED in Motion series, focuses primarily on individuals and organizations employing green building, specifically […]