GOING GREEN: NEW APPROACHES TO SUSTAINABLE BUILDING

Northwest Researchers Are Laying Foundations For More Environmentally-friendly Designs

By Stephanie Cartier

When Heidi Nymark-Williams and her husband Paul were looking for a new home, they knew they wanted something modern. Turns out, they found one of the most cutting-edge styles around. The couple is now saving big money on a smaller home and loving it. The secret? Their home was built using green technology.

In recent years, the concept of designing sustainable buildings has grown tremendously. Builders pay attention to materials needed for construction, and they look at the full life cycle of the product, from how much energy is used in its creation to the environmental impact when the product is finally discarded. Products are designed to last longer and need less maintenance. More research efforts are focused on green technology and buildings than ever before.

Entire towns, like Post Falls, Idaho, have made green technology a top priority. Green technology is cropping up in everything from energy-saving LED traffic lights and strategically placed windows to water-heating systems.

Seattle architect Tony Case built the Nymark-Williams house, and he taps into the latest innovations to create environmentally-friendly buildings from the ground up. He says he looks into everything from how the product was made to how it holds up after years of use. His choice to develop sustainable buildings came from observing the development process and seeing a lot of room for improvement.

"As an architect, I saw, first of all, a tremendous amount of waste in the construction process," Case says. He adds that nearly a quarter of the volume in landfills is construction waste. Case also observed substantial excess and consumption in construction, which he didn't feel was appropriate. He's seen plenty of buildings that were the result of poor choice of material, poor water-proofing, and poor detailing. "I see that as a tremendously wasteful process when you have to go in, five years after you build something, to fix it." For him, involvement in sustainable building practices is more than just part of the job. "To me, it just seems like an ethical issue, ultimately, to reduce the amount of waste that you create and try to limit the excess that you create."

The result is smaller homes, designed smarter. By creating smaller buildings, builders save money in raw material costs and occupants save energy. Smaller homes take up less land, use less energy to heat and cool the space, and typically don't have amenities like giant bathtubs, so consumers use less water and energy.

Nymark-Williams says her home is about 1,700 square feet, but the lofty interior makes it feel much bigger, while maintaining the low-energy benefits. On a warm day, the house stays cool, and in the damp winters of the Pacific Northwest, the couple's house stays toasty warm. But don't look for heat vents. "We use a radiant floor heat system which is a really nice, even heat. It's also very efficient in that you're not necessarily heating the air, you're heating the surfaces, and you're not moving a lot of air around," says Case, adding that forced air systems push air and dust around, only to go out a window later.

An on-demand hot water heat system is used instead of a water heater. "So instead of using energy to store hot water in a tank, this system applies the energy to the water as it flows through a little coil, and heats it on its way to the faucet or to the shower head. And you don't have a storage issue," says Case. It means you don't have a cold shower issue, either.

Many structural materials, like exposed beams and the bare radiant-heat concrete basement floor in the Nymark-Williams home, are used as a finish. Case says that leaving materials uncovered goes a long way. "You're not spending time and energy and money to cover them up."

While the green building movement has made serious progress since starting out a few decades ago, developers are working hard to increase the visibility and appeal of building green, and researchers are contributing some fascinating finds.

On campuses throughout the Northwest, research is taking place to discover new ways to keep building green. At the University of Idaho, one researcher discovered how heat can be converted into electricity, which could reuse heat usually wasted by refrigerators and computers. Other schools are making strides in construction.

Washington State University (WSU) students are working to develop new technology to be used in green buildings. In October, a dozen students went to Washington, D.C. to compete in the U.S. Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon competition. The assignment was to design, build and deliver an 800 sq-ft house to the National Mall that could be entirely run from solar power. The skies over the nation's capitol poured rain the entire week of the competition, but fortunately, the use of solar power was only one component of the competition.

Brad Frey, an architecture graduate student and lead designer, says the team took top honors for their approach to the mechanical systems of the house. The students found a refrigeration system that had originally been designed for yachts and applied it to the home. The system runs on a series of compressors, and the refrigerator is so well insulated that it only needs to run for two hours every day.

"So when we're not using the compressors to run the refrigerator, we actually use the compressors to run coolant through the refrigerator lines and that actually becomes our air conditioning system," says Frey. The system that turns the house into a giant refrigerator also, ironically, acts as a water heater by taking wasted heat from the refrigerator and adapting it to the plumbing. "Just using one system did three different things within the house, so it's a very innovative system that we applied," says Frey.

During the three-year design and building process, the team kept looking forward to newer ideas and resources. And while systems like those used by their team aren't likely to appear in your neighborhood or office any time soon, the competition helped generate new ideas and raise awareness of what is available. "Right now it's probably impractical for someone to install this within their home, but we're kind of hoping that ten years down the road, this will become something that's very standard, in which people are using one system to do multiple different tasks," says Frey.

Other campuses are taking a different approach, by integrating green building technology into the actual learning environment. The University of Victoria in British Columbia hired Sarah Webb to work as a permanent sustainability coordinator for the campus. Webb has overseen retrofit programs designed to make buildings and grounds more sustainable and provide for more efficient energy use. By creating landscapes consisting of native and drought-resistant species, the grounds attract animals and save on the university's water bill.

Webb says the university has taken on an aggressive energy-saving strategy, and it is working. The university recently earned the 2005 Power Smart Excellence Award from BC Hydro, which recognizes businesses and organizations for significantly reducing energy consumption.

One way the campus drastically cut energy use was through the innovative, campus-wide voltage optimization project. The project focuses on adjusting the voltages on transformers to run at optimal capacity.

Webb says the university is continually looking for ways to improve efficiency, even going so far as to treat waste water and use it in the toilets in the medical sciences building on campus. This project alone will save the district more than two million liters of potable water every year. Through composting, the university is able to keep more than 170 metric tons of food waste out of the landfills. "It's something we're doing here on campus that goes above and beyond the call of duty in the region. It's not only an opportunity for us to reduce our environmental impact, but also create new markets for environmental sustainability initiatives," says Webb.

Oregon State University (OSU) also is working to create a greener campus. This fall, OSU unveiled the new Kelley Engineering Center, and under Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) accreditation standards, it is on track to earn a "Gold" certification.

LEED certification is determined by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), which formed 12 years ago as a non-profit to promote building green. At the time, there was no way to measure how green a building was, so the council developed LEED as a ratings system to evaluate the sustainability of a building. The four levels, in increasing order, are: certified, silver, gold and platinum.

"We look at five different areas of the building and then within each of those areas, there's a certain amount of points that a buildings can get. Then, depending on how many points the project gets, that will determine the level of certification that we'll award them," says Taryn Holowka, communications manager for USGBC.

Earning LEED approval takes time and paperwork, but it is gaining popularity. Oregon State is trying to gain approval for the use of interior paints, finishes, flooring and wall surfaces that were selected to minimize off-gassing to improve indoor air quality. Windows and lighting were designed to help cut costs and increase productivity.

Lighting is another area of tremendous growth in the sustainable building market. Architects and developers of commercial and residential buildings are looking for more ways to help consumers save energy costs. Using natural daylight has become an increasingly popular option, but must be worked into the building plan from the beginning.

"It really is fundamentally intertwined with the form of the building itself," says Chris Meek, a daylighting specialist at the Better Bricks Daylighting Lab in Seattle. Buildings must be oriented properly to maximize daylight at the appropriate time for the occupants. Developers interested in using daylighting techniques must consider building configurations that allow more light to reach the interior.

Using a special table that tilts on three axes to represent time of day, time of the year, and the latitude of the building, Meek and director Joel Loveland mount building models and use a bright light to represent the sun to observe how sunlight moves through the building throughout the day and year.

The lab also has a room that simulates an overcast sky to determine how daylighting can best be utilized in climates well-known for gray skies. But even the most well-designed daylighted buildings have to use electricity. "Daylighting on its own doesn't always necessarily save any energy. To save energy, you really have to integrate the electric lighting system with the daylight to turn off the lights in response to daylight,” says Meek.

New developments are happening in the world of electric lighting as well. While there has been a lot of talk about light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, in recent years, high-quality white light is still difficult to achieve. Lighting Design Lab Lighting Specialist Eric Strandberg says LEDs are currently best used in colored lights, such as in exit signs and traffic signals, because of their long life spans and efficiency. But research is still underway to continue developing affordable, durable and efficient light sources. "One of the largest costs for most commercial users is not the cost of the lights or the light bulbs even, it's the cost of the power to operate the system and the cost of maintanence," says Strandberg.

Comfort of the occupants is climbing the list of important features of a building, and it's important to employers as well. Workers in better lighting conditions tend to be more productive, which Loveland says can have a huge financial impact. "If you take the typical construction cost of an office building, a 10 percent improvement in the productivity of a worker can pay for the entire construction cost of the space that they work in within two years," he says.

Aside from the financial impact, comfort increases the livability of a home or office. Matthew Freeman-Gleason founded the Environmental Home Center in 1991 to provide attractive and affordable methods to create a green home. "This is really a high-performance technology that can, in a very positive way, really change our lives, can make our homes more comfortable, healthier, and less costly to operate."

Developing that technology and increasing visibility of it will help more families like Nymark-Williams find their dream homes without cheating the environment. Case says "If my kids are going to have something left to inherit, then I have to be thoughtful enough to do this."

Stephanie Cartier is pursuing a master's degree in technical communication at the University of Washington.

Images

Top: The Kelley Engineering Center at Oregon State University features an array of "green" building features, including a four-story atrium that brings natural light to interior spaces. The facility is built to LEED "Gold" specifications (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). Photo: OSU

Middle: Washington State University students display their solar home on the National Mall in Washington, DC for the Solar Decathlon competition in October. Photo: Stefano Paltera/Solar Decathlon

Bottom: More architects are leaving the raw materials of the home exposed, like these support beams, which saves the time and money it would take to cover them up. Photo: Stephanie Cartier