Students at Explore Charter School in Brooklyn

Recently, Director of Programs, Tiffany Broyles Yost and I were invited to speak about sustainability in the classroom at Explore Charter School, a K-8 public school in Flatbush, Brooklyn. At Urban Green Council, most of our educational events are geared towards building professionals, so it was a nice change to meet with middle school students newly introduced to the world of green building.

We took the opportunity to speak with the students about USGBC’s Center for Green Schools’ Green Apple initiative to provide healthy and environmentally responsible schools. We wanted to discuss how schools with clean air and plentiful access to daylight have more engaged students and that better acoustics and more comfortable classrooms enhance productivity and alertness.

This information was not news to the 7^th and 8^th graders at Explore. Our first question to them was, “Why does it matter if your school is green?” The first student to answer said it mattered because schools need to be a healthy environment, so children can learn and take care of the planet for the future. I was impressed! As we presented images of “green” schools, the students immediately recognized the sustainable features, including everything from skylights to bicycle racks. The students also spoke of the difference between their school’s current location, in a large building with plenty of operable windows, and its previous location, inside an “old warehouse” with fewer and smaller windows. They described how hot it had been, which made it difficult to concentrate, or worse, made them tired.

Throughout our presentation, Tiffany and I emphasized the importance of conserving resources and how “using less” is really the first step to going green. By simply turning off lights, students can help lower the school’s energy use. The students also offered several ideas for renewable energy sources, citing biomass and geothermal among the more common solar and wind. To end our discussion, we talked about some innovative systems, such as soccer balls that generate power, solar backpacks, and energy producing sneakers. The response was fantastic!

In addition to being a nice change from the office, our visit to Explore was an extremely encouraging experience. The students already had a firm grasp on sustainable practices and how they can positively impact their environment. They are now more aware of the benefits of green buildings and will inevitably bring that knowledge home to their families. As they continue through school, they’ll want to attend green colleges and eventually work in green offices, creating a demand for sustainable building. That’s a good sign.

Our firm has come across a way to substantially lower energy use in many commercial buildings using a simple, readily implemented measure. This observation arose from our work on two large energy conservation efforts for NYC office buildings.  The first was NYC’s Energy Conservation Capital program (the largest municipal program at that time) highlighted in this 1980s article. The other was our more recent effort to identify and implement energy efficiency projects in high-rise commercial buildings in New York City (August issue of ASHRAE Journal).  Despite the intervention of almost three decades, at least one large wasteful concern persists: the excessive amounts of outside air most buildings draw in through defective outside air dampers.

Though not always inexpensive, this is a relatively straightforward issue to correct and one that most building owners and managers should consider.

In one major office building, after the outside air quantities were field tested, we found that leaking dampers allowed several times more outside air in than that recommended by ASHRAE Standard 62.1-2007 (see Test Building 1 in Table #4 below, taken from our ASHRAE article). Even with ostensibly closed dampers, the leakage rate exceeded 40% in this building. Testing in subsequent buildings confirmed that a large majority of the ubiquitous 1960’s and 70’s commercial office buildings are over-ventilated, resulting in wasted energy, some for heating, but mostly for cooling.  Many of these dampers date from the original construction of the building.  Table #4 shows the results of air testing of a number of other properties.

Table #4: Excess outside air is common in older large, commercial buildings

If a majority of Manhattan office buildings have excess outside air quantities similar to Table #4, installing new dampers would significantly reduce wasteful energy use as well as overall energy costs.

Another measure connected with curbing excess outside air is demand controlled ventilation (DCV), a process for reducing the cooling and heating costs associated with excess air. It has wide ranging applications not only in office buildings but in hospitals, recreation spaces, auditoriums, museums and many other facilities. The DCV technique employs equipment that measures the freshness of air in a building, typically done by measuring carbon dioxide (CO2). Although typically associated with global warming, in this case CO2 turns out to be an excellent proxy for determining appropriate ventilation conditions. (Because people breathe CO2 out, the concentration of CO2 reflects the number of people in a space.) Typically outside air in New York City is 400 to 450 ppm of CO2. An occupied air environment is normally considered “fresh” when the CO2 level is less than 1100 ppm.  Clearly, unless tightly-closing dampers are in place, DCV will not be fully effective since it relies on being able to stop outside air exchange when ventilation is not needed.  Using Test Building 1 as an example, Figure #2 shows the extent to which installing low-leakage dampers can be key to the effective use of DCV.

Figure #2: Test Building 1 proportional outside air savings; low-leakage dampers vs. DCV.

Unfortunately, some dampers constructed by local shops are not always engineered appropriately.  The linkages and damper motors often do not properly close the large damper assemblies and the damper blades become deformed, further limiting closure.  Outside air dampers must be installed on a modular basis, with appropriately sized damper motors and linkages, to provide adequate torque to close the dampers leaktight. High quality dampers, properly installed and adjusted, are the key to reducing outside air to appropriate levels and employing DCV effectively.

In his quirky but groundbreaking book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Buckminster Fuller pointed out that if you are aboard a sinking ship, even a floating piano top can look extremely promising.  But Fuller also notes that this doesn’t mean a piano top is the ideal design for a flotation device.

To continue the metaphor, in the absence of anything like a global plan to combat the planetary climate crisis, we seem to be searching the horizon for piano tops, forcing ourselves into a series of more and more uncomfortable decisions regarding energy, resources and the ecology that supports us.  In almost every sphere of the environmental movement, you see strategies once considered beyond the pale under serious consideration–only because the options grow worse and worse each day.  Should we allow hydro-fracturing for shale gas if it keeps us from using the even more damaging Canadian tar sands?  If we could eliminate mountaintop removal to extract coal by ramping up our nuclear power output shouldn’t we consider doing that?  Even if tomorrow there were some miraculous global compact to transition to 100% renewable energy, these questions would need to be resolved to determine how we bridge to that desired outcome.

A recent addition to this growing list of uncomfortable strategies under consideration is geoengineering: the science of intentionally altering the earth’s atmosphere to curb the rise in average global temperature.  As we continue to burn fossil fuels at a breakneck pace and as negative feedback loops in the global system (like the growing seasonal reductions in the polar ice cap or the release of methane from melting permafrost grow worse much more quickly than expected, a growing chorus advocates for a dramatic response: injecting sulfate particles into the atmosphere that will reflect significant amounts of the sun’s heat, thereby slowing the rise in global temperature.  What might once have sounded liked science fiction is being studied and discussed by reasonable, intelligent people with no particular ax to grind.

A few weeks back Michael Specter at the New Yorker did a wonderful job of summing up the recent scientific activity in the field, and there have been other discussions of the subject at Scientific American and Wired.  Yale 360 surveyed the pros and cons here.

The basic idea is to mimic a major volcanic eruption, without the big bang and the earthquakes.  When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, huge quantities of sulfur dioxide were released into the atmosphere and a period of global cooling followed.  Scientists surmise that a continued infusion of sulfates would result in long-term cooling of global average temperature.  Tinkering with the earth’s atmosphere is not for the faint of heart.  Somehow filling the atmosphere with sulfates would need to happen every year, in perpetuity, or the cooling effects would cease.  Perhaps more importantly, many are concerned that even discussing the concept of geoengineering will give those that are already complacent about climate change an excuse to ignore the subject entirely under the assumption that a simple technical fix will be found.  Others have pointed out that simply reflecting the sun’s heat while continuing to pump CO2 into the atmosphere will do nothing to curb acidification of our oceans, one of the most dreadful and largely ignored impacts of the current climate crisis.

Ultimately, what should give us pause about geoengineering are the things we don’t know.  The atmosphere is too complex a system to think that we can start mucking with it and have anything like a comprehensive sense of the repercussions.  For instance, many fear that geoengineering has the potential to seriously disrupt the Indian monsoon.  The list of things we don’t know about how the atmosphere interacts with our planetary ecology is almost unfathomably long.  I was reminded of this when someone recently described to me the relatively recent discovery of ballooning spiders, which cast their gossamer into the air like a sail and are carried off by the wind to new domains.  These spiders have been found upwards of 16,000 feet above sea level and travel many hundreds of miles. Will geoengineering impact this species?  I doubt anyone really knows.  And how many others are there like them?  Or consider the emerging understanding about how microbes in our stratosphere impact rainfall, disease and climate?  How will geoengineering affect this almost unknown ecology?

Humans have a tendency to assume that what we know is all there is to know, or close to it. Ultimately, the thing that should make us wary of geoengineering is the same thing that should lead us to slow our emission of greenhouse gases, because we don’t really know how it will impact our otherwise stable global climate.

Ellen Honigstock, a member of the Urban Green Council Chapter Task Force for LEED Regionalization 2012, shares their initial findings on recommendations for LEED RPC 2012:

The USGBC recognizes the importance of projects that address region-specific environmental issues in their design; these Regional Priority credits were first introduced in the LEED 2009 rating systems.

Urban Green Council, along with all the other chapters of the USGBC, is currently evaluating which credits to prioritize in LEED 2012 for the five boroughs in New York City and Rockland and Westchester Counties.

Starting in late summer 2011, the Urban Green Council Chapter Task Force for LEED Regionalization 2012 began to meet monthly.  Shortly thereafter, the Chapter Task Force (CTF) identified five general categories of regional priority issues: Water, Air, Energy, Ground and Resources.

Focusing first on what the important issues should be rather than where they might occur, the CTF compiled a comprehensive list of 17 possible priority issues. These priorities were compared with the ones identified in LEED 2009 Regionalization in order to maintain as much continuity as possible.  The list was also compared with the recommendations in the Urban Green Council Green Codes Task Force Report to identify which environmental issues would benefit most from green incentives, rather than from proposed legislation.

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Green codes continue to fly off the City Council’s legislative shelf like bagels on a NYC morning. We can’t even keep track and we helped draft them!

Last Wednesday, the City Council gave New York a New Year’s present by prohibiting the sale, offer for sale, or installation of carpets and carpet cushions that contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in excess of the Green Label Plus standards from the Carpet & Rug Institute. Implementing the Task Force proposal Health & Toxicity 1: Limit Harmful Emissions From Carpets, we believe this law is another first in the nation for a municipality. While many jurisdictions have standards on paints and coatings, carpets haven’t received the same attention.

But they should. For those who aren’t familiar with VOCs, they are a class of carcinogenic chemicals behind “new car smell” that cause a host of health problems ranging from respiratory ailments to major organ damage. While paints and coatings off-gas VOCs very quickly, it takes longer for carpets to release their VOCs thus increasing the likelihood that end users will be impacted. Interestingly, the vast majority of U.S. carpet manufacturers meet the Green Label Plus standards — the problem is with imported carpets. So, in one package we have a new law that improves the health of New Yorkers and also increases the competitiveness of American carpet manufacturers.

For ongoing updates on the status of the GCTF proposals, check out our Codes Status Report.

Catherine is the President of Luthin Associates, an energy management consulting firm that proactively manages energy procurement and sustainability services for their clients.

With the passage of Local Law 43 by the City Council last year, a minimum of 2% biodiesel must be blended into all grades of heating oil – #2, #4, and #6 beginning in October 2012. Local Law 43 also requires that the sulfur content in #4 heating oil be reduced from 3,000 parts per million (ppm) to 1,500 ppm (a NYS law also passed last year requires that sulfur in #2 heating oil be reduced to 15 ppm by July 2012).

This came about because of New York City’s poor air quality – the Fed gives the city a failing grade. The NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has concluded that buildings using the dirtiest heating oils—#4 and #6—are a major cause of the city’s high air-pollution levels. Further, the hospitalization rate of New York City children with asthma (which is aggravated by pollution) is twice the national average.  This caused the city to look into cleaner alternative fuels for heating. One solution? A bit of biodiesel in the heating oil mix.

Biodiesel is a 100% renewable fuel that is made from domestic soy oil, recycled restaurant grease and numerous other sustainable “feedstocks.” Biodiesel contains zero sulfur and greatly reduces air emissions when blended with traditional heating oil.

Here are some of the most common questions on biofuels, and answers to them:

Where do I purchase these fuels?
By the 2012 heating season, when the legislation kicks in, all of these products are expected to be widely available. However, biodiesel is competitively priced and readily available today. All bioheat oil sold in New York must meet ASTM biodiesel spec D6751 and heating oil spec D396.

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For years, boiler service people have been saying (in strictest confidence, of course) that #6 fuel oil would soon be banned by the NYC Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP). In December, 2009, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) released a report, The Bottom of the Barrel, (co-sponsored and co-authored by Urban Green Council) calling for just that, and soon after, the Green Codes Task Force did the same in recommendation HT 9, Phase Out Dirty Boiler Fuels. After a few twists and turns, it now appears to be happening through a local law passed last August and new boiler rules on which the DEP will hold a hearing next week. Why is this good, how did we get here, and what will it mean for building owners and operators? First, it’s good because #6 is the dirtiest oil available, and when consumed in even a well-maintained boiler, produces substantially more particulate emissions than either lighter and cleaner #2 oil or natural gas. These particulates, especially the ones that are smaller than 2.5 micrometers (in lay terms, that means very, very small), are a serious pollutant, since they readily penetrate our lungs and come to rest there, irritating and poisoning the tissue and giving rise to problems from asthma to lung cancer. However, #6 has historically been cheaper than other fuels, so it is now burned in about 10,000 of New York City’s larger buildings.

Getting rid of #6 will remove more particulate pollution from our air than would banning all the cars, trucks, and buses on our roads.

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Data is fundamental, but not always inspiring.

I’m always interested in efforts to communicate the environmental issues of our time that go beyond the raw data- through graphics, narrative, etc.  From the incredible John Thackara we learn of the Madrid In The Air project.  An effort to make the silent, invisible air pollutants in their community visible, and beautifully so.

I would love to see a similar project for the NYC region where we would presumably find a direct correlation between our air quality and our highways, our paved areas, our forests and parks. And the really exciting part would be the unexpected- the data that doesn’t track with our common sense understanding of the issues- and figuring out why.