Some Thoughts about BuildingEnergy Boston 2024

By Matt Root

As always, NESEA’s BuildingEnergy Boston conference was filled with thoughtful discussions and lots of positive energy.

Two sessions that stood out the most were rooted in what attracts me to the NESEA community. The first was presented by Rachel White, CEO of Byggmeister Design/Build, and Michael Hindle, Principal, Passive To Positive, on The Deep Energy Retrofit Controversy Revisited. As a follow up discussion to last year’s keynote, Why We Stopped Doing Deep Energy Retrofits (presented by  Rachel with Brendan Kavanagh, Byggmeister co-owner), it sparked some lively feedback. The session was passionate, insightful, and thoughtful.

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Materially Better

How do I Reduce Embodied Carbon in My Building?

By Amy Johns, Senior Strategy Consultant

“Embodied carbon” refers to the greenhouse gases released in the manufacturing and transportation of something. As a rule of thumb, if a material requires combustion or melting in its manufacturing (think glass, concrete, steel), it’s high in embodied carbon. Plant-based materials tend to be lower in embodied carbon—or even carbon sequestering, depending on the supply chain. 

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Advocacy is Critical for Advancing Regenerative Materials

This essay by Charley Stevenson, founder and principal of IES, is excerpted from The Regenerative Materials Movement: Dispatches from Practitioners, Researchers, and Advocates (Ecotone Publishing, 2023). Just published, this new book from @International Living Future Institute features diverse thought leaders across the sustainability industry sharing their stories, experience, research and insights through a series of dispatches. Together, they help sketch a bold vision for overcoming the drawbacks of our current materials economy. To learn more, visit https://store.living-future.org/

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Better Materials Managed Digitally

IES’s Matt Root recently presented Better Materials Managed Digitally at the BE+ Building Tech Forum at The Foundry, Cambridge, MA. The theme was Accelerating Change in the Built Environment, with five-minute talks from a diverse group of innovators showcasing building technology advancing  this vision–including our own Red2Green materials management platform.

Click through to watch the video!

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Transparency in Building Materials: An Expert Q&A

By John Nevadomski

An expert Q&A with IES’ Matt Root on transparency & healthy materials.

Thanks to our friends at Pioneer Millworks for showcasing our work at Harvard.

#materiallybetter #sustainability #Red2Green #livingbuildings

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Ten Simple Steps to High Performance Buildings

By Matt Root

The details of better building are well understood, but when considering the variety of options it’s all too easy to get tangled with needless complication. Yes, parametric energy models provide cool visuals, but since we already know the basics, let’s take a look at some ways to increase performance and keep it simple.

Well-established strategies and ambitious but achievable metrics provide us with some key starting points. Every project and each project team is different, and we all know the devil is in, well, the details.

Here are ten easy steps, and we note that there is flexibility in all of them: 

  • Make it airtight: 0.10-0.15 cfm75/sq ft shell area
  • Detail continuous exterior insulation:
    • Aim for a true R15-20ish in the walls
    • Small things can make a difference—such as using thermally broken attachment clips
  • Ensure that there are no major structural thermal bridges
  • Stick to a modest window to wall ratio—24%ish is good
  • Look at higher performance windows
    • You don’t necessarily have to go to triple glazed, but doing so may allow higher window to wall ratios
  • Employ high efficiency air source heat pumps for heating and cooling
    • Air to water heat pumps are also worth a look
  • Specify 85%+ high efficiency ERVs
    • For residential units, ensure that fresh air is routed directly to each bedroom (as opposed to the return side of the fan coils)
    • Minimize ductwork on roof
  • Minimize the DHW loads
  • Location, location, location—and simple here means establishing the best possible building orientation for solar
  • Design for unit compartmentalization (0.30 cfm50/sqft)
    • Whole-building sealing is essential, but don’t overlook sealing up gaps between adjacent residential units

Of course every step won’t be applicable or achievable in all cases, but giving each of these basic ideas due consideration at the outset covers the essential factors for a high performance building.  When we begin a project by getting clear on the goals  and appropriate standards such as these, we provide valuable parameters—creating a solid framework that the design and construction teams can leverage to perform their finest work.

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Finding & Using Healthier Materials: Leveraging Lessons Learned

by Carlye Woodard

When asked to participate in the Living Future 2022 Conference panel presentation on the Volume Certification process IES developed with Williams College, I’ll admit I was skeptical about filling the allotted time with relevant information. Living Building Challenge (LBC) Volume Certification requirements had only recently been agreed upon, and represented a relatively small adjustment to IES’ overall process. The advantages of reusing compliant and audited products from a certifying campus project on subsequent campus projects seemed clear. Incorporating these previously researched and approved products into the campus standard just makes good common sense.

By shifting my thinking to the perspective of the audience—imagining an architect, CM, or college planning director just beginning the process of designing to LBC standards—I recognized that the process we have developed and the perspectives we have earned from multiple projects are perhaps the most valuable information I could provide.  Fortunately, the subject of process and best practices is something any of us on the IES team could talk about for hours!  Realizing the true scope provided a new challenge: condensing the wide angle view into the time constraints of the presentation.  

The materials research process, whether or not it is for a LBC certifying project, can seem complicated and involved, particularly for the uninitiated. The work does not fit neatly into any spreadsheet, which is why Red2Green, our healthier materials management platform, is so essential to our work. The value of being able to track decisions, communications, research progress and results in real time is incalculable in the process of determining as many approvable products as possible, particularly when we can accomplish this prior to spec writing.

By including clear product specificity in the specs, avoiding general performance language, and only including products that have been vetted and approved for use, we provide clarity to the trade partners and subcontractors to help them feel confident that they are understanding and following the goals of the project. As a follow up step, our “pre-submittal” process provides the confirmation that each product considered at this stage has been vetted and meets the requirements of LBC.

Future Williams College projects, including renovations and routine maintenance, will benefit from the investment in LBC for capital projects, which directly inform the updated college standards and improved specs. Each and every subsequent campus project will have a head start with a greater number of healthy, LBC compliant product options, building upon past efforts to meet the college sustainability and healthy environment goals. Stakeholders at the college can be confident that the lessons learned from LBC certifying capital projects are applied throughout the campus.

The advantages of the Volume Certification agreement that Williams College has pursued and begun to implement seem obvious. With the benefit of data and strategy based on years of experience, the process by which we choose, research, approve and document products that meet the healthy materials goals of the college is involved, but has proven to be achievable, effective and replicable. The truth about striving to use healthier building products in every building project—ultimately the goal of a Volume Certification process—is that we now know how to do it well. And in time, perhaps, it will all sound like common sense.

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How Healthier Products Embody Social Justice

IES believes that seeking healthier building products presents substantial opportunities for addressing social, racial and environmental justice issues. Here is why: 

Fenceline Communities

Manufacturing impacts fence line communities, where typically people are poorer, of color and disenfranchised. Health care community and social scientists have noted that your zip code is a more accurate predictor of your quality and quantity of life than almost anything else.

Asking for product ingredients (aka transparency) provides the opportunity to advocate for reduced toxicity. This improves indoor and outdoor air quality (as well as soil and water quality), as we remove chemicals from product ingredients that can result in harmful emissions. By avoiding PVC, for example, we are not only addressing the chloroprene and dioxin in the emissions but the exposure manufacturing workers face in the creation of the plastic, the potential exposure to VOCs for building occupants if those products become unstable (typically due to higher temps) and the exposure at the end of life, when these products are burned (more dioxins) or disposed of.

Workplace Safety

And while the hexavalent chromium used to create desired finishes like shiny chrome furniture legs and faucets might not harm users, it can absolutely impact communities where unintended releases of chromium baths happen, or injure the workers exposed to the toxic baths. When we ask manufacturers for transparency, and we demand labels like C2C Gold (for materials health), Health Product Declarations that omit chemicals of concern (e.g., no Benchmark 1 chemicals) or Declare/Living Product Challenge labels that indicate Red List is avoided, we are sending a powerful signal to the market. 

Occupant Health

When we improve indoor environmental quality, we reduce the incidence of asthma and other toxic impacts causing short and long term health problems for building occupants, and for maintenance, cleaning and other staff. Hospitals and healthcare organizations already recognize the adverse impacts of chemicals to their patients’ wellbeing and recovery, and have created Partners for Healthcare to address them in their procurement. We also know these underlying health conditions make us more vulnerable to disease, like COVID.

Preventing dangerous chemical exposure is an essential step toward improving people’s quality of life and protecting everyone’s health. This begins by asking the right questions and insisting on answers—and voting with our pocketbooks when necessary. Building products are more than building blocks, they represent opportunities to have a positive impact beyond our project boundaries. 

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Flame Retardants: A Cautionary Tale

By Lisa Carey Moore

We all have moments when our personal and professional lives intersect. For me a particularly poignant moment involved a couch and my first Living Building Challenge project. I was just starting research on products, learning about chemicals of concern and, more important, exactly where they are used in building products. Including furniture.

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Building with Healthier Materials: It’s Not Just Concrete and Gypsum Board

by Lisa Carey Moore
According to a 2020 AIA analysis of sustainability trends, 80% of architects would like to specify more sustainable materials. Yet, the study also showed that only one in three architects believe they are now meeting this responsibility. While there are many opportunities to succeed within architectural sections, specialty members of the design team can help achieve transformation goals too, including those involved in lab and commercial kitchen design, as well as with all major trades from landscaping to communications.

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