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Safe Trip to Eden: Ten Steps to Save Planet Earth from the Global Warming Meltdown David Steinman See book keywords and concepts

Seattle is the "ultimate source for green building materials" with revenues that have grown 40 percent a year since 2001. Carrefour, IKEA, and Lowe's are all creating business models that aim to support companies' wood products only from well-managed logging lands. Visit them at www.car-refour.com, www.ikea.com, and www.lowes.com. Endura Wood Products offers a wide variety of certified and rediscovered woods and wood products for homes and business. Visit www.endurawood.com.

The Secret History of the War on Cancer Devra Davis See book keywords and concepts

The green building revolution makes clear the power of the purse to create markets. In Texas, at the University of Pittsburgh and throughout the Kaiser Permanente system in California, those in charge of buying materials and keeping buildings running have become the next generation of environmental champions. The world's largest firm, Citibank, requires all its facilities to reduce their ecological footprint and adopt the Equator principles—a mandate for the corporate world to promote sustainable finance and operations.

Formerly known as hell with the lid off, Pittsburgh today is a center of green building, chemistry, health care and operations in my own hospital system—all built to have a smaller footprint. Television programming of dizzying arrays, luxury and regular magazines and new web sites are proliferating to promote green living options that are not just for the true believers. Yes, such activities appear in the midst of commercials for Hummers and SUVs, but those are dropping faster than lead balloons.

Today, Poretto and Yeoman are enthusiastic advocates for green building well beyond the medical world. Poretto is overseeing the construction of green, hurricane-proof homes on one of the outer banks of North Carolina. Yeoman heads up a research and education group for the National Association of Educational Procurement, helping higher educational institutions reduce their wastes and maximize their cost savings while reducing the amount of natural resources they use up.

One green building does not an entire revolution make. Still, it's a start. The University of Texas and Citibank are part of a growing national and international movement. Until 1996, in many industrial countries the burning of medical trash was not controlled at all. Mixtures of discarded plastics and hospital garbage were routinely burned in local boilers. When polyvinylchloride plastics are heated they are transformed. In addition to routine gases like carbon dioxide, burned plastic can give off the first gas to be banned in chemical warfare, chlorine.

The largest green building in the Southwest, the $42 million structure features a bookstore with cafe, a large auditorium, and state-of-the-art modular movable labs and teaching space for close to a thousand people. As one of the largest such buildings in the country today, the eight-story school of nursing gets one-fourth of its energy from the hottest free source in the solar system—the sun—and requires less than half the energy of a conventional building overall.

Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century Alex Steffen See book keywords and concepts

To cap it all off, all buildings will be required to meet or exceed a silver rating from the U.S. green building Council's (USGBC) LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification program, a set of rankings that indicates the environmental sustainability of a building. If what's built bears any resemblance to the plans, Southeast False Creek will be the greenest neighborhood in one of the greenest cities in the world. More People, Fewer Cars ¦mm Folks in Vancouver are giving up their cars.

According to the site, "Green building is growing in popularity with good reason—it makes sense. Building green is also about adventure and exploration —finding those one-of-a-kind pieces of salvaged wood or lighting fixtures that add character to your living room, or learning new ways to save energy and save water. Your decisions help drive sustainability in the marketplace, ultimately creating more cost effective green product choices." G/Rated Home Remodeling Guide: Designing and Building a More Sustainable Home (G/Rated, 2005) ecotrust.

SR E> JF MMMM resources Green Remodeling: Changing the World One Room at a Time by David Johnston and Kim Master (New Society Publishers, 2004) If you want to bore down into the underlying principles of green building and really know that you're making the right choices in your remodel job, Johnston and Master's book is an essential resource. There are the normal to-do lists and tips here, but there is also a depth of carefully explained research into why certain decisions are greener than others.

Sustainable building materials have historically been more expensive and more difficult to acquire than traditional building materials, but this has been changing rapidly in the last few years, as knowledge and demand have increased. green building has begun to shed its early "granola" aesthetic, giving way to a much wider variety of styles Flooring mm Reclaimed Wood Every home tells a story. Some chapters of the story were written before we moved in, but others are ours to compose.

William McDonough is mainly known for shepherding green building into the American public mainstream, but his partnership with German chemist Michael Braungart has been helping to change the way small things are made. Their Cradle to Cradle (C2.C) protocol, outlined in their book Cradle to Cradle, is the most thorough set of guidelines available for the voluntary certification of sustainable products, and among the best set of guidelines for making things that are high performing, efficient, and harmless to delicate ecologies in the air and the human body.

Studies undertaken by John Holtzclaw of the Sierra Club and Jennifer Henry of the U.S. green building Council have shown that people who live in drafty old homes in compact neighborhoods use less energy (and spew less pollution) than even those suburbanites with new green homes and efficient appliances. How could that be? How could an apartment in New York, where you can see (and taste) the grime, be greener than an Energy Star house on a wooded lot? The answer: Density is efficient.

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