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US Prisons
Tuesday, 08 March 2011
U.S. Prisons There's no excuse not to green your lifestyle. Unless you're locked up in prison, that is. Fortunately for inmates, some prisons are investing resources into greening their grey-and-white facades. What goes on in United States prisons matters, especially since the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world. The U.S. has almost a...

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Green Roofs
Thursday, 09 September 2010
Green Roofs The 2010 World Green Roof Congress goes to London this September! Green roofs have been a subject of conversation in the environmental world for a long time. They have the ability to change a bland, unused, rooftop, into a beautiful, lush, exciting, and green space secretly tucked into an urban atmosphere. 2010 has been a great year for...

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Mandated Energy Accounting For Commercial Buildings
Thursday, 03 June 2010
Mandated Energy Accounting For Commercial Buildings We live in a society focused on statistics. We measure every conceivable statistic on sports from baseball to our everyday use of gas in our cars. Yet for some reason we seemed shocked and worried that it has finally reached a level where energy accounting is becoming a mandated requirement for commercial buildings. Yes, here in...

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Winning Sports Arenas
Thursday, 21 January 2010
Winning Sports Arenas With 7 wins and 29 losses this season so far, the Minnesota Timberwolves have one of the NBA’s worst records, but their Target Center Arena is an environmental slam dunk. In 2009, the Timberwolves unveiled the first green roof in professional sports, which, at 2.5 acres, is also the fifth largest green roof in the United States. The roof cost $5.3 million to...

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Airports
Tuesday, 03 November 2009
Airports Airports, it’s time to recycle! I recently returned home from a cross-country trip to Michigan, spending an excessive amount of time in several different airports. Due to the time and circumstances of my layovers, I was forced to have my coffee and meals of the day at a couple of different hubs and purchase some reading material to entertain the delay. Like any good...

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Green Building Progress at the Federal Level
Wednesday, 01 July 2009
Green Building Progress at the Federal Level Sustainable building has been around for centuries, but it hasn’t been until recently that green building practices have become a priority for new construction in the United States. One of the most notable examples of the rise in green building in the US is at the federal level. Not only have a few significant pieces of legislation passed for the green building...

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Benchmark Review of Your Utilities
Tuesday, 16 June 2009
 You Have Performed a Benchmark Review of Your Utilities—Now What? My last article explained how to benchmark your utility bills so that you can determine if your building is energy efficient or not. People often assume that their building’s HVAC system was designed by an engineer to operate efficiently so what need is there to benchmark energy usage? In California, buildings are required to be designed per...

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Determining Your Commercial Buildings Energy Efficiency
Wednesday, 20 May 2009
 Determining Your Commercial Building’s Energy Efficiency People are becoming more concerned about the cost of their commercial space and many companies are now looking beyond the base rent and wanting to ensure that the building they buy or lease is energy efficient. Many tenants today want to know what the total cost of their lease is going to be, and they seek to determine beforehand all of the...

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Understanding Your Commercial Building’s Metrics
Friday, 08 May 2009
Understanding Your Commercial Buildings Metrics My last article provided a simple way to measure your utility consumption by calculating your building’s kilowatt hours per square feet per year. One tip to help make the process of gathering your utility information easier is to use the free tools found at most utility companies. As an example, Pacific Gas & Electric provides free commercial...

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International Green Building
Friday, 27 March 2009
International Green Building As our world moves to a deeper shade of green, environment-focused opportunities continue to unfold. In the United States, a huge shift is being made in the design world, where many new buildings are taking the green approach. Examples of platinum-rated buildings granted by the U.S. Green Building Councils’ LEED rating system can be found...

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My Energy Audit
Monday, 23 March 2009
My Energy Audit Last week I asked John Vialard of my local Marshall County, Indiana electric cooperative to do an energy audit of my house. It’s an inventory of a home’s energy output, followed by some energy-saving solutions—usually a free service to utility customers. I learned that while some energy innovations are great, simply cutting back makes the...

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Buildings Going Green LEED Platinum Rating Highlights
Friday, 20 March 2009
Buildings Going Green: LEED Platinum Rating Highlights At a time when the environment and money-saving incentives are a priority, it only seems appropriate that green building is receiving its fair share of attention. Across the globe, examples of green design are surfacing from college campuses, to corporate office buildings, to public museums, to individual residences. Even in the...

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Gyms Get Sustainable
Friday, 21 November 2008
Gyms Get Sustainable! Green gyms are popping up all over the world. It's no surprise that yet another kind of building is “going green”. How are green gyms any different? A unique and key feature of green gyms is that they can actually use the energy generated from people exercising and use that to power their facilities. The problem most health clubs...

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Passive Solar Design
Tuesday, 21 October 2008
Passive Solar Design An Easy Way to Green Your Home Never heard of passive solar design? Passive solar design is just the ability of a house or building to utilize the sun to either heat or cool a house simply by its direction or shape. By constructing a building according to very simple design standards, homeowners are able to capitalize on the sun's energy and virtually eliminate the need for a thermostat...

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Green Building on the Rise
Wednesday, 08 October 2008
Green Building on the Rise As our country continues to move to a deeper shade of green, so are our buildings. In the United States, more than 2,000,000 acres of open space, wildlife habitat, and wetlands are developed each year. This development also accounts for almost half of the total energy consumed by our country. Green building aims to increase the efficiency...

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Tiny House Movement
Tuesday, 07 October 2008
Tiny House Movement Considering the long-standing American tradition of “bigger is better”, one of the last things you'd expect in the U.S. is the growing trend of tiny houses. In the last few years, it's become so big that people are officially calling it the “Tiny House Movement”. Tiny homes range anywhere between 65 square feet and 750 square feet. So why...

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Green Facts

  • Americans throw away more than 120 million cell phones each year, which contribute 60,000 tons of waste to landfills annually.

  • It takes 6,000,000 trees to make 1 year's worth of tissues for the world.

  • Due to tiger poaching, habitat destruction, and other human-tiger conflicts, tigers now number around 3,200—a decrease in population by about 70% from 100 years ago.

  • Turning off the tap when brushing your teeth can save as much as 10 gallons a day per person.

  • Refrigerators built in 1975 used 4 times more energy than current models.

  • Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year.

  • Glass can be recycled over and over again without ever wearing down.

  • A single quart of motor oil, if disposed of improperly, can contaminate up to 2,000,000 gallons of fresh water.

  • Every week about 20 species of plants and animals become extinct.

  • An aluminum can that is thrown away instead of recycled will still be a can 500 years from now!

  • 77% of people who commute to work by car drive alone.

  • Recycling 100 million cell phones can save enough energy to power 18,500 homes in the U.S. for a year.

  • Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial fleet of airplanes every 3 months

  • A laptop consumes five times less electricity than a desktop computer.

  • In California homes, about 10% of energy usage is related to TVs, DVRs, cable and satellite boxes, and DVD players.

  • You will save 100 pounds of carbon for each incandescent bulb that you replace with a compact fluorescent bulb (CFL), over the life of the bulb.

  • You will save 300 pounds of carbon dioxide for every 10,000 miles you drive if you always keep your car’s tires fully inflated.

  • Rainforests are being cut down at the rate of 100 acres per minute.

  • Recycling aluminum saves 95% of the energy used to make the material from scratch.

  • Bamboo absorbs 35% more carbon dioxide than equivalent stands of trees.

  • Americans use 100 million tin and steel cans every day.

  • Nudge your thermostat up two degrees in the summer and down two degrees in the winter to prevent 2,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere.

  • Less than 1% of electricity in the United States is generated from solar power.

  • Shaving 10 miles off of your weekly driving pattern can eliminate about 500 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions a year.

  • American workers spend an average of 47 hours per year commuting through rush hour traffic. This adds up to 23 billion gallons of gas wasted in traffic each year.

  • If every U.S. household turned the thermostat down by 10 degrees for seven hours each night during the cold months, and seven hours each weekday, it would prevent nearly gas emissions.

  • You’ll save two pounds of carbon for every 20 glass bottles that you recycle.

  • Current sea ice levels are at least 47% lower than they were in 1979.

  • Washing your clothes in cold or warm instead of hot water saves 500 pounds of carbon dioxide a year, and drying your clothes on a clothesline six months out of the year would save another 700 pounds.

  • Recycling for one year at Stanford University saved the equivalent of 33,913 trees and the need for 636 tons of iron ore, coal, and limestone.

  • Recycling 1 million laptop computers can save the amount of energy used by 3,657 homes in the U.S. over the course of a year.

  • For every 38,000 bills consumers pay online instead of by mail, 5,058 pounds of greenhouse gases are avoided and two tons of trees are preserved.

  • A tree that provides a home with shade from the sun can reduce the energy required to run the air conditioner and save an additional 200 to 2,000 pounds of carbon over its lifetime.

  • The World Health Organization estimates that 2 million people die prematurely worldwide every year due to air pollution.

  • 82 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. come from burning fossil fuels.

  • One recycled aluminum can will save enough energy to run a 100-watt bulb for 20 hours, a computer for 3 hours, or a TV for 2 hours.

  • A steel mill using recycled scrap reduces related water pollution, air pollution, and mining wastes by about 70%.

  • States with bottle deposit laws have 35-40% less litter by volume.

  • In the United States, automobiles produce over 20 percent of total carbon emissions. Walk or bike and you'll save one pound of carbon for every mile you travel.