Greenovation: Eco-Certified

  • When doing home improvement projects, WaterSense, EnergyStar, GREENGUARD, and FSC certifications are some to keep an eye out for. (Photo by Michelle Miller-Freeck, courtesy of FEMA)

When you’re planning a home
improvement project, you can
be overwhelmed with decisions
about the right materials, the
right quality, and the right
design. Trying to keep it eco-
friendly on top of everything
else just adds to the confusion.
Lester Graham reports it can be
as simple as finding a label:

Transcript

When you’re planning a home
improvement project, you can
be overwhelmed with decisions
about the right materials, the
right quality, and the right
design. Trying to keep it eco-
friendly on top of everything
else just adds to the confusion.
Lester Graham reports it can be
as simple as finding a label:

Julia Weinert and her boyfriend like the idea of making their place nice, but even something as simple as painting causes concerns.

JW: “We want to support environmentally friendly options and we just don’t want to be smelling it for three days out and have to be running the fans. We just want it to be convenient and we think it would be an easy thing to do.”

LG: “Well, you’re in luck. We’re at the local Home Depot and we just happen to have Greenovation.TV’s Matt Grocoff here. Matt, you’ve got some advice for her.”

MG: “And it’s really, really simple. When you’re trying to find a paint that’s healthy for you or another product, you shouldn’t have to be a chemist when you go to the store. There’s a really simple thing you can look for. Just look for the simple GREENGUARD label. GREENGUARD is an independent organization that lets you know with a simple label that that product is safe for you.”

So, none of the really strong paint smells that mean polluting chemicals are being released. GREENGUARD Environmental Institute sets indoor air standards for products and buildings. Julia and I sniffed a can of paint WITH the GREENGUARD label, and then one without.

LG: “I’ll let you sniff first.”

JW: Okay. Oh! Yeah! Oh my gosh! That is ridiculous. I mean, it smells so much stronger than this one. You can’t even smell that one compared to this one.”

A gallon of paint with the GREENGUARD label DOES cost a few dollars more, maybe as much as ten bucks.

Matt then herded us to another part of the store, the plumbing section, where Julia and I were confronted by all kinds of shiny chrome and brass faucets.

JW: “There’s a whole wall, a whole aisle of faucets here and I just don’t know which ones to look for.”

LG: “So, Matt. You got any fancy labels here?”

MG: “Absolutely. Again, if you’re looking for that eco-friendly option, a way to save yourself some money and some water, it’s simple. Just look for the WaterSense label. The EPA does EnergyStar labels for appliances. The EPA also does WaterSense label for plumbing fixtures.”

WaterSense means the fixture – whether a faucet, shower head or toilet – will use less water but still works well.

As we wandered over to the lumber section of the store, Matt told us the last label he wanted to show us is the most ignored label – and it might just be the most important one.

MG: “FSC stands for the Forest Stewardship Council. And what that means is they’ve made a commitment that they’re not going to be tearing down forest and clear-cutting them in order for you to build some bookshelves in your home. This is one of the biggest causes of greenhouse gases is that we don’t have these forests capturing this carbon any more. Instead of having to have a PhD in forest management, you can just simply look for a piece of wood that has an FSC label on it.”

So, labels. Julia says, works for her.

JW: “It’s going to be great, taking my boyfriend around the store and showing him all these cool things I can get to make our home improvements a little more cheap and environmentally-friendly.”

LG: “Alright remind me, go over this again. What am I supposed to be looking for?”

MG: “It’s very simple. If you’re looking for paint, look for GREENGUARD. For plumbing, WaterSense. For lumber, FSC, Forest Stewardship Council certified.”

LG: “That’s Matt Grocoff, Greenovation.TV. Thanks again, Matt.

MG: “Lester, it’s always a pleasure. Thank you.”

For The Environemnt Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Related Links

Lessons From a Skyscraper

  • Shawn Allee gets a tour of a roof atop the Willis Tower from co-owner John Huston. The skyscraper will undergo a environmental rehab that will include replacing windows, adding wind turbines and cutting overall energy use. (Photo courtesy of Shawn Allee)

You might have heard the Sears Tower
in Chicago is now called the Willis
Tower. But there’s more changing for
America’s tallest skyscraper. Soon,
the Willis Tower will start an environmental
facelift that could cut eighty-percent
of its energy use. You might wonder:
what could a homeowner learn from what
the Willis Tower is doing? Shawn Allee thought it wouldn’t hurt to ask,
and went on a tour for the answer:

Transcript

You might have heard the Sears Tower
in Chicago is now called the Willis
Tower. But there’s more changing for
America’s tallest skyscraper. Soon,
the Willis Tower will start an environmental
facelift that could cut eighty-percent
of its energy use. You might wonder:
what could a homeowner learn from what
the Willis Tower is doing? Shawn Allee thought it wouldn’t hurt to ask,
and went on a tour for the answer:

One of the co-owners of the Willis Tower is John Huston. He says there’s plenty for
people to learn from the tower’s green rehab plans. To start – we’re at the base of the
tower, and we’re craning our necks up.

“We’re facing north. We’re looking at a hundred and ten floors, so that’s 16
thousand windows in total.”

Huston says those windows are the old single-paned kind common in 1974 – back
when the Willis Tower was finished. In the summer, the windows let heat in, and
during the winter, they let heat escape. And that black metal you see in photos? It
does the same thing.

Huston: “The building is clad in aluminum if you went outside in the winter, you
certainly wouldn’t want to wear an aluminum ski jacket.”

Allee: “You’d freeze.”

Huston: “Exactly.”

So, Huston says the first thing they’re gonna do at the Willis Tower is what he calls
“tighten the building’s envelope.” It means insulating the building from the outer
walls and replacing the windows – all sixteen thousand of ’em.

“It’s an incredible job. That’s what we have to change in order to conserve the 80%
of energy that we anticipate doing.”

Huston says energy consultants pretty much give homeowners the same energy
advice. He says, the nice thing is, once you do that it’s easier to figure out what’s
next.

“Watch your step.”

Huston takes me into the guts of the Willis Tower. This is where it’s heated and
cooled. He says since the building’s gonna waste less energy, he won’t need such
powerful equipment.

Huston: “A lot of what’s in here will disappear or shrink.”

Allee: “So what is this?”

Huston: “This is an electric boiler. It provides hot water to heat the building. Each
one of these consumes enough electricity to heat and light a town of 6,000 people.
We have eight of these throughout the building. It’s not just the boilers. in this
section behind us, you have all the pumps that move hot water throughout the
building. Each one of those pumps is hooked to an electric motor, and 50% of them
can be eliminated.”

Huston says the take-away here is that once a building requires less energy to heat
and cool it, the other savings can kind of cascade from that.

But there’s another lesson homeowners can learn from the Willis Tower’s green
rehab.

The architecture firm that planned this project is called Smith and Gill. Gordan
Gill tells me, their work was made easier by the fact the Willis Tower owners keep
records of their power use.

“When you’re designing something new, you’re predicting the performance of
something. Here, you can actually test it, since you have records of how much
energy was spent, how much energy was used – you know where you stand, exactly.
And so now, you can do mock-ups and tests and things like that.”

Gill says that’s a good reason for homeowners to hold onto their power and heating
bills, too. He says if you’re confident in your actual costs and likely savings, you’re
more likely to follow through with your rehab project.

“And that’s important because you’re avoiding the obsolescence of these buildings,
and I think that’s true from everything like Willis to people’s houses.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Recycling Nuclear Waste

Several Midwest universities will be part of a controversial
effort to improve the recycling of nuclear waste. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

Several Midwest universities will be part of a controversial effort to
improve the recycling of nuclear waste. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Chuck Quirmbach reports:


Spent nuclear fuel is piling up at many commercial nuclear power plants around the nation.
Scientists know how to re-process and re-use the fuel. but that’s currently not done
in the U.S. nuclear industry.


Michael Corradini is an Engineering Physics Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He says the re-use of nuclear waste can be improved… and he contends this is the moment to do
it.


“And with the need for energy… particularly electrical energy… this is a way to more efficiently
deal with our spent fuel.”


Wisconsin and other Big Ten universities with nuclear engineering programs will team up with
the University of Chicago for a recycling project at the Argonne National Lab in Illinois. But an
anti-nuclear group contends that trying to recycle more nuclear waste makes it more likely some
spent fuel will be made into bombs. The university scientists say safeguards will be taken to
prevent that from happening.


For the GLRC, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

Related Links