Green Salad Dressing???

I just saw a great video post from author and psychologist Barry Schwartz on the Paradox of Choice, and how in our western society the sheer number of choices we have are more paralyzing then they are liberating. When he talked about the fact that we have 175 different kinds of salad dressing available at the grocery store and the dilemma this causes for some people in making a choice I couldn’t help but think about the sheer number of different green building choices and programs that are available today.

It’s not 175 yet, but herein lies what I think is one of the greatest challenges in the green building movement to date. Now that green building is no longer a niche market in our industry how do we tell what’s real and what’s greenwash? More importantly, how does our consumer? I did a quick search for green building certification programs and just on the first two pages I came up with a pretty long list… NAHB Green Home Building Guidelines, LEED for Homes, The ANSI ICC National Green Building Standard, Energy Star, Northwest Energy Star, Earthcraft Homes, Builder’s Challenge, Earth Advantage…and this doesn’t even start to take into account the number of local and regional programs that add an even greater number of programs and choices for builders and consumers.

I can see it in the eyes of some of the builders I talk with and with many of the clients as well. They’re paralyzed with choice and in their inability to make what they perceive to be the absolute right decision they make none at all. The guiding principles of green building are pretty concrete. When I look at the criteria of all of the different green home certification programs the same principles; Lot Design, Resource Conservation, Energy Efficiency, Water Conservation, Indoor Environmental Quality, and Operation and Maintenance are the core of all of them. Even the Chinese Ministry of Construction recently released their own green building evaluation standard and their categories…yep…you guessed it, the same six basic criteria areas.

The differences lie only in what is considered to be the right amount of energy, resource and water savings, which air quality standard must be followed for a product to be considered low-VOC, what the acceptable percentage of permeable pavement should be installed and other hair splitting that only seems to undermine the whole process. I find so many people firmly entrenched in the belief that the program they use is the best and all others are unacceptable that they refuse to even look at another program.

So how do we keep from becoming salad dressing and putting so many different products out there that we effectively paralyze our consumer? I see great signs of moving toward a consensus on what green building is and how to talk about it, but the competing programs keep moving further and further apart in the battle for supremacy.

For those of us who've been around long enough, I know you can remember the early 1990's when we had multiple, competing building codes. Groups including Building Code Administrators International (BOCA), The International Conference of Building Officials (ICBO), The Council of American Building Officials (CABO) and the Southern Building Code
Congress International (SBCCI) all had developed their own set of building codes. It took over four years, but these legacy groups worked to form what we now know as the International Codes Council (ICC) and develop the International Building Code (IBC). The IBC includes what homeowners know as the International Residential Code (IRC,) and this code has now been adopted in 48 states and continues to be THE benchmark for building safety, structure and fire protection.

When will we have only one green building standard and what will it look like? Sorry did I say all of this out loud?

Fireworks and Carbon Output.

"What better way to celebrate your country's Independence by blowing up a small part of it."- Apu from The Simpsons circa 1994


I really tried to find some good data on the carbon and pollution emissions from fireworks, I thought it would be neat to find one of those "equal to this many cars off the road" comparisons. Like, not lighting off 1,000 Whistling Moon Travelers would be equal to removing 10 cars from the road for one year, .................. but I couldn't find any.

The only real empirical data I could find was an abstract on the atmospheric pollution release caused by the burning of fireworks during the Beijing Lantern Festival. As interesting as it was for a short time it didn't have the catchy analogy that I was hoping for.

In any case, have a safe and happy holiday and make a point to offset all of those carbon, sulfate and nitrate emissions from your fireworks this weekend in any way you can. Walk...don't drive, choose local produce and foods for your BBQ, guzzle lots of organic beer, use cups, plates, and utensils that are recyclable or are made from recycled content, use a woodless stove, and perhaps my favorite suggestion, make your margaritas with your own pedal powered blender!

Enjoy!!!