Green Eco Services

Carlsbad High School Goes Green- Saving $100,000 a Year in Taxpayer Cost

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Submitted by guest blogger, Nicole

With cash strapped governments, urged on by rising costs schools are going green and employing ways to save money in water, electricity and in health costs. Even if the school cost a little more to build the overall savings over time is incalculable. Over 100 schools have been certified by the Green Building Council and hundreds more are seeking certification.

Pacific Ridge High School Plan

According to a study done by U.S. Green Building Council, green schools use 33% less energy and 32% less water, saviang over $100,000 each year in energy costs alone.

With that in mind, designer Carrie Johnson and construction company Swinerton Incorporated, are ‘rebuilding’ Pacific Ridge High School in Carlsbad, to become one of the most eco-friendly campuses in the country.

There is no better way to teach kids about energy efficient habits then by building a green, eco friendly school, where they can have first hand experience on environmental impact and instill sustainable habits to last for a lifetime.

I think this is a great plan. The population is growing each year, which is increasing the demand for schools. There is already 374 schools in San Diego.  If every new school could begin to follow this green campus, so much energy and money can be saved. And most importantly, it is teaching the up and coming generations how to be environmentally efficient, and they too can make a difference in their every day life.

Some of the things they plan to incorporate:

• Decrease electricity bills- have indoor and outdoor space for classrooms to provide access to natural light.
• Easy access to outdoor air, preventing excessive use of air conditioning.
• Sensors to avoid the use of extra light when not needed.
• Landscape- efficient water system and plants that are native to the environment.

Overall, this project will result in a 40% decrease of energy use.

Source:http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2009/nov/29/new-school-keep-environment-mind

Costa Rica Eco-Tourism

Green Living With Eco Friendly Design From Parasoleil

Living Green Design Solutions is Discovering the Art of Shade

Everyone loves to re-decorate their house and landscaping. Let me introduce you to this fairly new design company Parasoleil that is striking the architectural world, creating some very new and very unique designs that anyone would love in their backyard. They want generations to come to enjoy the beauty around us. In order for that to happen, we must conserve and preserve our environment.

Parasoleil- Eco Friendly Recycled Copper Shading

Parasoleil is making panels from recycled and reclaimed materials, mostly copper. (Green certified) These panels come in all different designs and colors. The different patterns on each panel creates a unique shadow affect against the sunlight. Its various uses range from an overhead canopy for your outside patio, to fences, railings, and arbors. Light reflects through these cut outs in the design, making shadows of the shapes. It will give an additional flare to any space, whether you are using it for fencing outside around the pool or dividing some rooms inside. Its multiple purposes provide shade and a beautiful design for your garden.

How is Copper Eco-Friendly?

• Durable- Made to last in your backyard!
• Preventing landfills from overflowing!- When thrown into landfills, this metal can be harmful when it seeps into the ground water. So by recycling and reusing it, we are helping to save landfills.
• Easily shaped and molded-popular choice for construction and architecture
• Fully Recyclable

Submitted by guest blogger, Nicole

Reuse Bottles- Ghost Town Bottle House

Bottle House Week Continues: This bottle house was made with over 5,000 whiskey bottles back in the 50’s in Calico, California. Calico is located in the Mojave Desert and was abandoned in 1907, while the last resident died in the 60’s. It is now designated as a Historical Landmark

Reuse Bottles-Rhyolite Bottle House in Nevada

Bottle House week continues on- This bottle house was made by Tom Kelly back in 1906 in Rhyolite, Nevada. Rhyolite is now a ghost town, if you want to visit, it’s on the east entrance to Death Valley.

Reuse Bottles-Beer Bottle House Made With 6 Million Beer Bottles

Bottle House Week Continues: Tito Ingenieri built his house out of six million empty bottles. He will gladly teach anyone how to build this kind of ecological house that recycles materials and keeps the streets clean. In his town of Quilmes, Argentina, people gladly give him their empty bottles and admire his artistic creation.

http://eco-ideas.net/story/id/23/
http://twitter.com/ecoideasnet

ReUse Bottles- Beer Bottle House By Jenna Mack

Jenna Mack wants to build bottle houses all over! An article in The Examiner tells about Jenna Mack:

Beer Bottle House

She is not your ordinary recycler.  She is building her home from used beer bottles. After her latest haul she discovered beer diversity of the third kind. “I had no idea how many different sizes of beer there are in the world.  Originally, my thought was I would have all 12oz bottles.  I now have an amazing variety and will be redesigning the cabin based on the sizes I received.”

The glass bottle house is part of a larger plan to build multiple eco-cabins in Evans, West Virginia.  She hopes to complete the first house in no less than one year.  It’s a part time project since as Washington, DC event planner, her job ramps up with the event season.

Read the full story at The Examiner

Reuse Bottles- Make A House- Ocean Front Bottle House

This is Bottle House week at Green Eco Services. This bottle house was made in the 80’s on Prince Edward Island on the ocean front. The Bottle Houses encompass the house, the tavern and the chapel, using over 25,000 bottles.

Good and Bad-Re-Building with Shipping Containers

Shipping Container Home by Adam Kalkin

I love the shipping container building that is going on. Upcycling these containers is a new hot trend in reused and salvaged building supplies. (See articles: Thinking Out the Box- Shipping Containers and Shipping Container Homes in Costa Rica

Due to several comments about the use of shipping containers I found this excellent article from sincerelysustainable.com with a little more depth in the use of using containers as building materials.

Shipping, or cargo, containers are probably the most widely used and almost completely ignored structures in the world. The majority of the imports countries consume arrive via shipping containers. Subsequently, there are literally millions of these containers on ships and in ports around the globe. Though it’s becoming an ever increasing trend to repurpose these containers for use as modular building materials, very rarely do you see it being done in a way that is either aesthetically pleasing and/or, in simple terms, ‘makes sense’ for the project itself, i.e. using containers as building elements then applying convoluted and expensive materials and techniques to hide the fact that containers are being used as the structural elements.

A Very Cool Container Building

A newly completed 3 story exhibition and artists’ studio space in Soul, Korea not only utilizes shipping containers for 95% of its structure, but makes no attempts at hiding the fact that it does. The building in question serves as the Asian ‘headquarters’ or ‘program space’ for the subcultural arts organization PLATOON who are a global collective of underground artists of all disciplines (street art, performance, music, etc.). In conjunction with Graft Architects, PLATOON designed and built the multifunctional building (known as PLATOON KUNSTHALLE) out of 28 cargo containers that can be rebuilt anywhere in the world (their European HQ in Berlin is of similar design and constructed using containers). The space will house artists, performers, workshops, events, and a multitude of other art-related endeavors. What PLATOON says about the space and it’s purpose:

Due to trade imbalances in the United States and elsewhere, these heavy-duty steel boxes are piling up in ports around the globe and are beginning to pose an increasing storage problem. As a result of this, architects and builders are taking advantage of this surplus to recycle the containers due to their relative uniform size and cost. Environmentally speaking, using containers as building elements makes much more sense than trying to melt them down in order to make more steel.

The average sized shipping container has approximately 8,000 lbs of steel in it. While this steel can be melted down and reused to make steel beams or more containers, the energy required to do so is enormous. It takes almost 8000 kwh of energy to melt down and remanufacture the steel in a shipping container. By contrast, it takes about 400 kwh of electrical energy to modify and install a container for building use.

There are also inherit advantages to using shipping containers over traditional building materials. The units are stronger than conventional house framing because of their resistance to lateral loads. The roof is strong enough to support the extra weight of a green roof. The building envelope of a container structure reflects about 95 percent of outside radiation, resists the loss of interior heat, provides an excellent air infiltration barrier and prevents water migration (though this is so only if experienced people are installing them).

There are also some disadvantages which are almost all as a result of improper installation or modification. After all, these boxes were never manufactured to be used as building materials, so care has to be taken when utilizing them for that purpose. Because the containers are steel, corrosion, water infiltration and thermal bridging are some of the biggest concerns when working with these modules. Fortunately, all of these concerns can be easily addressed and advances in products, like sprayed on ceramic paints that have an R-Value of 19, solve a multitude of problems in one application.

Not The Greenest, But It Works

PLATOON KUNSTHALLE is probably one of only a few ideal building projects where shipping container usage makes both aesthetic sense and practical sense in terms of the purpose and intent of the space itself. The raw industrial nature of the containers adds to the entire urban/underground vibe of the space and caters to the raw urban artists in which it houses. From an energy efficiency standpoint, there are things that possibly could’ve been done differently to improve it, but would most likely not work for the purposes of the space itself. Though the large expanses of glass for the artists’ studios may not be energy efficient, it serves to provide abundant natural light. Insulation is also an issue, but the main hall space, while naturally cross-ventilated, is not air conditioned, so controlling air temperatures there is not an issue.

The Good: A creative and appropriate reuse of an incredibly strong and versatile commonplace shipping staple turned building material. The energy saved repurposing the containers instead of melting them down is enormous. The steel containers offer many inherit advantages both structurally and in energy efficiency.

The Bad: Containers are not made to be used as building materials. Uniformity, integrity, and ability to be modified into a workable structure are all issues. Many containers being used for buildings now come from companies that modify and prepare raw containers for building use adding cost. Effectiveness as a functional and green building material largely lies in proper modification, application of necessary products, and installation.

The Bottom-Line: PLATOON has built a structure that is both a creative reuse of materials and a signature aesthetic that fits perfectly with their organization. Though not every aspect of the structure is focused on sustainability, its ability to be easily reproduced anywhere in the world, as well as the recycling of tons of steel, make PLATOON KUNTSHALLE a building project worthy of mention.

Green Building and Construction Trends

Construction Trends by Houston Neal

If you are in the construction industry, thinking of building green and eco-friendly, you might want to read about some of the latest trends by Houston Neil who just did a post on State of the Construction Industry Software Report

Our observations are based on roughly 6,000 conversations with construction software buyers over the past year. In these calls, our team listened to buyers’ “pain points” – the business problems they were looking to solve with new software. From there, we recommended what we felt were the best solutions. We later surveyed each buyer to find out if they ended up buying software, what they bought and how it all went.

Estimating and takeoff solutions are in demand
We’ve seen a very healthy level of interest in construction estimating software across all divisions. Over and over we hear contractors saying something to the effect of, “Bidding has gotten very competitive, which means I’ve got to be as accurate as possible.” As a result, we’ve seen a lot of estimators replacing their spreadsheets and manual processes with database-driven estimating systems.

We’ve also seen plenty of interest in on-screen takeoff software. We’ve seen three primary reasons for this:

* Increasing the speed and accuracy of takeoff measurements (see previous paragraph);
* Avoiding the printing costs of paper plans; and,
* Responding to increasing electronic plan delivery and use of online plan rooms.

While demand for onscreen takeoff appears fairly strong and growing, we have seen a considerable amount of downward pricing pressure in that market.

Software as a Service is in the right place at the right time
Software as a Service (SaaS) is gaining momentum in many software markets. In fact, we would agree with other IT prognosticators that SaaS is a major structural shift in software deployment and is here to stay. We’ve seen this model succeed in the project management segment where there is a clear need for the collaborative benefits of web-based software. Moreover, the current recession is making the SaaS model more attractive to contractors because:

* Subscription pricing can easily be added to a project’s general conditions;
* Low up-front costs allow project managers to avoid an onerous approval process; and,
* Faster and less expensive implementation makes the new systems more digestible.

We have not seen much demand for SaaS accounting, estimating or service management, although we do get asked about it now and then. We also have not seen many vendors emerge to deliver that sort of solution. We would not be surprised to see SaaS accounting and/or estimating solutions emerge over the next few years.

LEED credit tracking creates new demand
Another trend driving the adoption of SaaS project management systems is the increasing demand for LEED credit tracking. LEED certification has grown in popularity; so too has the need to track the detailed documentation requirements related to earning LEED credits. At their core, projects seeking LEED certification need document control and efficient communication. This is the core of what project management systems deliver. Going one step further, we are seeing a number of project management vendors building in specific LEED credit tracking modules within their system. Houston Neal wrote a great post on how to Track LEED v3 Credits in Project Management Software back in July.

Read the Full Article Here

Everything and The Kitchen Sink Recycled Building

Sustainable Kitchen Sink Building in Amsterdam

You gotta love this Sustainable Sky Box in Amsterdam made entirely of recycled Kitchen Sinks. Source Greenopolis