There are a lot of questions about concrete insulated homes. Insulation is a key to reducing energy costs in your home associated with heating and cooling. There is a new movement in the building industry to incorporate insulation into the basic construction of the home. Most of this is achieved with Insulated Concrete Forms, often refered to as ICFs. We met with Matt Muhsam to learn more about green building options, including Quad Lock and Faswall products.
Seattle Green Festival (March 28th, 2009 - Ecofactory) - Ecofactory got a chance to meet with Derek Van Dyke of Trio Green Benefits to learn more about his involvements in creating educational opportunities. Through his company's effort to create eco-friendly fund raisers for schools and groups, Derek has transformed an eco-friendly printing company into a powerful tool to spread an Earth friendly message to children and young adults.
Green Festival Denver (May 3rd, 2009 - Ecofactory) - Laurie Hessemer of New Era Paint brought us up to speed with the exciting new developments in the eco-friendly paint industry and her efforts to bring this health-promoting technology to homes across the nation. Hessemer got her start in Scottsdale, Arizona before coming to Denver to build a retail showroom of her eco-friendly paint discoveries. Through her travels, Laurie discovered paints that have a Zero-VOC rating and are certified non-toxic.
Kellie Mills of Greencycling met with Eco Factory to teach us the value of recycling your home's interior prior to a remodel. Typically, your old cabinets flooring, fixtures, and finished plumbing goes to one convenient place during a remodel: a 10 yard dumpster parked on your driveway.
On this week's fair trade coffee break, we don't talk about Michael Jackson.
We do talk about the climate bill being postponed in the Senate, the practicality of owning a hybrid, and the controversial Gray Wolf hunt. We touch on the differences between the seal hunts of Namibia and Canada, and speculate on why the Cape Fur Seals receive less attention.
As the managing principle of a strategic management firm, Coyne and his team take a holistic approach to improve his clients’ market share. Coyne’s business methodology is an unapologetically profit driven sustainable business model addressing environmental and social stewardship which, he says leads to better profits for his clients. Coyne notes that by not considering the larger environmental issues, as a business, core strategies suffer.
For the last 13 years, David Eisenberg’s focus has been on applying sustainable context to building regulations. As the director of DCAT, his organization’s mission is to preserve the long term health of the planet and communities. In his Green Building Focus session entitled “Not Your Father’s Building Codes,” Eisenberg will discuss the unincorporated set of regulatory structures and codes to meet our larger needs. Listen as he discusses what he feels is contextually missing from the building regulatory realm.
In this interview Douglas Pierson and Christopher Mercier, Partners and Design Principals of Form Environment Research (fer) Studio discuss their recent rehabilitation and greening of a 100-year-old building in Louisville, Kentucky. Their session at Green Building Focus will use this project as a case study for the incorporation of environment into building design. Listen as Pierson and Mercier discuss their experience modernizing this historical structure, which is awaiting LEED platinum certification.
As Executive Director of the Urban Land Institute (ULI) of Atlanta, Jeff DuFresne’s membership organization serves as an educational think tank focusing on global land use and sustainability. In his session at Green Building Focus entitled “The City in 2050: The Strategic Role of Green,” DuFresne will address the future of the collective “city”. According to DuFresne, ULI has been tracking where we’re headed as a nation and planet.
Dagmar Epsten is the founder and president of the Epsten Group, a design and consulting firm for high performance buildings. In her session at Green Building Focus, she will address envelope building incentives through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). ARRA will make billions of dollars available for commercial and residential building envelope improvements. Over 75 percent of federal building space and more than one million homes may be modernized under this legislation.
