What are the best kind of kitchen cabinets?
Posted by on July 15th, 2010 at 12:03 pm
At our booth at the recent Organic Island Festival I was asked what kind of kitchen cabinets would be best from a sustainability perspective. Here was my suggestion:
1. Choose a style that is plain rather than ornate, and classic rather than trendy. A good candidate for this is Shaker style: it's been around for more than 200 years and with its clean lines and simple, uncluttered appearance, works well with many different types of architecture.
2. Have doors made from local and sustainably-grown wood sources. In the Pacific Northwest this could mean Douglas fir, larch, broadleaf maple, or alder.
3. Have the cabinet boxes made from plywood with no Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). Many less-expensive cabinets are made from particle board, but this material breaks down readily when exposed to water and
The Elephants of Doom at Copenhagen
Posted by on July 13th, 2010 at 11:02 am
University of Victoria professor Michael M'Gonigle published a series of articles in The Tyee during the leadup to and during the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December 2009, which took the view that no deal was better than a weak agreement. Here, in the second part, he discusses "the elephant in the room" that nobody was talking about: economic growth.
Bring in the Elephants
So now that you understand my concerns about what is on the table at Copenhagen, I want to look at what is not. I am not just referring to the so-called elephant in the room that stands there but no one acknowledges. There's a whole herd of elephants out there, and some of them aren't in the room at all. (read more)
2010 Organic Island Festival green building forum well-received
Posted by on July 13th, 2010 at 8:27 am
The following is the text of a 10 minute presentation given as part of a Green Building Forum at Victoria’s annual Organic Island Sustainability Festival, held July 10 and 11th, 2010.
Good morning. In the time I have available I’d like to share with you some ideas about what I think sustainable design means and some ways we can design homes to reduce their ecological footprint, reduce their cost and make them more resilient places to live the years to come.
There is a common perception that sustainable homes and buildings are going to come about from technological advances like paint-on solar panels and better heat pumps. I won’t deny that these likely have an important role to play in future sustainable dwellings. However, before we get caught up in the technology there is an even more important requirement: good design.
Good design is what helps us make the most of finite resources, fit our buildings to their site and to the sun, and respond to the needs of their occupants.
But even good design is not enough to get us to where we need to go with our buildings if we leave all our habits and expectations unquestioned. I can think of a couple of extreme recent examples that illustrate what I mean, such as a 6000 SF “Green Mansion” profiled in the Times Colonist in May 2009, and Jay Leno’s 17,000 SF “green garage” with its wind turbines and solar panels to make it more “sustainable”
I would say that we need a shift in values and culture towards things like greater personal responsibility, smaller homes, less stuff and new measurements of happiness. If we were to approach the design process with an open mind and a willingness to question what we really need to be content, many things are possible!
So, the design process that we like to promote in my firm starts with these bigger issues and leaves the technological decisions to later in the process. Here’s a condensed list of what you might consider if you were planning to build a home with a truly smaller footprint.
We would encourage you to start by purchasing a building site where you could get to work, to shopping, to schools or to meet friends, without spending half your day in a car. The ability to meet your daily needs by walking, cycling or taking transit would have a huge impact on your carbon footprint. People in North America move, on average, every 6 years or so. Consider making this home a place where you’ll stay for the long term, rather than treating your home as a short-term step towards the home you really want. A serious investment in sustainability is much easier to make if you are going to be the one benefiting from it over the long term.
Next, we would work to make your planned home no larger than it absolutely needs to be. Some guidelines suggest a figure of 500-600 sf per person as a reasonable target. This saves land, materials, energy to build and operate, saves money, frees up resources to invest in sustainable features. And it means you need less stuff. Remember, the average home today has more than 200% more space per occupant than it did 50 years ago. Were people less happy then? The stats say no.
Once we got the square footage down, we’d situate the house on your site so that it got lots of sun in the heating season, and then design the roof and windows to take advantage of that sun. We’d make it longer in the east-west direction and seriously cut down on glass on the north and west sides. There would also be big overhangs to keep it cool in the summer and lots of opening windows to allow natural ventilation.
Then we would make the house as airtight and well-insulated as you could afford – so that it would require very little energy to heat or cool it. In fact, in our climate it is possible to insulate well enough to do away with a heating system altogether. There’s a home near Sidney that’s operated this way since the 1980’s.
Inside this snug structure we would put heavy, dense materials to create thermal mass. This would keep indoor temperatures relatively constant day to day and season to season, by moderating extreme fluctuations. We would also make sure that all electrical fixtures, lights and appliances in the house were super-efficient.
Another important and often overlooked consideration: If you really wanted the house to be sustainable, and to last for many decades, we would make it beautiful, so that future generations would see that beauty and be inspired to put the energy into its upkeep and renewal.
Once we’d covered these aspects, we would design systems that captured the renewable energy and rainfall that occurred naturally on your site. This is where the technology comes in.
In our region the water that falls on the roof over a year is sufficient to provide for the modest needs of a careful household. With proper heat storage, solar thermal panels or tubes can supply up to 100% of your hot water needs, and can also be used with a radiant in-floor heating system.
A modest photovoltaic system would generate much of what you needed for electricity throughout the year. If it was connected to the electrical grid, at night and in the winter you could buy whatever little bit of extra power you needed. In the summer, you would sell your excess production to hydro – resulting in an annual net bill of zero.
Once the house was completed, we’d plant the yard with a great variety of food-producing and soil-building and habitat-creating plants. This could dramatically reduce your food footprint and begin, in a tiny way, to rebuild the natural legacy of rich soils and biodiversity that we started with.
So far, I’ve been talking about new housing, where it’s obviously easier to go further than when you’re dealing with an existing home. However, lots of these same principles and ideas – such as increasing insulation and utilizing renewable energy - are applicable there as well.
The important thing to realize is that the home is a tremendously empowering place to invest your efforts towards sustainability. The opportunity to modify your environment, to impact very significantly on the amount of energy you consume, to create food, to harvest water and wind and sunlight, to recycle and reuse your wastes, all these things go a long way towards putting you back in a nurturing and harmonious relationship with the earth.
I’d like to leave you with a quote from architect Rolf Disch, a pioneer of green building in Germany. He says: “When you build a home, you have a responsibility for the whole society”. I would extend that to add a responsibility to future generations, and to the planet as well. On a finite world, every action we take has consequences, and few actions have more consequences than how we build and live in our homes.
I believe that if we acknowledge that building has this moral dimension, what we need to do to achieve true sustainability becomes much, much clearer.
Axiom #3: Design for nature
Posted by on July 12th, 2010 at 5:08 pm
(This article is 3rd in the series of "12 Axioms for Building Homes that Live Lightly on the Earth")
Land plays many other roles besides being a site for our buildings, roles such as aquifer recharging, providing natural habitat for native species, acting as a windbreak for adjacent forest, building soil and preventing soil erosion. When designing homes that live lightly on the earth, once we have chosen a building site, the third step is thus to ask: “ what other important ecological functions are being fulfilled by this land and how can they be protected or enhanced as it is developed for a home?”
An “exclusion mapping” process such as in McHarg’s 1969 Book “Design with Nature” is a good place to start. It suggests taking a thorough inventory of all the different natural features, functions, habitats, hydrological zones and so forth on the property and recording these locations on a scale site plan. Through this mapping process, areas may be identified in which development can occur with minimal impact and would result in the protection of trees, riparian zones, and sensitive areas. Other objectives would be to retain natural vegetation, habitat areas, nesting trees and maintain overall species diversity on the property.
Once a suitable building site has been selected, other actions can be taken during construction to minimize the area of site disturbance, such as by staging construction off-site (by using prefabrication, for example).
To protect riparian functions design decisions such as permeable paving, bio-swales and seepage beds will help to return water from roof and driveway surfaces to the aquifer
The goal: After completion of the home, the building site is returned to a condition where it can continue to provide the natural services and benefits to the larger environment.
hands-in-circle
Posted by on April 23rd, 2010 at 10:25 am
IMG_8300
Posted by on April 18th, 2010 at 10:38 pm
IMG_7866
Posted by on April 18th, 2010 at 10:27 pm
Axiom #2 - Choose the best location
Posted by on April 2nd, 2010 at 12:36 pm
For most of us, where we choose to live is a decision usually governed by concerns about affordability, environmental ambience, the quality of schools or safety. Living sustainably means also thinking about the energy expended in daily living – ie, commuting, community involvement, childrens’ activities, shopping – and the potential to generate food, energy or income from our property. It also will require us to rethink our culture’s easy acceptance of mobility (the average length of time between moves in NA is 6.8 years) and be more willing to put down roots for the longer term.
A partial list for selecting a location for your home:
- Is housing affordable?
- Can I grow food there?
- Is the area safe for our children?
- Will I have a social network of family and friends and enough like-minded people to help keep me inspired?
- Are the streets safe for walking and cycling?
- Can I access nature or get to work, schools or shopping under my own propulsion?
- Is it a decent place to nurture my life’s work?
- Is the air, land, and water healthy?
- Will I want to be there in 50 years?
To which we might add: can I keep chickens there? Are there opportunities to become involved in the shaping of the community and its ongoing governance at a scale I feel comfortable with?
Something to watch for: a lifestyle that is self-sufficient in many regards – grow own food, burn wood for heat etc, - but relies on car trips to commute to work, or involves clearing forested land or disrupting ecosystems to create it.
The goal: To live where work, friends, culture and opportunities can be found within walking or cycling range, where we can provide for a significant amount of our daily needs from local sources, and where we can be content to see our children grow up and to live out our lives .
Greenhouse
Posted by on April 2nd, 2010 at 12:35 pm
Axiom #1: Sharing space with others
Posted by on March 30th, 2010 at 10:15 pm
Making better use of living space by having more people living in it is the first of my 12 Axioms to reduce the footprint of our dwellings and live more lightly on the earth.
Double up for ecological and social sustainability
Having more people in a household is much more economical and energy-efficient than having fewer people. Unfortunately, our society is going the other way. Higher divorce rates and trends towards smaller families over the past few decades have led to a steady decrease in the size of the average household in North America, and to a per-capita increase in energy, water and materials used.
A basic tenet of sustainability is to share what you have with others. Examples of this are co-housing, co-ops, intentional communities or eco-villages – or simply sharing your household with roommates, renters or your extended family. Many of the objections to shared living can be overcome with thoughtful design choices and careful layouts that allow for privacy and personal space. Becoming part of a larger group can provide more options for living, and clustered developments or increased densities provide opportunities to create more parks and green spaces. Sharing with others is an excellent way to decrease your ecological footprint.
The goal: Living arrangements where more individuals share a home or group living space and realize the efficiencies of sharing spaces, energy, appliances, tools, workload and childcare.
coop
Posted by on March 30th, 2010 at 9:58 pm
Living within our Means: A lifestyle sustainability quiz
Posted by on March 30th, 2010 at 9:48 pm
Just about everyone on the planet by now must have a sense that things are getting a bit tight when it comes to resources and the environment. As children, most of us were taught the "Golden Rule" about sharing and not being greedy, but in this complex and interconnected world how do we know what is our fair share? For me, one of the most useful concepts is the
Ecological Footprint, developed by Mathis Wackernagel and Bill Rees at UBC. The following is an adaptation of a sustainability quiz created by Jim Merkel in his book
Radical Simplicity which shows how one can calculate their personal footprint goal, based on their own values and desire to see change happen.
The Ecological Footprint measures humanity’s demand on the biosphere in terms of the area of biologically productive land and sea required to provide the resources we use and to absorb our waste. In 2005 the global Ecological Footprint was 17.5 billion global hectares (gha), or 2.7 gha per person (a global hectare is a hectare with world-average ability to produce resources and absorb wastes). On the supply side, the total productive area, or biocapacity, was 13.6 billion gha, or 2.1 gha (5.2 acres) per person. (source:
WWF Living Planet Report 2008)
1. What percentage of the Earth’s bioproductive spaces should humans use?
It's not just us here, after all. We share the planet with millions of other species, and leaving room for them means it's not all there for the taking. In this first section a ratio of 0.2 means that humans use 20% and 80% remains wild… 0.8 means humans use 80% and 20% remains wild.
10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Humans Use
0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0 My Use
90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Left Wild
My use: _____________ (enter decimal)
2. How much bioproductivity do you wish to use compared to what is available for each person worldwide?
If you believe that every person on earth has the same entitlement to the earth's resources, it gets more complicated. Here a ratio of 0.5 means that you will use half the global average available; 1 means perfect equality amongst humans; 3 means that you’ll use three times the global average.
My Use: ____________ (enter decimal)
Step 3. Intergenerational Equity
Presuming we as a society
could live within our means, are you happy with the current state of, say, the Amazon rainforest or global fish stocks? At what rate do you wish to use your portion of the planet’s bioproductivity? In this section, an answer of 1 means that nature just keeps pace with our use. An answer of 0.8 means that you use your portion 20% slower than it regenerates – leaving fallow areas so the next generation inherits a less intensively-used Earth.
regenerating max use depleting
0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5
My Use: ___________ (enter decimal)
Step 4. Your overall equity factor
Clearly, the cumulative effect of these values decisions has an impact on what a sustainable rate of consumption could look like to each of us. To get a picture of your overall commitment to equity multiply “My use” from Steps 1-3 above together in decimal numbers.
Interspecies Interhuman Intergenerational Overall Equity
Equity Equity Equity Factor
__________ X _________ X _________ = ____________
Now, multiply the decimal above by 2.1 ha (an equal portion of total planetary bioproductivity), to get your
personal sustainability goal.
2.1 ha x ___________ = _____________ ha (for acres x 2.47)
Now consider the footprints of average citizens in a few different countries today:
Canada: 5.8 Cuba: 2.7 USA: 9.0 UK: 6.1 France: 4.6 India: 0.8 China: 1.8
(For a more comprehensive list se this Wikipedia site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ecological_footprint)
Adapted from Jim Merkel
“Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth” 2003
Food for thought
Posted by on March 30th, 2010 at 9:45 pm
"Imagine that you are first in line at a potluck supper. The spread includes not just food and water, but all the materials needed for shelter, clothing, healthcare, and education. How do you know how much to take? How much must you leave for your neighbors behind you - not just the 6.8 billion human beings currently alive on the planet, but our fellow creatures and the yet-to-be-born?”
Building “Net Zero Ready”
Posted by on March 30th, 2010 at 9:27 pm
Here’s a science-fiction proposition: What if the freely available energy falling every day as sunlight on your home could keep you warm, cook your food, run your washing machine and TV, even power the family car, and at the end of the year, your energy bill would be zero?
It’s possible. Right here in Victoria, and in a surprising number of other places as well.
I recently attended a CMHC-sponsored NetZero Energy forum in Edmonton. As it is generally defined, NetZero refers to a system of home design and construction where the home produces all the energy required for the needs and comfort of its occupants from renewable resources available at the building site. It also has an objective of good indoor air quality, resource conservation, protection of the natural environment, and affordability.
The forum was convened to review the state of knowledge about NetZero that had been developed from CMHC’s Equilibrium challenge. Participants from three Alberta projects shared their experiences- from the intial design charettes (workshops) that launched the projects throught to completion and occupation. Here are some highlights:
NetZero is possible, even in a cooler climate such as Edmonton’s. In warmer climates such as Victoria the ideas are that much easier to implement.
Achieving NetZero results from carefully following a series of steps. Common to all the presenters’ approaches were the following:
• Site assessment
• Preliminary design
• Model Energy Performance in HOT2000
• Optimize envelope
• Optimize passive solar
• Reduce Domestic Hot Water (DHW) load
• Reduce lighting and appliances loads
• Examine / Model solar DHW
• Examine / Model geothermal
• Size PV (photovoltaic system) to meet remaining total load
• Finish detailed architectural and system design
NetZero depends on an Integrated Design approach. Due to the complexity of balancing energy needs with the available renewables on the site and the right system to harness them, all the people involved in the creation of the home need to be involved from the start, communicating and brainstorming together and working out the bugs and challenges cooperatively. The team typically consists of: designer or architect, contractor, electrical and mechanical engineers, framers, tradespeople (heating plumbing, electrical, mechanical), interior designer, and suppliers of key components – particularly of the solar panel systems.
NetZero will reduce utility bills to almost nothing and can have a tremendous impact on the overall ecological footprint of a home. In all of the examples, the only expected utility bills were for the cost of being tied into the electric grid.
NetZero adds considerably to the initial cost. In the examples discussed at the forum, the incremental increase in building costs over conventional construction required to achieve NZ ranged from a low of $65,000 to $225,000. Experience across the country indicates the average costs will be in the $65,000 to $80,000 range, depending on type of systems chosen
Don’t ask about the payback. The costs for building this way are not appropriately evaluated using traditional Return on Investment criteria. As Sevag Podarian explained in his delightfully entertaining and thoughtful presentation, we don’t expect an ROI payback for a luxury car, a yacht or an executive home. The NetZero home is not a luxury item in the same way, but neither is it a commodity. The incremental costs for going from standard-built home to NetZero work out to around $4000/yr on a mortgage at 4% and 25 year amortization. This is offset by a potential saving of least $2000/yr on energy bills – a saving that can only increase as oil, natural gas and electricity costs go up in the future. You can do the right thing, be ahead of the curve, and, within 10 or even 5 years, be making money on your investment.
There is as of yet no consensus on what is the best system. Among the examples discussed were solar thermal (hot water), solar thermal (air), all-PV, geothermal, radiant heat, forced air, electric baseboards, and passive solar. However, there were key components and principles common to all the team’s experiences: Site and orient for the sun. Construct a very well-insulated and extremely air-tight envelope. Employ passive solar for baseline energy supply and then top it up with active solar collection and PV. Waste as little energy as possible.
This type of building relies on a connection to the electric grid. These NetZero homes are not “off grid”. Instead, the principle is that the home’s PV panel arrays are sized to produce a surplus of electricity in the sunny summer months that is fed into the grid. In the winter or on dark, rainy days and at night, the house draws power for its needs back from the grid in a process called net metering. In effect, the grid becomes a battery for storing energy that can be withdrawn when available solar power is inadequate. However, when the power goes down these homes will function independently at some level – providing, of course, that it’s not dark out.
Solar PV is totally central to the achieving of NetZero. Given that solar PV accounts for such a large proportion of the overall incremental costs of going NetZero and that the cost of panels are almost certainly going to come down with the development of this industry, a prudent response may be to build “NetZero Ready”. Such homes are built to implement all the energy-saving measures which so reduce the space-heating, DHW and domestic electrical demands. Their energy bills will be miniscule.
Many at the conference believe Net Zero is the way we’ll all be building in the future. Accelerating climate change and the energy price increases due to the effects of Peak Oil mean we’ll just have to. In Europe they get this. So does the provincial government; future versions of the building code incorporate increasingly stringent energy performance requirements. It’s not hard to imagine that sometime within the next decade efficient homes that produce all the power they require from the earth and sunlight will be the norm, rather than the rare birds they are today.
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