Buildings + Beyond Podcast

The residential building industry has made incredible progress toward sustainability and energy efficiency goals. At the same time, Senior Sustainability Consultant and Registered Architect Steve Klocke finds many new buildings under-performing because designers continue to make simple, avoidable mistakes.

Based on lessons he’s learned from certifying over 1,200 dwelling units over the past seven years, Steve discusses the top ten multifamily design mistakes being made over and over again – and how to avoid them. On this episode, Steve uncovers mistakes 6-10. Be sure to check out Part 1 of this episode if you haven’t already!

Episode Guest: Steve Klocke, RA

Steve Klocke is a Senior Sustainability Consultant at Steven Winter Associates and a registered architect with 18+ years of experience in architectural design and building science consulting in residential buildings. He provides comprehensive green building certification support for the LEED for Homes, ENERGY STAR and Indoor airPLUS programs with a focus on lowrise multi-unit new construction and gut rehabs.

Steve is an integral part of the initial strategic planning sessions and workshops with builders, architects, and homeowners, setting goals and scopes of work for projects. The certification support he provides for project teams includes energy and building systems analysis, architectural design support, and project management. As a HERS Rater and LEED for Homes Green Rater, Steve inspects projects under construction for compliance with energy performance, durability, and health and safety standards. His performance testing expertise includes whole-house infiltration and duct leakage, as well as infrared thermal imaging.

Episode Information & Resources:

Presentation slides (mostly graphics): Top 10 Multifamily Design Mistakes

Steve’s Top 10 Multifamily Design Mistakes:

Other Resources:

Air Sealing Guide for Multifamily Masonry Construction

Building America Solutions Center

What comes to Robb’s mind when Steve mentions illicit, high-flow shower heads…

Send your feedback and questions to [email protected]

Buildings and Beyond is a production of Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building, and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment. For more information, visit www.swinter.com.

Robb Aldrich | Kelly Westby

Heather Breslin | Alex Mirabile | Dylan Martello

Song: Slotcar | Artist: Podington Bear

The Psychological Side of Engineering with Kristof Irwin

Guest: Kristof Irwin, The Building Science Podcast

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Kelly :                                00:06                   Welcome to buildings and beyond

Robb:                                00:08                   The podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment

Kelly :                                00:13                   By focusing on efficiency, accessibility and health.

Robb:                                00:18                   I’m Rob Aldrich

Kelly :                                00:19                   And I’m Kelly Westby.

Robb:                                00:22                   This week is part two in my conversation with Steve Klocke, architect and rater here at Steven Winter Associates. We were talking about his top 10 frustrations, top 10 multifamily design mistakes. And this week we talk about the second five on his list. We start by talking about lighting controls, which was probably the one that I found most surprising.

Steve:                                00:48                   Here’s the deal.

Robb:                                00:49                   All right. I was surprised to see this on your list. I was.

Steve:                                00:52                   Really? Because this is so often done poorly.

Robb:                                00:56                   And again, we’re talking about multifamily buildings. When there are just lights that are on always is that the issue?

Steve:                                01:02                   as far as I can tell, the only reasons to have lights on all the time is if you’re growing pot, which is certainly legal for some of you. Or in areas of, you know, Egress, et cetera. The trick is, in areas of egress. So there’s a lot of different parts of the code and lot of different codes that apply to lighting. So here’s the jist. 10 foot candle is the norm for supplying illumination to a space. Let’s focus on Egress, I guess, cause that’s areas that usually get screwed up. But when it’s not, when an ingress area is not in use, you can go down to as low as one foot candle and that a big jump in consumption of energy. So, you know, there’s parts of the energy code that says you have to have occupancy sensors in these, you know, dozen spaces. It doesn’t say you can’t have occupancy sensors in these other spaces, right? And so it’s a misinterpretation of the problem.

Robb:                                02:11                   So really, it’s not that people are lazy and don’t care about energy. But sometimes they think the code forbids?

Steve:                                02:20                   That’s my impression. Yeah. You know, and the rooms like electrical rooms, for safety reasons, et cetera. I’m not gonna argue with that. But you know, a lot of times you’re going to have these stairs where in some buildings we have, you know, for security reasons they don’t want people to use the stairs. And so they actually kind of make it harder to use the stairs. And yet they’ve got the lights on 24/7 full blast in there and just kills me. And so really what you need to do is put in controls. It’s all about controls. You know this from an engineering standpoint, Rob, it’s all about controls. And now, occupancy sensor, vacancy sensor, what’s the difference? An occupancy sensor will turn on when someone enters the room and it’ll turn off after a certain period afterwards once it stops sensing that person in there. A vacancy sensor, you typically will turn on yourself and then it’ll turn itself off. And there are some spaces where one is appropriate and some of the places where the other is appropriate.

Robb:                                03:21                   And that’s not a timer? You turn it on, and then there is an occupancy sensor that senses you leave

Steve:                                03:27                   In this room we’re sitting in right now, It is an occupancy sensor, and it doesn’t matter if the sun is shining bright through the windows, this light comes on, which drives me nuts. And it will eventually shut off, but you know, think of all the startup, you know, wear and tear on the lights, and the consumption, et cetera. And so, you know, an occupancy sensor makes sense in your egress areas where, look, if it’s an emergency, you don’t want someone have to flip the switch and turn the lights on and you know a hundred people plowing over you because you’re the first one through the door.

Robb:                                03:59                   I see. So, a vacancy sensor, in this office in which we’re recording, for instance, if someone walked into this office just to empty the trash, or just came in to get some more coffee. You have to turn on the light.

Steve:                                04:23                   Yes.

Robb:                                04:23                   In a lot of the offices, there’s plenty of natural light. So this would be a great place for a vacancy sensor.

Steve:                                04:35                   Agreed, but not in in egress area.

Robb:                                04:35                   In multifamily buildings, what places are good for vacancy sensors?

Steve:                                04:50                   So offices, closets, exercise rooms, mail rooms, trash rooms. As far as I’m concerned. I suppose you could do an occupancy sensor in there because most of them are internal and don’t have any windows. But you know, in your egress areas, your corridors and all of those places, you definitely want an occupancy sensor for safety. And we’ll never try to pick a fight with a code official. I mean, we know where we stand, but there are nuances that are being missed

Robb:                                05:21                   And they’re getting better and cheaper, is that right?

Steve:                                05:25                   Yeah, and I guess you have to balance the short term versus long term cost implications. Look, if you’re selling this building and you’re not paying for the utilities or whatever, you’re going to put in whatever’s cheapest. If you’re maintaining the building, keeping it, you know you are going to want something that’s going to minimize your operating costs and so there’s that issue too,

Robb:                                05:42                   These are things that don’t come into the ratings a lot of the times.

Steve:                                05:44                   They’re required under some certifications and basically what it comes down to is an argument. With me, they’re like, “hey, you can’t do this.” and I’m like, “well no, you can, you just need to try a little harder.” You try to say that without hurting anybody’s feelings or sounding like a jerk, which is not always achieved by yours truly.

Robb:                                06:07                   Moving on, I’m going to let you talk about this one: oversized HPAC.

Steve:                                06:16                   I’m glad that as the engineer in the room, Robb differs to the architect in the room to talk about oversized HPAC. I think it’s going to be a testament to how well I’ve been trained by the engineers here at Steven winter associates. So the keyword here is short cycling and it doesn’t mean a whole lot of people on bicycles that are short of stature. That’s the slide in my presentation, is my bicycling team from rag rye in Iowa. Anyway, short cycling means that your equipment is typically of a single speed. It turns on hard, runs hard, shuts off, and it does that in rapid succession. And so what you get is, the analogy I use, is a car or like, let’s say you’re in a taxi or something like that, if you’re in a crown Vic with a v8 engine, you get in there, the driver pounds on the gas until he hits a red light and then pounds on the brakes. So not only is he wearing out the vehicle faster, he’s consuming way more gas than should he’s, making you sick in the back seat, et cetera. So if you apply it to HVAC, you know, humidification, or dehumidification I should say, is the hot topic now as we keep getting these warm, wet summers that seem to be warmer and wetter than the past. I’m not going to digress into any sort of questionable theories, don’t want to make any enemies here, but good thing our house is on a hill here in Norwalk. Anyway, so you’re not pulling that latent heat- that ones for your benefit Robb. Which means “moisture” to the rest of the architects out there.

Robb:                                07:41                   Thanks for clarifying, cause I wasn’t going to, I was like, yeah, of course, you’re right. That’s I think one of the biggest, probably the biggest issue with oversizing- is not dehumidifying in a warm or humid climate you really don’t get the dehumidification.

Steve:                                08:33                   Yeah so you’re not achieving the efficiency that your equipment is rated to cause of short cycling, you’re wearing it out, you’re not getting dehumidification on the cooling side and it’s just uncomfortable. You know, like who wants a cold hard blast of air on their necks every 10 minutes, right? You’d rather have sort of a more even, smooth operation, ramp up a little bit, ramp down a little bit, smooth operator is what we aim for.

Robb:                                08:56                   It’s interesting. So you can make an argument that some fuel fired heating systems, there’s not a big efficiency to oversizing.

Steve:                                09:13                   Sure, especially those that ramp down. Like, you know, boilers for example, can go at a 10th of their…what’s that term Mr. engineer? Modulating but uh, turn down?

Robb:                                09:25                   Turn down. Sure.

Steve:                                09:26                   Yeah. That’s the term I’m looking for.

Robb:                                09:27                   Yeah. If you could modulate down 90%, turn it down 90% that’s pretty good. But I think it’s a comfort issue. It’s a humidity issue and it’s a cost issue. Especially with air conditioning, I mean you put in twice the capacity you need, you pay almost twice as much

Steve:                                09:46                   Yeah but Robb what if you’re going to add on some day? You really want that extra capacity man.

Robb:                                09:53                   We’re talking about multifamily buildings, who’s going to add on Steve?

Steve:                                09:58                   Anyway, next one.

Robb:                                10:04                   Next one, and actually, I’ve been dealing with this tons lately on the oversize HVAC with heat pumps, which are really taking over in a lot of things.

Steve:                                10:19                   Everybody thinks that “oh, the heat pump is no problem.” Is totally up and down, up and down

Robb:                                10:24                   It has some really big efficiency and comfort potential drawbacks when you oversize.

Steve:                                10:30                   Oh yeah. Well I was in a townhome in Brooklyn, in Park Slope actually, with millions of dollars of art on the walls and it’s getting ruined because they got these great VRS systems, but they’re just too darn big

Robb:                                10:43                   Yeah. No good. We need to do another episode on humidity. Too much. Too much. All right. Moving on for real this time. Antiquated ventilation.

Steve:                                10:56                   Yeah, so I start this one off in my presentation with the old school way of dumping a bunch of air into your corridors, undercutting your apartment entry doors and expecting the air to get into the apartments. Not only is it not allowed by mechanical code, it’s not allowed by fire code.

Robb:                                11:16                   With an exhaust fan? So we’re talking about an exhaust fan..

Steve:                                11:20                   You have exhaust out of your apartment and make up air. Make up air is, I realized, that it’s important in some areas in this area, it’s not applicable. Make up air is coming from the wrong place. You don’t want to be pumping air into the middle of the building and expecting it to get to where it needs to be. You need to control the air. So by antiquated ventilation, we’re basically meaning we’ve got to take it up a couple of notches. And let’s turn the equation backwards. What if we have central exhaust and then we’ve got a trickle vent scenario, there are some things like that. You know, and we unfortunately were pretty guilty of this. We’ve said for a while based on program clarification, that trickled vents are required and I’ve done a few studies, I’m fairly sure you can tell me better, that show that they really don’t work all that well cause you get all kinds of stratification and tall buildings and stack effect and all kinds of funny things are happening. When you take control away from your ventilation system, it needs to be controlled.

Robb:                                12:19                   In both the exhaust and supply.

Steve:                                12:22                   Exactly. Both sides.

Robb:                                12:23                   Okay. You can’t do one and hope the other side works itself out. And for a century that’s been the standard, where you just suck air from the kitchens, you have a big mushroom fan on the roof, a big stack sucks air from bathrooms and kitchens and there you go. You’re all done.

Steve:                                12:45                   Well I still get asked why we have to have exhausted in kitchens.

Speaker 2:                        12:50                   Kelly’s doing a separate episode on that one.

Steve:                                12:53                   Okay we’re just not going to dwell on that one.

Robb:                                12:56                   Its a hot topic. Because passive house and IQ people are butting heads over it.

Steve:                                13:02                   Yeah, I stay out of that.

Robb:                                13:05                   So what would you like to see? Are we talking balanced ventilation. Are we talking HRVs, what’s good?

Steve:                                13:12                   Well, it’s a matter of what you can stomach.

Robb:                                13:14                   We talking money?

Steve:                                13:15                   Yeah, basically. Yeah. I mean, the extreme end of the spectrum is balanced ventilation through an ERV/HRV. I feel like that’s the direction that you know, code is going to go eventually as soon the people who have been fighting it thus far run out of gas. And Robb says, no by reading his body language. I just don’t see how with more and more studies that come out about the value of indoor air quality, I just don’t see how we can keep not doing that.

Robb:                                13:56                   I don’t disagree. And once again, this is a whole other topic, but so many of the balanced ventilation systems, I see ERVs and HRVs, they may not be installed properly, and that’s a big deal. They may not work from day one and if they do work on day one, they’re maintained so poorly or not at all, that they don’t work even like six, nine months after occupancy. So that’s a big deal. And that I think is one of the more valid arguments against mandating ERVs and HRVs. But you can’t argue with the performance benefits with the health benefits, with the indoor air quality benefits.

Steve:                                14:37                   Well, in our house, we renovated LEED Platinum, exhaust only ventilation strategy, meets Ashrae, all the boxes are checked. And then after living in it a year, we were like, no, it’s too stuffy. I feel like I’m physically affected because I don’t have enough fresh air. And so we put the ERV in and it literally was a night and day difference. And so here’s the deal. Do they cost more to install? Yes. Do they cost more to operate? Yes.

Robb:                                15:10                   Well the energy savings can certainly make up for it

Steve:                                15:15                   Right. Well, in our house at least, we had turned up the flow rate above the exhaust only, what we had for exhaust only. So in our case, that was the case that it costs more to operate and there’s more air to heat and cool basically. And it took up space in the attic, Yada, Yada, Yada. But you know what? I mean when it’s your family and you don’t think you’re as healthy as you should be, I mean, it’s a no brainer. Now as a designer, it’s different, you know, but in my presentation, I say, look, try to think if it was your kid, your family, and if you’re living in these apartments.. I know what the constraints are, but you know, it’s something to consider. I tug at the heartstrings.

Robb:                                16:03                   There’s no argument about the benefits. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. And there’s better ways to do it. Maybe there are better products coming.

Steve:                                16:14                   Yeah. We’re slow to it here in the U.S. I mean, I guess,

Robb:                                16:18                   And in Canada it’s very common. And in a multifamily building with good property managers, with good owners, good maintenance, they can be maintained very well.

Steve:                                16:31                   I mean do you buy a car and not change the oil every, you know, 5,000 miles or whatever?

Robb:                                16:36                   Most people don’t but on the ERV’s and HRVs, most people do.

Steve:                                16:43                   This is the luxury I have of it just being an hour presentation. Say what you’re doing wrong and not worry about the bigger consequences.

Robb:                                16:51                   Alright enough about ventilation.

Steve:                                16:56                   I know you want to dwell on that, but maybe that’s a whole other podcast

Robb:                                16:58                   We could go on and on and on. But we won’t, okay. Domestic hot water.

Steve:                                17:04                   Domestic hot water. So I had always wondered before I got into this, how the hotel hot water works. How is it that it’s a big hotel and I can turn on the faucet and I get hot water right away? Scolding hot water. And I wonder how does that work? And now I know, right? There’s hot water coursing through the building 24/7. And so you can’t get around that. I mean, people are going to want their hot water and not have to wait for it. So at this point, the best you can do is make that system as efficient as you can. And that means, this is the most technical part of the presentation, there’s a diagram showing a three pipe domestic hot water re-circulation system and a box design. And basically all it is, is taking the hot water return and shortening those runs instead of taking them back down the risers that they came up. So, in a multifamily building, you’re going to hopefully have your hot water generation on the roof, it’s coming down a shaft in the middle of the building and then getting distributed horizontally and then back up again into the various apartments and it goes back down again over again and then up again. Right? So instead of taking the return water back down to the building, you just take it across the top of the building. You take a shortcut back to where it came from in the first place. And so basically if you can reduce your pipe length, if you can also reduce your pipe diameter, so surface area, right? And if you can insulate them. Well back to pipe diameter, I mean in New York City at least, we have to have low flow fixtures, in any of our green programs, you have to have low flow fixtures, and engineers are still designing their pipes to the higher medium on that ASHRAE chart. Right. And so they should be going no more than the low because unless everybody in the building yanked their shower head on the first day they move in and puts in, you know, nine gallon permit or whatever, you don’t need those big pipes. So bigger pipes, bigger loss. Yeah. So longer pipes, more loss, and insulation, just making sure you’ve got your details in there, keep those things insulated.

Robb:                                19:34                   I will put the link to one of your PowerPoints up on the site. And others here have done some work on this because it’s much easier to get a handle on this when you’re looking at diagrams in my opinion

Steve:                                19:46                   Yeah. It’s a very visual thing.

Robb:                                19:48                   Yeah. But, but you’re right. I mean it’s the oversizing thing again, it’s overkill, you know? It’s a CYA.

Steve:                                19:54                   Yeah. Not throwing engineers under the bus, but you are a conservative lot. I’m just going to say it.

Robb:                                20:03                   And good thing. It’s not inappropriate. That’s not a bad thing

Steve:                                20:11                   Sometimes.

Robb:                                20:13                   Alright. And how about controls for DHW distribution?

Steve:                                20:16                   I didn’t get into that. You are welcome to. Robb, tell me about controls.

Robb:                                20:16                   So like you said, in hotels, there’s this big loop that’s pumped 24/7. And in hotels and in larger multifamily buildings, that’s pretty much necessary to pump 24/7. In smaller multifamily buildings, I think there’s potential for demand control. So super simply, there’s like a flow switch that senses if anybody is calling for hot water and whenever anybody’s calling for hot water, then a pretty large pump comes on, primes the system very quickly. So people wait, you know, very short amount of time. But then when nobody’s calling for hot water, it shuts off. And you’re not recirculating hot water throughout the building.

Steve:                                21:08                   Midnight to 4:00 AM

Robb:                                21:11                   You don’t want to discriminate against people on the second shift.

Steve:                                21:14                   No, I’m just saying though that you know, instead of running full blast all night. I mean like you said, there’s savings to be had there. Yeah, for sure.

Robb:                                21:22                   All right, we’ll move on. Last but not least, poor communication.

Steve:                                21:29                   Yeah, so is that a design mistake? And so here’s what I say: yes it is. Because what is your job as an architect or an engineer? What is your product? I should say. Your product is not the building. Your product is not the MEP systems. Your product is the design, is the drawings and specs. That’s your deliverable. And so if you cannot convey what you’re trying to achieve through those drawings and specs, you’re not living up to, you know, your role as designer. And so it’s making sure that you’re getting everything that you need to on paper, but you’re also getting the feedback you need. So architects, are you listening to your engineers or are you just throwing background drawings at them and expecting them to make it work with whatever? You know architects, they got their hands full with all kinds of other things. Right? And so, it’s just one more input to this whole big machine that technically they’re responsible for. But the best projects I’ve seen is where the architects and engineers have a real partnership and they communicate back and forth. And you know, an engineer will tell an architect, “well, why are you drawing it like that? Why don’t you, if you could just do this, this and this, our systems would be that much smaller.” And you know, so it’s got to be a two-way street as far as communication

Robb:                                23:02                   And there are more and more people involved like through the raider to the passive house consultant to the sustainability consultant. I mean, if your feedback gets incorporated.

Steve:                                23:11                   this might be slightly biased, but yes, one big important point is listen to your consultants and actually have that two way dialogue. We’re not here to just tell you how much your design is not right. We want the building to be better. We’ve been improving the built environment since 1972 fairly sure. Six years before I was born. I was thinking about it. But anyway, it’s also construction, I mean, I was up in an attic out in long island on a Tuesday this week and we’re up there and I’m like, I’m sorry guys, you just got sort of backed into a corner here. Like, I couldn’t have done this any better than you did, but it’s still not where it needs to be because of the limitations that were placed on you by the design. And so, you know, the good architects will get out there and they’ll get their boots dirty and they’ll talk to the people who are actually building their buildings and they’ll learn from it.

Robb:                                24:12                   Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you learn so much being on the field and seeing the screw ups more than anything else.

Steve:                                24:22                   Learning from mistakes. Yeah. Well and not even necessarily mistakes, but maybe just things that could have been done better. If you can get out there and communicate with the guys and Gals who are actually making it happen, they have a lot they could teach you. And I learn every time I go out, I learned something from just some random plumber, like, oh, I’m going to put that in my toolbox and contribute that in the future because I would’ve never known.

Robb:                                24:52                   And it goes both ways. I’ve explained to various trades, the importance of an air barrier, what we’re trying to accomplish. And it’s not necessarily straightforward.

Steve:                                25:06                   No. And I get a lot of good suggestions there. They’re like “what if we did it like this?” And I’m like, “yeah, you could do it like that,” you know? Yeah. So just as designers, I don’t know if the siloing is the right term, but don’t put yourself in a place where you’re not willing to take feedback, basically. So communication is making sure what you’re putting out there is good in the first place. And then, you know, being willing to hear feedback on it and the other thing, and it actually feathers back into number two, which is designer regularities. You know, engineers are really good at having a pile of stock details that they’ll apply depending on what kind of system they’re working with. Architects not so much. Some are. I don’t think, at least personally. I don’t feel, I mean, and it’s not like if here’s dealing a window detail from scratch every time you’re, you’re doing exactly. If you redrawing the same detail two or three times, it’s a bad detail from the beginning. So what you do is, you learn from good designs, you put them in your own little virtual toolbox, right? You say, for wood construction, this is how we do it. For steel construction, this is how we do it. You’ve got those stock details, use Them. Instead of wasting your time trying to redesign the wheel a little bit every time, build yourself a good stable of details, and then either a. charge your clients less. There you go. There’s one thing. Make the project affordable overall, b. spend your extra time on making the building better in other ways or c. just go golfing, spend some time with your kids, be happy. whatever. Right? Like why are we spending our time with these cutesy, wootsy little details. You know, I’ve got a builder in New Jersey, who does affordable senior living developments. And in an 80 unit building, there are three unique designs, three. Guess what? He can’t build these things fast enough. People love them. They’re relatively efficient. And so it’s like, are they winning any design awards? Not necessarily. But is he providing affordable, healthy, efficient places for elderly people who need that sort of thing? Yeah. I mean, it’s nice to have a design trophy on your shelf, but gosh, I don’t know. I would sleep pretty good if I was saying that I was providing that, you know?

Robb:                                27:51                   Right on. That’s 10. We did pretty good. Less than an hour. Yeah. Anything, any other concluding comments? Anything to wrap up?

Steve:                                28:04                   Yeah so basically, at the beginning of the presentation, here’s where it starts. Designed decisions made in the office have a snowball effect throughout both the design process, the construction process and the life of the building. Right? And the earlier you can make good decisions, the better off your building’s going to be in perpetuity. And so someone asked me, as I was asking around the office, you know, like for suggestions on design mistakes, and what I should incorporate in this thing, and he said, “well, have you thought about why people keep making these bad design mistakes?” And you know, that’s a good question. It’s very meta or whatever you want to say. But I thought about it and it’s like, you know, design is just decisions. It is decision after decision after decision after decision, its endless. I mean, that’s really all design is, is you’re deciding to do one thing or another, right? So here’s the thing. If you don’t know, that’s what design is, how can you actually make good decisions, right? How can you move your design forward if you don’t realize that every time you put that pencil down to paper, which nobody does anymore obviously, but every time you click that mouse you’re making a decision. So you know, valuing those decisions is important and super hard to keep in mind and also very fluffy. But really that’s where it’s at. I mean, because who else is going to do it? I mean all these buildings keep popping up. Do they happen spontaneously? No. People are drawing them. People are developing them.

Robb:                                29:37                   Right. So being mindful, being conscious, learning.

Steve:                                29:42                   Yup. There it is.

Robb:                                29:46                   Thank you very much Steve.

Speaker 4:                        29:52                   Thank you for listening to buildings and beyond. For more information about the topics discussed today, visit www.swinter.com/podcast and check out the episode show notes buildings and beyond is brought to you by Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment. Our professionals have led the way since 1972 and the development of best practices to achieve high performance buildings. The production team for today’s episode includes Dylan Martello, Alex Mirabile, and myself. Heather Breslin, thank you for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Speaker 1:                        30:33                   [inaudible].

Steve Klocke, RA

Steve Klocke is a Senior Sustainability Consultant at Steven Winter Associates and a registered architect with 18+ years of experience in architectural design and building science consulting in residential buildings. He provides comprehensive green building certification support for the LEED for Homes, ENERGY STAR and Indoor airPLUS programs with a focus on lowrise multi-unit new construction and gut rehabs.

Steve is an integral part of the initial strategic planning sessions and workshops with builders, architects, and homeowners, setting goals and scopes of work for projects. The certification support he provides for project teams includes energy and building systems analysis, architectural design support, and project management. As a HERS Rater and LEED for Homes Green Rater, Steve inspects projects under construction for compliance with energy performance, durability, and health and safety standards. His performance testing expertise includes whole-house infiltration and duct leakage, as well as infrared thermal imaging.

The residential building industry has made incredible progress toward sustainability and energy efficiency goals. At the same time, Senior Sustainability Consultant and Registered Architect Steve Klocke finds many new buildings under-performing because designers continue to make simple, avoidable mistakes.

Based on lessons he’s learned from certifying over 1,200 dwelling units over the past seven years, Steve discusses the top ten multifamily design mistakes being made over and over again – and how to avoid them.

Presentation slides (mostly graphics): Top 10 Multifamily Design Mistakes

Steve’s Multifamily Design Mistakes 1-5:

Check out Part 2 of this episode for mistakes 6-10!

Other Resources:

 What comes to Robb’s mind when Steve mentions illicit, high-flow shower heads…

Send your feedback and questions to [email protected]

Buildings and Beyond is the podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment by focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Buildings and Beyond is a production of Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building, and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment. For more information, visit swinter.com.

Hosts: Robb Aldrich | Kelly Westby

Production Team: Heather Breslin | Alex Mirabile | Dylan Martello

Kelly: (00:06)
welcome to buildings and beyond

Robb: (00:09)
the podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment

Kelly: (00:13)
by focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Robb: (00:18)
I’m Rob Aldrich

Kelly: (00:19)
and I’m Kelly Westby.

Robb: (00:22)
This episode I talked with Steve Klocke who is an architect and senior sustainability consultant here at Steven Winter Associates. He works with a lot of builders and developers, largely multifamily, especially low rise multifamily, and he’s been asked to do a presentation at several events-several conferences, called “We should know better, top 10 multifamily design mistakes” and it really resonates with folks and certainly resonates with me. He gets big audiences, so we figured we’d try and talk about it on a podcast. We’ll link to the slides he uses in his presentation, which can help visualize some of the things he talks about, but it was really good to chat. This was a long chat. So this week we have the first five of his top 10 multifamily design mistakes.

Robb: (01:13)
All right. Number one over complicated geometry

Steve: (01:21)
yeah. Okay. So I won’t get too deep into architectural theory and what we all learned in school and what we should’ve learned in school.

Robb: (01:31)
We should say that you are a registered architect.

Steve: (01:34)
That’s true. I’ve been for 13 years now. And I wouldn’t ever say that I was ever a “hot pencil”- would be the term, like designing things that look great. I can make them work but, and then make them look good, but making like the really great stuff that wins awards, not my jam. Hence senior sustainability consultant. But anyway, so at some point in architecture we got the impression that to make a building interesting, you had to make it sculptural, blame frank Gary or whatever. And so architects are for some reason driven to make their buildings do funny things sometimes. And to me funny things mean: bump outs, bump ins, setbacks, jogs in the building footprint. I mean, I’ve seen building sections that look like a human spine. They jog in and out, and I guess it’s to make things look interesting, but it makes the building work a lot harder than it has to. And really it’s all subjective. And you know, again, not being a hot pencil, I can just say that, just because I was never good at it means I can trash it, but really very few buildings are going to go out and win a design award. Right. Very few buildings you’re going to look at and be like, “Yep, everyone agrees that it’s a great building.” Mostly everyone is going to have a different opinion and some people are going to hate your building no matter what you do. So its very subjective. Things that are not subjective include: gravity, heat, wind, rain, all these things that the building has to resist over its entire life. Those things are not subjective. They are all objective. And so I think sometimes we put too much of a priority on these subjective design desires, and not enough on these objective things that really maybe matter just as much if not more.

Robb: (03:34)
As an engineer, I’m exercising excellent restraints, I think right now. I couldn’t agree with you more.

Steve: (03:42)
It helps that you’re tied up with leather belts. Sorry.

Robb: (03:47)
I mean the more surface area, the better, sometimes seeing how many gables can we cram on this, or how many dormers can we cram on this roof? And it gets silly

Steve: (03:56)
yeah, I drove by one on the way home from Albany yesterday and I almost stopped to take a picture to add to the next time I give this presentation, but I didn’t, too much traffic.

Robb: (04:05)
And it turns into all framing and there’s no room for installation issues.

Steve: (04:08)
Yeah. You’re making the building work harder. And the basis of, of where I’m coming from is making the buildings easier to actually build. And so I think that results in a building that is going to be more efficient. It’s going to be probably less expensive. It’s going to be easier to maintain. It’s going to be easier to build in that you’re not giving your subcontractors a bunch of surprises. If you can build predictability into the design and a little bit of modularity, even, you can really get some momentum going. You make the lives easier for the guys and gals who are actually building it and you’re going to get a better product.

Robb: (04:49)
Better quality control. Yeah. And that actually leads very nicely into number two. Which is design irregularities.

Steve: (04:57)
Right. Which again, maybe they could be seen as the same thing, but they’re a bit different.

Robb: (05:02)
You’re talking about like the exterior form versus the plans. Is that kind of what you’re getting at?

Steve: (05:07)
Yup that would be one thing, you know, in a midrise, high rise building, they’re very good at lining up their apartments. Right. In nice clean stacks, in low rise, which is my jam, it’s not always the case. You have units overlapping each other. I have a project right now, I swear they were playing Jenga and designing at the same time and there was some cross pollination there. And it makes it hard to do your take offs for energy models. It makes it really hard to energy model. I’ve got so many funky little ceilings and floors and whatever. It makes it hard for the contractor. That stuff is going to eventually sag and yeah, it’s got more thermal bridging, more structure, they got to work harder to make the building do what it wants to do. So yeah, just, you know, don’t get cute, build sensible or design sensible buildings.

Robb: (05:58)
Yeah, I mean there’s a lot. Making a simple building look interesting seems like quite an art and there are some people that are very, very good at it. I’ve seen some very simple plans, simple forms, very functional- I’m not licensed to express an aesthetic opinion- but it’s good. I mean, we’re not talking about shoe boxes.

Steve: (06:28)
yeah. I mean, in my presentation, I’ve got a slide from park slope where I used to live, and the town homes all look exactly the same. Do you think those people paid $6 million for their brownstone because it looked the same as the neighbors or they didn’t care that it looked the same as the neighbors? Does it maybe even add to the urban, you know, the street fabric? I don’t know what the right design term is, but you know, is there value in things kind of looking more the same instead of everything having to be just a little bit different and putting all that energy into these little tweaks when you could be putting the energy into refining your details, building some standard practices in that everyone can build efficiently.

Robb: (07:11)
All right. Now we’re switching gears a little bit

Steve: (07:16)
More technical now. That was all very fluffy. Yes and No.

Robb: (07:21)
I can’t say that you can say that. I’d be pilloried. Alright. Thermal bridging- roofs and walls. This is a nitty gritty performance issue.

Steve: (07:34)
Yes. And we have our passive house friends to thank for really making this more obvious to the rest of us. So when we do all these energy models, actually, my friend Charlotte, she’s working on a project in Toronto where one of the key things that they’re looking at is the difference between modeled performance and actual performance in these buildings.

Robb: (08:01)
There is a difference.

Steve: (08:03)
There is a difference, and where did that difference come from? And one of the things in the envelope, that contributes to this, is thermal bridging. So roofs, you know, in New York City…

Robb: (08:14)
Should we define thermal bridging?

Steve: (08:14)
Go ahead

Robb: (08:17)
Well, in a framed home, for example, if you have a two by six wall and it’s filled with R19 bats, the studs themselves only are about R-5 or something. So t week, that lesser odd value kind of diminishes the performance of the whole wall. And by adding rigid insulation on the outside, Bill and I talked about this in the envelopes, podcasts, you add more. If you put R5 rigid on the outside, you add more than R5 to the whole assembly because you reduced the bridging.

Steve: (08:56)
Yup. And that’s the point. So in roofs, in New York City at least, with mostly low slope roofs, it’s not a problem because the typical detail is, you know, a few layers of poly ISO on top and you’re good to go. I will say though, that in the newest version of the building code, they added a table that was actually only in the residential code for years, where if you have an unvented ceiling or attic assembly, a certain percentage of the R-value, if you’re using your permeable installation, has to be above deck. So if it’s an r 38 roof, you have to have r15 continuous above, and then you can do your best down below. And it doesn’t apply if you do spray foam or whatever. But I still see drawings come across my desk that haven’t picked that up. And you know, again, thermal bridging is not only a loss of performance but it’s also potential for moisture condensation and then you’ve got durability issues and indoor air quality issues and etc.. So yeah, low slope roofs aren’t bad except for when you get around roof drains. A good architect will say, r15 minimum at the roof drain instead of going from zero to whatever. The walls are really where it’s at. And especially masonry and especially steel framed walls, that metal is so conductive, I mean, if you’re not putting rigid insulation on the outside, and I know for Code that’s an option, or you can try to load your wall full of closed cell spray foam, but who wants to pay for all that? Just do some bats on the inside and then a couple of inches of rigid on the outside.

Robb: (10:34)
Do you see steel framed walls with insulation in the cavities and nothing else?

Steve: (10:44)
I see it come across my desk. I don’t let it off of my desk

Robb: (10:48)
You still see drawings where you have steel framing bats in the steel framing and nothing else?

Steve: (10:53)
Yeah, I still see low slope wood-frame roofs with, you know R-38 bats between the joice and nothing on top. You know, and a lot of this is, the title of the presentation is, we should know better and so I have to tell people at the beginning of my presentation, look probably, hopefully, you will have heard about all these issues before or at least hopefully been aware of them and maybe just need to be reminded or whatever. But it’s not rocket science. These are things that we should have figured out a long time ago, and they just for some reason keep finding their way into these construction documents. So the sub category, or the next one for thermal bridging, is that slabs, and this is how I would say at least 50% of my project first time I see the drawings, and this is hard to do on the radio or podcast or whatever, but the installation is drawn behind the foundation and under the slab. If you have a slab on grade foundation, and so you have an inverted L, but you have continuous concrete vertically and horizontally. So A. you don’t need both the vertical and the horizontal, you only need one B. You need to get installation either on the outside of the foundation and make sure the top of it is contiguous with the above grade wall insulation, or you can leave it on the inside of the foundation and at least separate the slab from the foundation if you don’t have a structural slab. And man, that’s one that architects for some reason, just have a really hard time wrapping their heads around.

Robb: (12:26)
First of all, I think passive house people wouldn’t necessarily agree with you, that you don’t need sub slab insulation.

Steve: (12:34)
Right, let me clarify. So my projects are mostly low rise, multifamily, affordable. We’re not pursuing any of the advanced certifications. We’re just pursuing the base energy star, you know, LEED for homes or green communities.

Robb: (12:49)
And when you’re talking about slabs, are we talking about basement floors? Were we talking about slab on grade?

Steve: (12:54)
Slab on grade. There is a difference. Well yeah, and a diagram in my presentation shows we’ve got insulation starting at six inches below grade going down to 24 inches below grade. What about zero to six inches below grade? That’s the coldest part. The ground gets warmer the farther you go down, hence the frost depth for your footings. And so, the coldest part of the foundation is a part that’s getting any installation.

Robb: (13:21)
Yeah 20 years ago I was dealing with that. Yeah, I’ve seen it so many times, where in a basement, insulating the outside of a foundation wall, and you get to above grade, well, I don’t know. I don’t want the foam above grade. I’ll just cut it at grade and then leave the top 18 inches.

Steve: (13:44)
Yeah because they want to see that concrete. Or they don’t want to cover it. And it is a tricky detail to cover it on the outside if you have a lot of exposed foundation.

Robb: (13:49)
Yeah and this is one of the trickier details I think to get right.

Steve: (13:54)
I will definitely concede that

Robb: (13:56)
In the show notes can we put links to some resources you think? There are good details, we can put a link to at least one of your PowerPoints.

Steve: (14:07)
Sure. Absolutely. It is not rocket science though.

Robb: (14:16)
No, but it can be challenging and it can be different, and anything different is hard.

Steve: (14:25)
Yeah. Right. Agreed. If it was easy, we would have wrapped our heads around a long time ago and it wouldn’t be on my top 10.

Robb: (14:38)
Yeah, fair enough. Number five, poorly detailed air barrier.

Steve: (14:44)
The trick to air barriers is that you have to draw them.

Robb: (14:49)
So this is on plans?

Steve: (14:49)
Zone plans. Or sections. Yeah. And so actually that’s really how it should work, is you have that air barrier continuity, big fat dashed line running across your building section, top, sides and bottom. And then you zoom in and you’re looking at every jog in the building. If you just couldn’t help yourself. Every material transition, every assembly transition, you know, floors to ceilings to walls, etc. And you’re zooming in all the way down to the level where the general contractor should not have any questions about how you expect their leakage requirements to be met. Now he or she can say, “oh, I would rather do it this way.” That’s fine, but if you don’t have something to start from, what happens is, I get out there in the field as the building’s being framed, contractor looks at me and says, “what do we got to do?” And I say, “well, what’s in the drawings?” And they say, “this is what’s in the drawings, but we don’t know what it means” or it’s just buried in the spec somewhere because it’s buried in the code somewhere. And, you know, who looks at the specs? Let me take that back. Several general contractors look at specs, but are they sitting out there, you know, in the job trailer or are they in someone’s tool belt as they’re walking around building? No.

Robb: (16:24)
It’s hard to find things from specs. Oh my God, it really is. What are some of the examples you see? I mean, give me an example of an air barrier that’s just..

Steve: (16:35)
well, first of all, we should probably shouldn’t mention any trade names, but let’s say the sheet air and water barrier product, that one would typically apply to wood framed construction on the outside of a building. Building paper, house wrap, no brand names. Something like that can work well as a water barrier, if it’s installed correctly, which between you, me, and whoever’s listening, it never is. It can be, there’s less of a chance that it’s going to be an air barrier. And I can safely say it is never installed in a way that is going to achieve complete air barrier, like you and I would expect it to be.

Robb: (17:23)
And they stopped claiming that. Those manufacturers have not been claiming that. They call it a water resistant barrier or drainage plane.

Steve: (17:32)
Okay so they do know better by now, but do the people using it know better?

Robb: (17:36)
Well that’s the issue, yeah. I have house trap, that’s my air barrier. And you’re right, it’s not. Its lapped, it’s got staples

Steve: (17:46)
And who knows, its flapping in the wind for however many months while they’re waiting the weather to warm up so they can put up their clatting or whatever.

Robb: (17:52)
Gotcha. Whereas, so if this was the frame construction, what do you like to see for an air barrier?

Steve: (17:58)
Well, we started seeing a lot more of the, again not naming any products, but the sheeting with air and water barrier built into the outer layer. That seems to have a lot better results because it is more manageable.

Robb: (18:16)
And tapes all the seams there? It’s very important to tape those seams properly.

Steve: (18:19)
Exactly, and a liquid applied air and water barrier, we don’t see all that often on low rise wood frame, but you know, obviously in steel and masonry, it’s this the norm.

Robb: (18:31)
Caulk and foam from the inside?

Steve: (18:34)
Caulk and foam from the inside. Yeah. You know, we’re starting to back pedal a little bit on spray foam. Spray foam is good to use in certain areas when it was really hard to do anything else. But you know, if you’re looking at the global warming potential and all that stuff, we just really started to see, you know, either fiberglass bats or cellulose. As long as you’ve got a good layer of insulation on the outside, which also has its own, you know, global warming potential. Unfortunately, it’s all a bunch of tradeoffs really. You can achieve the same tightness if you’ve got a good air barrier in that assembly and all the way around.

Robb: (19:18)
Thanks for listening. That’s the first five of the top 10 multifamily design mistakes. We’ll do the other five next week. Thanks.

Heather: (19:27)
Thank you for listening to buildings and beyond. For more information about the topics discussed today, visit www.swinter.com/podcast and check out the episode show notes buildings and beyond is brought to you by Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy green building and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment. Our professionals have led the way since 1972 and the development of best practices to achieve high performance buildings. I’ve production team for today’s episode includes Dylan Martello, Alex Mirabile and myself, Heather Breslin, thank you for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Charley Stevenson, LFA, LEED AP

Charley Stevenson, Principal, Integrated Eco Strategy (IES), is a sustainability consultant and green building entrepreneur with a particular focus on helping others understand and implement their healthier materials goals. IES is a pioneer in assisting project teams in creating Full Living buildings, specializing in the Living Building Challenge Materials Petal.

Since 2010, Charley’s North Adams, MA, company has managed the green aspects of projects from 1,000 to 500,000 square feet, including the Williams College Environmental Center, Hampshire College’s R.W. Kern Center, Hitchcock Center for the Environment and Yale Divinity School campus. To facilitate materials compliance, IES created Red2Green (R2G), a comprehensive platform for building materials evaluation, selection and management. R2G is available to project teams by subscription and currently in use nationwide.

The advancement of building materials has allowed professionals to achieve new heights when designing and constructing high-performance buildings. But, the topic of building materials is not discussed enough, and more consumers are asking important questions. How do we know where these materials come from? What effects do they have on human health and the environment? How are standards for responsible building materials being enforced? The list continues…

This two-part episode features an interview with Charley Stevenson, a sustainability consultant and green building entrepreneur who has devoted his career to helping others understand and implement healthier materials goals. The discussion begins with a look at the Living Building Challenge, a program that pays particular attention to healthy building materials, and continues with a review of some of the resources that are intended to help consumers learn more about materials and their make-up.

Send your feedback and questions to [email protected]

Buildings and Beyond is the podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment by focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Buildings and Beyond is a production of Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building, and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment. For more information, visit swinter.com.

Hosts: Robb Aldrich | Kelly Westby

Production Team: Heather Breslin | Alex Mirabile | Dylan Martello

Kelly: (00:06)
Welcome to buildings and beyond.

Robb: (00:09)
a podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment.

Kelly: (00:13)
by focusing on efficiency, accessibility and health.

Robb: (00:18)
I’m Robb Aldrich.

Kelly: (00:19)
and I’m Kelly Westby.

Robb: (00:22)
This episode is part two of my interview with Charley Stevenson from integrated ECO strategy. And we continue our conversation about sustainable materials and healthy materials. We got into a little more detail about specific building products and approaches to selecting those products and also prioritizing what systems to look at first, which has a bigger impact. So here’s part two of my chat with Charley Stevenson.

Robb: (00:54)
People that are not ready to, as you said, dive into LBC. What are some of the lightest lists? What are some of the lowest hanging fruit to really get the most bang for their buck or their time and their effort to get more sustainable materials into their projects?

Charley: (01:12)
I have two thoughts in mind. If my practice had a mascot, it would be a ratchet. And the notion is you do a little bit of work and you get a click and then it’s clicked. You’ve, you’ve, you’ve made a change and it’s clicked. And then when you’re ready, you can do a little bit more work and get another click. And sometimes it’s really hard to get a click. Sometimes you gets some really easy clicks. But you know, that approach is, is half half of the answer here too, to think about places where in your practice, whatever it may be, you use the same product or product type again and again. And again, I don’t know of a building that doesn’t have drywall. So Rather than think of this as a problem that needs to be solved all at once, we can just say, let’s make sure we’re using drywall we feel good about because we always use it and we often use a lot of it. So we’ve reduced the hundreds of products that we’re worried about to that single one. And then we ask the question, well, what’s the right drywall to use? And if we can figure that out for a single family residence and we can figure that out for a commercial retrofit, chances are we’ve covered 90% of the market. And then anybody who has that answer, any design team that’s incorporated that and developed confidence in whatever that product may be, can simply make that their standard or could make three good walls, their standard and exclude from future work products about which they don’t know as much. Then it’s onto the next the next segment. What are, what are the concerns with drywall? Well, a reason to focus on drywall and I’m going to get to your answer in just a second, Is that we use a lot of it. So you know, if you were to prioritize where changes in a material Palette should take place. I think about what arrives by train car, what arrives by, by tractor trailer, what arrives in small cartons in the back of a pickup truck. So, you know, drywall is not coming in the back of the pickup truck by and large. So there’s a lot of it when you’re in a building, it has it been, presents a lot of surface area to occupants. So if it’s good, it could be really good and if it’s bad it could be really bad. So sort of starting with the inside skin that is presented to occupants in working out you know, deeper into wall assemblies as is, is one approach. Thinking about volumes you procured is another way to prioritize. And then, you know, back to thinking about mastics, wet applied products are different because the curing happens in the space. So whatever, whatever solvents or whatever chemical reaction makes it cure that’s happening live in the space that you, you care about. So to the specific question, there are excellent dry walls and many commodity dry walls are, are fully disclosed, are tested for offgassing and pass with flying colors. So, you know, you can, you can go to the major manufacturers, USG, national gypsum, certainteed, and you can ask and receive a red list, free or Red List compliant drywall. Excellent. paints are another good example. You know, it, it, first of all, there’s often a lot of them in a project and they’re wet applied. So what they have for chemical activity can be significant.

Charley: (05:45)
It’s nice that paints had been the subject of LEED scrutiny for a couple of decades. So it’s a pretty mature market, at least as far as volatile organic compounds are concerned. You can add the question of whether it’s red list free. So I think to a major manufacturer that we all know, and you know, it’s been prevalent in the, in the industry for, for decades, if not a century. You know, eight years ago a colleague of mine call to ask what was in their paint and he kinda got a laugh back from that manufacturer to say, you know, that’s our, that’s our secret recipe. There’s no way we’re telling you what’s in that paint. You know, from, from his perspective, that made perfect sense. Now have a declare label for not one, but many products which means that over time, there’s been comfort in disclosing and there’s a recognition on their part that they gained value by revealing their chemical constituents. So the declare label, for first steps is a very effective way for project teams to identify places where there are simply good answers to the question, What product should I use? So the declared product database is it’s a prescreened list of products that the screenings they actually done by the international living future institute. So products earn labels and then you can search for them and simply see which, which products are preapproved for use on an LPC project. And there’s an awful lot within division nine. So if you’re looking for interior finishes, carpet, paint, floor finishes, ceilings, you can, I won’t say entirely, but you’re, it’s getting close to the point where you could simply pick products that pass muster just by looking for them in a, in a pre-published list.

Robb: (08:07)
Nice. That that has struck me as well, that there’s much more, I guess, awareness of a healthy finishes. I think it may be because you said it’s, you know, many of them are white applied in space and that’s a big deal. But it’s also, you know, homeowners going out to buy stuff for their home and really wanting to kind of, you know, making much more personal decisions. I wonder how much that drives the manufacturer in that direction.

Charley: (08:43)
I think that’s a lot. I think the fact that interiors have been the subject of LEED credits for 20 years has driven that a lot. So it’s a mature market. when I think about the reason to focus on material health or the health impacts of materials, it’s a nested set of concerns. So at the core is just that issue, you know, what impact will these material decisions have on occupant in building user health? So that’s a very natural place, you know, as you speak of a homeowner please don’t let me renovate my child’s room to the detriment of my child’s health. If we go out one layer, we asked the question of installer health. So you know, you know, here’s a place it makes sense that trades people would be concerned and you know, they’re the ones who are working with these materials in the building at that period of, of maximum chemical activity. So that’s the next layer. shouldn’t we ask that the question? What products can I select for installation that won’t have a negative impact on those people I’m hiring to install? The next layer is the manufacturing process. So an example here is neoprene. You know, I have, it’s not here at my desk, but before I got into this, I had a toddler and she wanted a colorful lunchbox and it happened to be native made of Neoprene, which has all sorts of fantastic properties and she could spill in it and I could wash it out and it would dry and it was good to go. It is annert, I wouldn’t mind her eating spilled apple sauce out of it. But I’m awfully glad I don’t live near or work in a neoprene factory.

Charley: (10:52)
So it turns out that the production of neoprene has a terrible localized impact. It’s not healthy. You know, the act of producing Neoprene produces some pernicious, in fact, immortal, pernicious chemicals. So those impacts are felt by the workers in those factories. They’re felt by fenceline communities. And then once, once out in the wild those, those chemicals persist. So it’s not the case that we exclude neoprene from projects because it’s harmful in the building, but there’s no way to have made neoprene in a responsible way. So it makes sense in an, you know, with that lens to avoid consumption of neoprene because necessarily that meant production of neoprene, which meant harm.

Robb: (11:48)
I was not aware of that I’m going to have to rethink some duct liners and installation.

Charley: (11:58)
Well in this goes back to, you know, here I am, you’re asking how to do this simply.And I’m not making it simple, but you know, so that’s maybe a you know, a 200 or 300 level question, but, you know, it goes back to this idea of defining what success looks like and once in my world, once I’ve seen that question of how do I keep occupants healthy is a, can actually be optimized, but it may be optimized at the expense of other people or other planetary systems. So, so this iterative process has us expand our scope of concern to the point where we’re asking how do we minimize harm across the entire system? Not just for the building end users. And, and that goes to you know, it goes to volume as well. There’s not that much neoprene that goes into a typical building but there’s an awful lot of paint.

Charley: (13:03)
So if resources are limited as they always are, you know, picking those areas where you can have the most impact or flip that around have the least impact with the least amount of work. That’s to say bring the most benefit with the least amount of work, you can get a few clicks on the ratchet there. And then you’re thinking about little wins. So if you can think of where there’s neoprene in a vibration isolation hanger if everybody that specifies that asks their typical manufacturers, whether it’s available with an EPDM gaskets, so sort of the you know, benign rubber gasket instead, you know, neoprene is lovely because it’s resistant to absolutely everything. If you’re not exposing those gaskets to oils, an EPDM gasket would have a comparable surface life. So sometimes the one size fits all solution is very harmful. And if, if you could identify within your practice where a different gasket type is, does not risk exposure to chemicals, that would cause it to degrade, then perfect. That, that, that one inquiry, that one substitution, you know, ripples through a pretty wide swath of materials procurement and you don’t have to ask the question again.

Speaker 2: (14:34)
Yeah. So I definitely understand the point about volume. So drywall and paint and flooring, roofing, just the sheer mass, there’s so much of it and that’s a reasonable place to start. Are there some kind of pernicious elements that people don’t know too much about, but they’re relatively easy to avoid or, or choose better, make better choices?

Charley: (15:14)
So I would say often we can achieve results through deletion of products or expectations. So examples of that would be antimicrobial finishes or stain resistant finishes. Or flame retardants.

Robb: (15:36)
So flame retardants is, you know, fire alarms, as you said, was good. Flame retardants also sound pretty good.

Charley: (15:46)
So that’s they do until you find out where they are and why they’re there. So flame retardants, if you have an upholstered piece of furniture, chances are it has several pounds of known carcinogens soaked into the foam. And you know, the idea is we don’t want this phone to catch on fire in. I think in everybody’s experience before the foam can catch on fire, the fabric has to catch on fire cause you can’t, you can’t get the F can’t get the flame through the fabric without getting through the fabric. So you know, here’s a case where the history is that the notion, you know, the history of flame retardants is people falling asleep on couches with lit cigarettes. And so we want the fabric not to catch fire and then we want the foam not to catch fire or rather it’s not a flame preventative, It’s a flame retardant. We want it to burn slowly enough that there’s time to get out of the building, there’s time for the alarm to get off and there’s time to get out of the building. So interestingly, those flame retardants don’t prevent fire. They just slow it. But they do it in an awfully smoky, billowy, black toxic kind of way.

Robb: (17:30)
So it’s to the, so it’s toxic before it burns and it’s even more toxic when it burns.

Charley: (17:37)
Right. And if we just had something like a wool or you know, a, a natural fiber, you know, flame retardant upholstery over it, we don’t have to worry about if we can slow the flame getting to the foam, we don’t need to slow the flame in the foam.

Charley: (18:01)
Now this is, this has been a terrible nontechnical way of describing it, but its an example of a place where in many jurisdictions, the, the flame retardants aren’t actually required. And when you look at what those flame retardants provide, it’s marginal safety, even in a fire, at the expense of known health harm up until the unlikely event that there’s a fire. Right? So in those tradeoffs, we can either try to solve the problem without introducing chemicals of concern. And that the same would be true of antimicrobials. You know, anti-microbial finishes are typically endocrine disruptors. So and by design, there are things you’re touching a lot. So the very presence of those endocrine disruptors, you know, a classic example is on a baby changing station, right? we’re taking our most vulnerable and will undress them on a plastic surface coated with endocrine disruptors right? So, you know, put in those terms, maybe we could come up with a better plan. And it the same would be true of of stain retardant finishes. So these are typically Teflon derivatives. And you know, they are impactful at every point in their life. They’re, they’re terrible to produce. I happen to live in Northwestern, Massachusetts and there are three or four towns, four towns near me. All of which have municipal water supplies contaminated by precursors to Teflon. And yeah, there’s no getting it back out of the groundwater. So, you know, it’s just across the board, great to reduce Teflon production because that reduces this unavoidable ecological damage. Then, you know, further down the line, it’s you know, these, these are present in effectively all life because these are immortal chemicals. What makes them stain resistant makes them resistant to everything. So both in terms of interaction with, with living systems and then they’re indestructable. So every Teflon molecule that we’ve made will remain a Teflon molecule through geologic time. So we don’t know all of their consequences

Robb: (20:58)
its the precursors that have health implications, is that correct?

Charley: (21:06)
The precursors certainly have health implications. The use of Teflon compounds in certain applications also has health implications. So there’s typically a Teflon coating or Teflon derivative coating in microwave popcorn in the bag for the microwave popcorn. And There’s literature on people who eat more microwave popcorn than typical, suffering health effects. Not just from eating so much microwave popcorn, but from the, the Teflon compounds that they ingest with their microwave popcorn. You can kill certain sorts of birds by heating a Teflon pan too hot before you put food in it on that stove. And you know, it’s the canary in the coal mine in the sense that, you know, you know, it’s, it’s largely an immortal product, but it will interact under certain conditions. And, and that’s revealing to us that, that many of these compounds are in fact, biologically active. And therefore worth worth knowing about.

Robb: (22:35)
Going back, focus on the big quantity items like drywall and flooring and paint. Also the, the coatings or the treatments, the fire, the fire flame retardants, stain resistant materials antimicrobial finishes

Charley: (23:04) places where you can avoid through elimination Rather than through substitution. And this has potential health benefits. It also has potential embodied carbon benefits. You know, how do you reduce the chemical load in the building? You reduce the volume. And the number of products that you’re bringing in. So, so lighter buildings with a smaller pallet require, well, less research and in many cases less, less just sheer volume of, of product. So you know, places where you can have exposed structure, places where you’re not putting a drop ceiling beneath another you know, exposed mechanicals. Many of these are sort of modern design directions that teams will go anyway, but there’s, there happened to be ecological benefits to these on, on many levels as well.

Robb: (24:02)
Cool. Yeah. How about insulation?

Charley: (24:11)
So again, knowing that saying we’re gonna use cellulose insulation, has other impacts as far as you know, the other detail and the construction quality, having to play a bigger role. Natural insulation products can be seen as carbon sinks rather than carbon sources. So cellulose is sort of, I mean, in many ways it’s optimal on many levels. You know, many manufacturers are treating just with Boron for both insect and and flame resistance. So, you know, annert chemistry. And then, you know, as far as the source is concerned, you’re taking a significant source of carbon in the world and you’re putting it into a building for 50 or a hundred or 200 years. That’s a low tech carbon sequestration strategy contrasted with a spray foam or a rigid foam insulation product, which you know, they’re chemically complicated. Many of the blowing agents, though this is changing, Many of the blowing agents are still powerful greenhouse gases. And often in the formulation there is a, a halogenated flame retardant to, to meet certain code requirements. So there’s middle ground in some of the wood fiber board insulation products. There are an increasing number of that products, both fiberglass and mineral wool that are formaldehyde free. and again, these are not high weight, but typically high volume, large surface area products that go into a building. Another, another thing to think about is just stuff you touch every day. So I’m looking at it, oh, in the buildings, where does your food land? If you’re going to pick it up and you know, eat according to the five second rule? You know, what’s your door knob finish? Just the things that, that, you know, you’re, you’re physically in contact with. You know, those are places where it makes sense you in terms of, in terms of bang for the buck or, or health return for the effort. Those are places where it can make good sense to, to pay a little bit of attention. You know doorknobs. An example of something that does also repeated, you know, through a building. There might be one doorknob type purchased 20 or 30 or 50 times. Yeah. So if you can, as opposed to the kitchen sink where there’s only one kitchen sink.

Robb: (27:23)
Gotcha. I remember reading, maybe it might’ve been a year ago, somebody’s doing some research where they replaced all the handrails and doorknobs with, I think it was copper just with copper because copper has kind of innate anti bacterial properties.as I understand it, and, and trying to ascertain if there was any reduction in God, I forget what it was. Communicable diseases or, or what, but I mean stuff that you touch every day. I, you know, some people would think, oh, great place to have lots of antimicrobial to prevent bacteria spreading. But that’s not where you’re going.

Charley: (28:02)
No, well you know, many things have bronze or a chrome finish. Well, there isn’t bronze without low levels of lead. So, you know, if you look at a lot of hardware, you’ll see that it comes with a California prop 65 warning, which is to say, okay, this product contains known chemicals of concern. And when I see that prop 65 warning I’m usually doing, in the case of metallics, I’m usually thinking that it contains trace amounts of lead. And yeah, so that’s an example of a place where you could consciously move in the direction of not having a, I’m looking at an antique doorknob here in my office, which I’m quite certain is bronze and it’s polished, which is to say that every day I use it and I clean it off a little bit with my hand. And then I could eat lunch. So you know, the purpose of this conversation is not to induce paranoia but to, to sort of give frameworks for thinking about this because there are many small steps, which taken incrementally, will move us in the direction of sensible solutions.

Robb: (29:36)
Excellent. One thing I liked to ask is where are we going to go from here? If we talk about this again in five years, what do you think we’ll be talking about?

Charley: (29:48)
That’s a great question. I see in the eight years that I’ve been working with healthier materials, I’ve seen night and day changes. You know, engagement from manufacturers who are completely resistant, you know, three and five and six years ago. You know, new levels of awareness and engagement from the full spectrum of project types. This topic of healthier materials has had remarkable growth and yet it’s still the early days. So I think five years from now we’ll see a much greater public disclosure and we’ll see a much broader awareness. You know, take BPA. As an example. You know, it had its moment in the spotlight and, and not favorable in the spotlight a few years ago. that’s an example of the kind of market change that can happen when when there’s a lot of, you know, broad scrutiny on a particular product. The, the problem that that can create and we haven’t touched on so I’m glad we are here, is what’s known in the industry is regrettable substitution. So if you have a water bottle that says it’s BPA free, chances are it’s chemically very similar to a water bottle that contains BPA. It might just contain BPS, which is to say it is literally BPA free, but it contains a different bicephenol compound, which is chemically similar to BPA. And in many cases, what this means is that, you know, people use the term whac-a-mole, that we identify this problem BPA, we push it out of the system and we replace it with a closely related chemical compound, which hasn’t yet been tested, which is to say it hasn’t yet been implicated in the studies of hormonal disruption. But there’s an excellent chance that it will be. So, you know, we want to be very careful that we’re taking a class base approach to this rather than an individual compound by compound approach. So that, the notion is not to eliminate BPA, but the notion is to reduce any BPX compound. So there’s been tremendous advancement in this discussion at the industry level. I think thought leaders like healthy building network and the health product declaration collaborative sixclasses.org. You know, there are a lot of unbelievably smart not for profit groups making tremendous strides here. And, and really what will continue to tip it is engagement by a growing number of practitioners and building owners making this, even at the simplest level of requirement for their projects. Because indeed it’s those market forces that bring about the most rapid and permanent change. So we just want to make sure that we’re asking the right questions so that we get the right outcomes, not just elimination of single compounds, but the unit reduction and elimination of whole families of chemicals of concern.

Robb: (33:49)
And continuing the trend of more and more engagement and more and more demand on, on manufacturers.

Charley: (33:57)
Right. You know, I think manufacturers are absolutely partners in this and you know, from a risk mitigation standpoint, they have the most to gain. You know, they’d stake their reputations on the quality of their products, and none of them want to be implicated in longterm health impacts. So there’s great alignment around this and it’s really a matter of raising the consciousness among all sectors of, I’m saying the building industry, but this entire conversation could port over to home electronics, it could port over to clothing, it coud pour over to personal care products, you know, these, all of these same factors are at play. And I think as we have a common language, a common set of goals and a common set of tools we’re, we’re poised for rapid transformation. And really it’s new chemical compounds that we need because no one wants formaldehyde. No one wants carcinogens. They do want strong glues. So how do we achieve strong glue without the you know, without the harmful side effects.

Robb: (35:10)
Excellent. Makes Sense. And it’s an optimistic note to end on. I think that we’re moving in the right direction.

Charley: (35:18)
Oh absolutely, and I think we’re constantly talking here at the office that we don’t need breakthroughs. We just want little clicks. We want incremental change. And the more people we have exerting this pressure, the more the market will move in the direction. That makes sense. So I, we’re, we’re fortunate to have powerful, brilliant thought leaders that can point us in a rational direction and then we can in small ways, but in constant ways, exert these forces and, and help move the market. And where, where can people find out more about you and your work? We’ve launched a new website that’s called materiallybetter.com.

Robb: (36:08)
All right. Awesome. Thank you very much charley.

Charley: (36:11)
It’s a pleasure. It’s fun to talk about. I’m grateful for your time and attention and I look forward to continuing this conversation.

Speaker 4: (36:25)
Thank you for listening to buildings and beyond. For more information about the topics discussed today. Visit www.swinter.com/podcast and check out the episode show notes buildings that beyond is brought to you by Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment our professionals have led the way since 1972 and the development of best practices to achieve high performance buildings. I’ve production team for today’s episode includes Dylan Martello, Alex Mirabile, and myself. Heather Breslin, thank you for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Charley Stevenson, LFA, LEED AP

Charley Stevenson, Principal, Integrated Eco Strategy (IES), is a sustainability consultant and green building entrepreneur with a particular focus on helping others understand and implement their healthier materials goals. IES is a pioneer in assisting project teams in creating Full Living buildings, specializing in the Living Building Challenge Materials Petal.

Since 2010, Charley’s North Adams, MA, company has managed the green aspects of projects from 1,000 to 500,000 square feet, including the Williams College Environmental Center, Hampshire College’s R.W. Kern Center, Hitchcock Center for the Environment and Yale Divinity School campus. To facilitate materials compliance, IES created Red2Green (R2G), a comprehensive platform for building materials evaluation, selection and management. R2G is available to project teams by subscription and currently in use nationwide.

The advancement of building materials has allowed professionals to achieve new heights when designing and constructing high-performance buildings. But, the topic of building materials is not discussed enough, and more consumers are asking important questions. How do we know where these materials come from? What effects do they have on human health and the environment? How are standards for responsible building materials being enforced? The list continues…

This two-part episode features an interview with Charley Stevenson, a sustainability consultant and green building entrepreneur who has devoted his career to helping others understand and implement healthier materials goals. The discussion begins with a look at the Living Building Challenge, a program that pays particular attention to healthy building materials, and continues with a review of some of the resources that are intended to help consumers learn more about materials and their make-up.

Send your feedback and questions to [email protected]

Buildings and Beyond is the podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment by focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Buildings and Beyond is a production of Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building, and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment. For more information, visit swinter.com.

Hosts: Robb Aldrich | Kelly Westby

Production Team: Heather Breslin | Alex Mirabile | Dylan Martello

Kelly: (00:06)
Welcome to buildings and beyond.

Robb: (00:09)
the podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment.

Kelly: (00:13)
by focusing on efficiency, accessibility and health.

Robb: (00:18)
I’m Robb Aldrich.

Kelly: (00:19)
and I’m KellyWestby.

Robb: (00:22)
In this episode I talked with CharleyStevenson from integrated eco strategy about sustainable materials and healthy materials. He’s been looking at this for a decade or more- healthy materials and buildings, and I really learned a lot. This is something that I am finding that I’m more and more interested in. We talked for a long time, quite a long time, so long that we had to edit it down and break this up into a couple episodes, but I’d learned tons. I hope you get something from it too. In this episode, for the first 10 or 15 minutes, we talked about mostly about the living building challenge, which is a program that I’ll let Charleydescribe in more detail, but healthy materials is a big piece of the program. And then we talk about how to find out information about materials, what databases are out there, how to source sustainable materials, what to ask manufacturers, who is keeping track of all this info. And listening back to the episode, actually I realized we threw out a few abbreviations that I thought maybe would be good to define up front. HPD is a health product declaration, ILFI by International Living Future Institute, which is in charge of the living building challenge program, and SDS’s or MSDS’s are safety data sheets or materials safety data sheets. I thought those might be helpful if you are not familiar with those, but here is part one my interview with CharleyStevenson.

Robb: (02:03)
Well first of all, thank you for being here. This is an important topic. Healthy materials, sustainable materials. And I know you are very involved with living building challenge projects. Yes?

Charley: (02:17)
Correct. We started our first living building challenge project in early 2011. And that seems like a long time ago.

Robb: (02:30)
Yeah. Right. And I listened to the green architects lounge podcast and they talked about the living building challenge project or two and they mentioned you and they mentioned that the materials pedal, the materials piece, is the toughest. Do you hear that a lot?

Charley: (02:50)
so I would put it this way, the materials pedal is the biggest surprise among the challenging pedals. So you know, in living building challenge there are seven pedals, three of them are highlighted as particularly challenging energy, water and materials. The energy pedal requires net zero or in some cases net positive energy. And I think there are lots of rules of thumb that have evolved over the, over the years. And project teams can look to a pretty substantial set of case studies and understand, you know, generally things are converging toward heat pumps and triple pane windows and you know, certain levels of, of air infiltration. And in so doing they can pretty reliably get to net zero energy. The water petals is a different kind of a challenge simply because it’s a regulatory challenge and an operations challenge. You know, the requirement that a project produce and treat all of its own water on site, by and large from rainwater, theres a way to do it, if youre outside of a city, with groundwater and and a pretty standard septic system. But in places where there’s municipal water and municipal sewer convincing first a client and then later a regulator that it’s a good idea not to use that system water is an effort. So I think the water pedal will remain a challenge for the reason that you’re replacing, you know, small sections of pipe with technical systems that need to be designed well and then really relying upon rainwater, other precipitation and, and then sort of continuous operation issues. And again, there’s practice there and there are precedents there. That’s a bigger lift in terms of scope than net zero energy is at this point are net positive energy is at this point.

Robb: (05:25)
Yeah, that also makes sense. It seems like a bigger, more non traditional systems and approaches.

Charley: (05:32)
right, at the single family level it can be very straightforward. I mean there are a lot of LPC projects in suburban or rural areas where it looks a lot like a conventional drilled well in a conventional septic system and that meets the intent of the living building challenge, presuming that there’s enough rainfall on site to demonstrate aquifer recharge. The materials petal on the other hand sounds simple in principle- avoid carcinogens and endocrine disruptors and biocumulative toxins when possible. That unpacks to be a task that touches 100% of products or very nearly a hundred percent of products that go into a project.

Robb: (06:22)
Is that it? Is that like the whole requirement of the pedal that you in that one phrase?

Charley: (06:28)
That’s the, that’s the red list portion of the pedal. So the pedal in living building challenge is the sum of one or more imperatives. So the energy pedal is the single imperative- provide 105% of annual energy needs from onsite renewables without combustion. That’s not verbatim, but, but it boils down to that. The materials pedal has a couple of different facets. One of them is the requirement I just mentioned. To avoid so called Red List Chemicals. These are chemicals of concern, about 800 specific chemical abstract service numbers, on the order of 25 chemical families of concern. So that’s one piece. Another piece is net positive waste. I don’t, I’m not, I’m not reciting these in order. That imperative looks at really four phases of the project. It looks at the design phase. Is it designed to minimize waste? It looks at the construction phase. Are our resources brought to the site, repurposed, and salvaged and diverted from either landfill or incineration to the highest extent possible? The third is the operations phase. Asking the question of sort of responsible resource stewardship. You know, that’s onsite recycling, that’s composting, that’s sort of making sure that as the building is used, it’s not contributing to a waste stream. And then finally end of surface, you know, 50,100, 200 years down the road. What care has been given in the design and construction phase to ensure that the, the materials aren’t destined for landfill or incineration down the road. So some of that’s designed for disassembly, some of that is flexible structures so that if a building is set up to be adapted for future use rather than demolished and replaced. So that’s that’s another piece of the materials kettle.

Robb: (09:09)
So I guess the healthy materials piece is the red list, as you mentioned, but then there are the three others.

Charley: (09:18)
And then there’s him embodied carbon.

Robb: (09:21)
Oh, there’s one more. Ah, I was wondering, I was going to ask you about that. I thought you said that was the last one.

Charley: (09:27)
I’ve learned not to, I’ve learned not to number my lists before I start talking cause I’m always wrong when I do that. You know, embodied carbon at this at this point requires project teams to, using tally within revit or using the Athena tools to calculate embodied carbon for the project and its renewable energy system and then purchase a one time carbon offset at the start of the project effectively to pay back the carbon debt so that embodied carbon is covered. And then the operational carbon is covered by the onsite renewable systems so that the project truly is a carbon neutral in construction and operation.

Robb: (10:23)
And that includes extraction and processing and shipping. That piece of the pedal?

Charley: (10:28)
It does Using libraries. So we’re not studying, you know, how many trucks come to a project on a given day or how many hours are put on an excavator that’s all covered in tons of concrete and square feet of drywall and basically don’t get, you know, in the, in the simplest terms, looking at the assemblies and then using industry standards to assign embodied carbon impacts to the, the volumes of each assembly type.

Robb: (11:03)
That makes sense. That makes sense. And I mean, there’s a lot to it. And this is, correct me if I’m wrong, but this is the most rigorous formal program looking at sustainable materials, Yes?

Charley: (11:21)
It’s the most rigorous one I know of. I’m imagining there’s something out there. I mean, the way I see living building challenge, having evolved, it certainly wouldn’t be possible without USGBC and LEED, if we accept that lead is an evolutionary process and it certainly has evolved, you know, continues to evolve. And in each iteration LEED gets more stringent with the idea that it’s moving toward sustainability. Over time, years, decades, it moves to a place of positive impact that no harm is allowed to be caused by a LEED project. So certainly there are LEED projects that are net zero energy for instance, but if there’s no requirement, so then the notion in LBC is to say what’s the logical extension? What would true sustainability or regenerative design look like? It wouldn’t necessarily be that we stopped at a project that’s 30% better than code energy use or 50% better than grid energy use. Let’s take that to the place that looks truly sustainable or it looks future-proof and that would be net zero energy. So effectively in each sector of green building consideration, we follow that evolutionary curve to the point where it looks neutral or positive and that’s the starting place for the living building challenge.

Robb: (13:01)
Makes Sense. Kind of going all the way. And I personally have been involved very only tangentially in a few living building challenge projects. I know others in our office have been much more deeply involved, but it’s ambitious. It really is. And it’s off putting, I think many of the petals can be off putting, the materials one maybe more than the others.

Charley: (13:33)
Yeah, someone described it as a Trojan horse. It seems really straightforward and then you welcome it in and it starts to unpack inside the gates of a project. And you’ve committed to a lot and you might not even, particularly in the early days, you might not have realized quite how much you committed to.

Robb: (13:58)
But and this is what we discussed talking about perhaps, the red list and LBC. I think you used the phrase waiting into LBC, not diving into LBC. There are some less heavy lists lifts that can make a big impact to indoor health, to overall carbon and bodied carbon of projects. And I think that some more accessible pieces might be well more accessible.

Charley: (14:30)
Right? So I think that’s, that’s one thing I’m really looking forward to talking about. Another piece is that the market has evolved a tremendous amount since the advent of LBC. So you know, the way projects work most have an LBC projects in particular, they may have a three year five life cycle. So the stories that current projects are telling are quite different than the stories told by projects Five and 10 years ago. Back in 2011 and 2012 we were a smaller operation and there were two of us and we could hear one another in an open office and it generally took five or 10 minutes on the phone to describe to a manufacturer or you know, an engineer, product engineer at a manufacturing firm. Just what the living building challenge was. So if we were on a research task, we had to plan on stopping and giving background. It is no longer the case, or It’s very seldom I should say the case that we call a manufacturer and have to explain LBC. So just that fact alone means that the, you know, the effort required by a particular project team is, is vastly reduced because there’s familiarity. So that’s one thing I would want to make very clear is that while it remains a challenge, a lot of the war stories from early projects are now somewhat outdated in the sense that it has gotten significantly easier. And another piece of that, is that unlike say the water pedal, where it’s a new regulatory lift for each new project, materials can be fairly consistent from project to project. So once a single project team has determined a good drywall or you know, an appropriate non flat interior latex wall paint, that is a really good starting place, if not a good solution for subsequent project teams. So because information can be shared and because there’s the possibility of reuse of compliance information from project to project, the community of practitioners can facilitate future materials, project compliance paths for all subsequent projects. So there’s that, that idea of data reuse and information sharing is I would say much more significant in the materials petal than it is in others.

Robb: (17:36)
And you manage a database. The red to green database I believe, is your product that you have kind of compiled over the years? Is that true?

Charley: (17:47)
Yes. So I think almost all LBC project teams begin with a spreadsheet. So the international living future institute has a template spreadsheet that’s effectively the reporting form that that needs to be submitted for audit at the end of the project. So everyone begins there, there’s certain information that gets tracked and it’s a subset of all of the information that’s collected over the course of researching a product for LBC compliance. So the quick story of red to green is that we had our first living building challenge project at Williams college and then about two years later signed on to do one at Hampshire college just about 40 miles away. And we thought it would be really easy because we had all these answers from the first project. And Lo and behold, we’d fought, forgotten a lot of what we’d learned because we didn’t write it all down. And then we started our third project, the Hitchcock Center also on the Hampshire College campus. And those two projects had the same construction team and were overlapping in design and construction. There again, we ran into the limitations of a spreadsheet. First of all, it didn’t contain all the information that we’d learned. And then on top of that, there weren’t enough dimensions in the spreadsheet to keep track of what was consistent from project to project and what had changed from project to project. So we started a database development process to take advantage of the many dimensions that a database allows. And over time that’s evolved to be a software platform that’s focused on LBC materials compliance that we call red degree.

Robb: (19:37)
I hear quite a few people mention the red list, but the red list is not a list of products. It’s a list of chemicals that are not allowed in any products that you use in an LBC building, is that accurate?

Charley: (19:50)
That’s correct. So the red list is you could say worst in class chemicals. So you’re familiar with some of them asbestos, led, you know, others by name, BPA or p Foss, even something like BPA isn’t a single chemical that’s a chemical family. So I won’t really know the numbers off the top of my head, but there are dozens of BPAs, there are polycarbonate VPAs and so forth and so on. So we sort of start with the idea that we’re going to avoid BPA and then need to delve much deeper to find specifical chemical compounds revealed by manufacturers, which may or may not be BPA. So there’s a lookup process that we do when, when screening a product.

Robb: (20:48)
Gotcha. Basically all the products in that database do not contain any red list chemicals. It’s that accurate?

Charley: (21:11)
It’s not quite so simple. So we’ve looked at something over 9,000 products and we sort them into categories. There are a couple of different ways of sorting. Sometimes we know all that we need to know about a product to make a determination and other times we don’t. It’s still the case that not all manufacturers will reveal 100% or anything approaching 100% of the chemicals in their products. And there are a couple of reasons for that. Some valid, some arguably less valid. Sometimes they just don’t know. So I’m sitting in a chair which has, you know, I’d guess 150 parts, you know, they’re the arms and they’re the screws that hold on the arms and they’re the little plastic levers that let me adjust the arms. It’s quite possible that each one of those comes from one different sub supplier. And it’s also possible that like a screw that has a black coating might involve two or three suppliers. So just the act of figuring out what’s in a chair sounds straightforward. It’s nontrivial. Yup. And then sometimes it’s just a data acquisition problem and we’re totally sympathetic when manufacturers face that. Other times we’re also sympathetic, but we when there’s a concern about proprietary information. That’s to say a company has invested significant resources in figuring out how best to make whatever, a flexible coating that could go on a, you know, the arm of a chair in this example. And they, they don’t want to reveal how they made that because understandably if they, if they gave the chemical recipe, someone else would have a shortcut to replicate their high-performing chair arm coating. The trick in all of this is that, you know, as a, as a consumer or as a designer, that’s, that’s recommending products to consumers, we want to begin from a place of information that allows us to make informed decisions. So it’s very different to say, you want me to indicate that you, if we switched to food as an example you know, the difference between, trust me, it’s organic and I have a third party seal from the Oregon tilth saying that this fruit bar was produced organically and it contains only fruit as opposed to, you know, preservatives or other synthetic chemicals. So, you know, I think I take materials health to be a two step process initially. First obtaining disclosure, so that information sharing and then second, a screening process to understand it, judge for myself, using sort of established rules of health and potential health impact to understand if a product screens positively or negatively against those lists of chemicals of concern.

Robb: (24:47)
Yeah. Okay. And so where’s the best place for looking for HPDs, which stands for?

Charley: (24:58)
Health product declarations. It is still early days for getting this information and there isn’t a standard standards. So there are multiple standards for ingredient disclosures, all of which are good and maybe none of which are perfect.

Robb: (25:22)
Yeah, no, it’s, it’s very confusing. There’s all kinds of different sustainable product certifications. It’s a little alphabet soup that I, for one don’t know exactly what to make of them.

Charley: (25:35)
Right. and I wouldn’t claim that I know what to do with them either. I think the, you know, the way we approach it and we talk about waiting into this, potentially overwhelming pool just pick a couple of criteria that seem to make sense. So, you know, on the simplest level, is it good to know what’s in a product? Better, that is, than not knowing. So yes. And then it doesn’t need to be a hundred percent disclosure, is it good to know something rather than nothing? Sure. So if you look at a safety data sheet, for instance that does not reveal 100% of material ingredients now, but it will flag certain chemicals that are known bad actors. So that’s to say there are, there are regulatory requirements to reveal certain things. Now, there are other bad actors that aren’t subject to requirements. So if a product contains Formaldehyde, for instance, it will show on the SDS. Gotcha. If it contains BPA, it may or may not show on the SDS. Someone could choose to put it on the SDS, but they’re not required to put it on the SDS. So that’s a good first screen because a product, or many products are required to have them. So anything that’s any chemical constituent, that’s a proven carcinogen, will be revealed through the safety data sheet. If we move on to something like a health product declaration, that’s a voluntary standard, it’s fantastic because it is a standard. So there is an increasing level of consistency from manufacturer to manufacturer. It’s good that it’s an evolving standard. So, you know, the health product declaration collaborative does tremendous work in industry helping manufacturers understand the benefits that accrue from disclosure.

Charley: (28:00)
And then over time, that standard evolves, you know, moving toward higher levels of disclosure, which is to say you know, moving from say a thousand parts per million as the threshold for disclosure to a hundred parts per million as the threshold for disclosure. So there’s fewer places for chemicals of concern to hide as you move toward a more stringent screen for ingredient disclosure. So all of these resources are tremendous. What they do is they bring information out into the light for review and reflection by project teams. So as we reach higher and higher levels of ingredient disclosure, we now that get to the next question, great, I know what’s in this product, should I use it? And that’s an entirely different question because that we presume some knowledge about chemicals of concern in order to move from the factual question to the, the guiding question. Andagain, there are lots of tools. Something like the red list gives us a way to ask the binary question, does this product have a chemical that someone else has said I should avoid? So in the case of Formaldehyde, it’s a carcinogen I understand intuitively that given a choice, I wouldn’t use that in a building.

Robb: (29:59)
Yeah. I ran across something in an article that was a pretty general article or paper that advised avoiding mastic for duct sealing, use tape instead of mastic for duct sealing because mastics contain many chemicals of concern and they were talking about just generally. And so this kind of floored me because mastics are so much better at duck ceiling then tapes usually, that I was a little concerned. So I went through, I looked up a few SDSs from some mastics that I had used that I knew about. And you know the compounds list on the SDSs accounted for something like 17% of the volume or the weight of the product. And then, so I dug a little more, tried to find some duct mastic with product declarations. HBDs and did not find any. So it’s frustrating.

Charley: (31:00)
Right. Well, I mean, you can’t unthink these thoughts. You know, we might change our diet if someone said to us, what do you have for breakfast every day? I can only tell you 17% of what’s in it. And that leads to that question well what’s the other 83%? And if someone were unwilling to tell you, you might go looking for a different breakfast. And it’s possible that the other 83% is a nerd, but wouldn’t you feel more comfortable if you knew that? Absolutely. And it gets to a really good point, robb. That A consideration in design is to avoid single variable optimization. So it is absolutely true that mastic produces, you know, duct leakage with a higher effectiveness rate. Lower duct leakage at a known installed cost. Right. if you asked the question, what’s the most cost effective way to reduce duct leakage? The answer is mastic. If you’ve asked the question, what’s the most effective way to deliver uncontaminated air to building occupants? You’re introducing a new variable in the discussion and that’s uncontaminated. Leakage reduction is great, but If it comes at the expense of a contaminant load it may be less great. And noq you know what the optimal solution focused on leakage alone might be mastic. We may be willing to accept a higher leakage rate in exchange for our production and in chemical load. And now we’re really asking a different question.

Robb: (33:37)
Or somebody can step up and make a mastic without any red list chemicals.

Charley: (33:41)
Exactly. And that’s really, you know, the entire premise of the living building challenge is precisely that- no one stepped up and delivered a red list free. If someone hasn’t delivered a mastic mastic that’s free of red list chemicals, it’s probably because no one has asked them to yet. So what we end up doing as practitioners in this realm is just asking the question, Hey, what’s in your product? I’d really prefer a mastic that contains no red list chemicals and that does a couple of things. First of all, it alerts the manufacturers that there’s an interest, you know, that there’s a market here for a red list free product. It alerts them to something that they can act upon. So it’s not just that I want a healthy product, it’s that I want a product that doesn’t contain anything in these 25 chemical families. Some of them are going to be easy. Yeah, we don’t put asbestos in our mastic. though it might be legal, we don’t put led. But there may be some plasticizers that we’d have to look at and come to a better understanding internally speaking as the mastic manufacturer, to know, do we have it now and can we reformulate without. And to a topic you touched on a little bit ago, there may not be a perfect mastic and then a design team is left with the question, are they better off with a leaky duct or a duct that uses mastic to achieve a certain level of sealing and that decision left to the design team. So I don’t think in terms of absolutes, but rather think in terms of the best that we can do for a particular design problem. So when we’ve finished an LBC project, as much as we’d love to say it’s red list free, really what we’re saying is that use of red list compounds has been minimized. So we’re using them in known places for known purposes. So an example of that is a fire alarm. We have not found a red list free fire alarm annunciator, but we believe there’s very good reason to have fire alarms in buildings, and code officials agree. So what we’ll do in that case is we’ll advocate to the manufacturer and say, you know, we have this red box. You didn’t tell us what the, what the coding was on that box. And we can deduce that it contains led. That’s fine. We accept that this is the state of the market for now. And to have a safe building, we want a fire alarm system, and to have a fire alarm system, we accept these shortcomings and current disclosure and compliance. Please know that when you or one of your peers has a product that does better than this from a chemical perspective, we’ll shift our purchasing there. So we’re engaged with the market as it exists, but we’re telegraphing what we want the market to be in the future, in an effort to tip the market toward optimization. And the idea there really is the living, building challenge teams individually may or may not have a lot of power, but collectively they define the terms red list, red list free. And they commit in the abstract toward buying better products in the future. So whoever’s making the case for better paints or better coatings or better what have you, can be accumulating this information to say, boy we’d own market share, if only we had a red list free solution in this particular building product sector.

Robb: (38:03)
It makes sense. And we’ve seen the market change in this way and in other and other aspects. Our accessibility group I know has had issues with high tech windows and doors, not having the proper clearance to get into in and out of buildings and working with manufacturers to get products that satisfy everybody. And if there’s big enough demand, it’s worth their while.

Charley: (38:36)
Right. Absolutely. We internally track what we call success stories, which are these breakthroughs with manufacturers. And you know, many go to great lengths and we appreciate, you know, their their knowledge of their products, their knowledge of the manufacturing process, and they alone can pinpoint the shortcomings and then work within their supply chain and work to innovate in ways that addresses these concerns. And it moves either in large steps or incrementally toward better products. Where in this case better is holding the line on all of the other performance criteria, durability, what have you, and increasing awareness of health impacts and really making efforts to reduce those.

Robb: (39:34)
Yeah. If anybody knows of a good mastic with HPD, let me know. I’d be very keen to find one.

Charley: (39:42)
So that’s effectively what we do, is we’re just cataloging what we find. So when I go back to those 9,000 products, you know, some, we have full disclosure, some we don’t, you know, in every case if we’re trying to ratchet toward fuller disclosure and then certain products are red list free, certain products or Red List compliant, certain products or red list unknown and certain products are red list noncompliant. So that gradation, red list free I think is obvious. Red List compliant, you know, there are what ILFI calls temporary exceptions. So exterior sheathing, so plywood sheathing, It needs to be weatherproof for a few months and no one has yet come up with a resin that let’s you know, cdx plywood, weather for a few months without delaminating, without using fetal formaldehyde. So if we want buildings to be durable, they have to stand up through the construction process and they need to tolerate a certain amount of moisture.

Charley: (41:03)
So the chemistry, the green chemistry isn’t there to give us exterior grade plywoods without fenal formaldehyde. So we’d love one, but for right now, ILFI has given us permission to use that chemical of concern in this limited application until the market has transformed.

Robb: (41:24)
All right. So that’s an explicit quote exception for now. That’s something that design teams have to judge, right? But ILFI themselves have given stated permission.

Charley: (41:37)
So there’s dozens of exceptions that reflect temporary market limitations. So part of what we’re doing is we’re attaching that exception to a particular product so that the next project team that comes along can see it’s okay to use this. There’s nothing better than this product in this particular market segment for the time being. And then, you know, further down the list of the products about which we’ve not gotten enough information to make a judgment, there’s something that’s called the due diligence case. So if we reach out within the bounds of a particular project to three manufacturers, none of whom will answer our questions, and we know of nothing else that can be used to meet the project’s requirements, we can go ahead and use one of those products of uncertain compliance, because the work can’t stop either in design or construction to wait for the market to transform. And that’s equally true for noncompliant products. So, you know, back to the fire alarm, they contain lead. We wish they didn’t contain lead. But we, we need them. So, you know, as we look at the library, it’s about a third products that are compliant. A third products that are unknown, and a third products that are noncompliant. And where it gets interesting is when you have a particular design need or performance need that can be met either by a compliant product or a noncompliant product. Now you really feel yourself pushing the market or moving the market to say, no, we’re not going to buy this thing that is noncompliant. We’re going to favor this thing that’s compliant. And I think back to your mastic example, you know, this is where, you know, it, it’s an interesting process for designers to ask what products are necessary in a building. Is that the case that mastics are necessary? Maybe, or there may be a creative solution that says we can achieve an adequate level of duct sealing without mastic. And now we’re asking the question, well, what would replace mastic to achieve the desired performance level? So a lot of what we end up doing is, we feel most impactful at the beginning of design where we’re able to broaden the question, you know, to steer away from say, spray foam solutions into bat or loosefill solutions. Because you know, these are places where you can make a huge step away from chemicals of concern. You can also make a huge step away from embodied carbon. And now, we’re focusing on the performance and the abstract rather than the particular performance characteristics of a material. So it may be those are different air barrier solution. It may be that there’s a whole different wall assembly. But with openness in the early days you can often move toward products that meet multiple at the optimized and multiple criteria.

Robb: (45:21)
That’ll do it for part one of my interview with Charley. Next time we’ll talk about where to start with healthy products or sustainable products. If you’re not going to go whole hog with living building challenge, where does it make sense to start spending effort to look at healthy materials and buildings? I also wanted to mention Charley’s website materiallybetter.com there’s links to that on our show notes, but I wanted to give you a shout out for that website too. Thanks and I hope you tune in next week.

Speaker 4: (45:54)
Thank you for listening to buildings and beyond. For more information about the topics discussed today, visit www.swinter.com/podcast and check out the episode show notes buildings and beyond is brought to you by Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment. Our professionals have led the way since 1972 and the development of best practices to achieve high performance buildings. Our production team for today’s episode includes Dylan Martello, Alex [inaudible], and myself. Heather Breslin, thank you for listening and we’ll see you next week.

The advancement of building materials has allowed professionals to achieve new heights when designing and constructing high-performance buildings. But, the topic of building materials is not discussed enough, and more consumers are asking important questions. How do we know where these materials come from? What effects do they have on human health and the environment? How are standards for responsible building materials being enforced? The list continues…

This two-part episode features an interview with Charley Stevenson, a sustainability consultant and green building entrepreneur who has devoted his career to helping others understand and implement healthier materials goals. The discussion begins with a look at the Living Building Challenge, a program that pays particular attention to healthy building materials, and continues with a review of some of the resources that are intended to help consumers learn more about materials and their make-up.

Episode Guest: Charley Stevenson, LFA, LEED AP

Charley Stevenson, Principal, Integrated Eco Strategy (IES), is a sustainability consultant and green building entrepreneur with a particular focus on helping others understand and implement their healthier materials goals. IES is a pioneer in assisting project teams in creating Full Living buildings, specializing in the Living Building Challenge Materials Petal.

Since 2010, Charley’s North Adams, MA, company has managed the green aspects of projects from 1,000 to 500,000 square feet, including the Williams College Environmental Center, Hampshire College’s R.W. Kern Center, Hitchcock Center for the Environment and Yale Divinity School campus. To facilitate materials compliance, IES created Red2Green (R2G), a comprehensive platform for building materials evaluation, selection and management. R2G is available to project teams by subscription and currently in use nationwide.

Send your feedback and questions to [email protected]

Buildings and Beyond is a production of Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building, and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment. For more information, visit www.swinter.com.

Robb Aldrich | Kelly Westby

Heather Breslin | Alex Mirabile | Dylan Martello

Healthy & Sustainable Building Materials with Charley Stevenson, Part 2

Guest: Charley Stevenson

CLICK HERE TO LEARN HOW TO SUBSCRIBE

Kelly :                                00:06                   Welcome to buildings and beyond.

Robb:                                00:09                   the podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment.

Kelly :                                00:13                   by focusing on efficiency, accessibility and health.

Robb:                                00:18                   I’m Robb Aldrich.

Kelly :                                00:19                   and I’m Kelly Westby.

Robb:                                00:22                   In this episode I talked with Charley Stevenson from integrated eco strategy about sustainable materials and healthy materials. He’s been looking at this for a decade or more- healthy materials and buildings, and I really learned a lot. This is something that I am finding that I’m more and more interested in. We talked for a long time, quite a long time, so long that we had to edit it down and break this up into a couple episodes, but I’d learned tons. I hope you get something from it too. In this episode, for the first 10 or 15 minutes, we talked about mostly about the living building challenge, which is a program that I’ll let Charley describe in more detail, but healthy materials is a big piece of the program. And then we talk about how to find out information about materials, what databases are out there, how to source sustainable materials, what to ask manufacturers, who is keeping track of all this info. And listening back to the episode, actually I realized we threw out a few abbreviations that I thought maybe would be good to define up front. HPD is a health product declaration, ILFI by International Living Future Institute, which is in charge of the living building challenge program, and SDS’s or MSDS’s are safety data sheets or materials safety data sheets. I thought those might be helpful if you are not familiar with those, but here is part one my interview with Charley Stevenson.

Robb:                                02:03                   Well first of all, thank you for being here. This is an important topic. Healthy materials, sustainable materials. And I know you are very involved with living building challenge projects. Yes?

Charley :                           02:17                   Correct. We started our first living building challenge project in early 2011. And that seems like a long time ago.

Robb:                                02:30                   Yeah. Right. And I listened to the green architects lounge podcast and they talked about the living building challenge project or two and they mentioned you and they mentioned that the materials pedal, the materials piece, is the toughest. Do you hear that a lot?

Charley :                           02:50                   so I would put it this way, the materials pedal is the biggest surprise among the challenging pedals. So you know, in living building challenge there are seven pedals, three of them are highlighted as particularly challenging energy, water and materials. The energy pedal requires net zero or in some cases net positive energy. And I think there are lots of rules of thumb that have evolved over the, over the years. And project teams can look to a pretty substantial set of case studies and understand, you know, generally things are converging toward heat pumps and triple pane windows and you know, certain levels of, of air infiltration. And in so doing they can pretty reliably get to net zero energy. The water petals is a different kind of a challenge simply because it’s a regulatory challenge and an operations challenge. You know, the requirement that a project produce and treat all of its own water on site, by and large from rainwater, theres a way to do it, if youre outside of a city, with groundwater and and a pretty standard septic system. But in places where there’s municipal water and municipal sewer convincing first a client and then later a regulator that it’s a good idea not to use that system water is an effort. So I think the water pedal will remain a challenge for the reason that you’re replacing, you know, small sections of pipe with technical systems that need to be designed well and then really relying upon rainwater, other precipitation and, and then sort of continuous operation issues. And again, there’s practice there and there are precedents there. That’s a bigger lift in terms of scope than net zero energy is at this point are net positive energy is at this point.

Robb:                                05:25                   Yeah, that also makes sense. It seems like a bigger, more non traditional systems and approaches.

Charley :                           05:32                   right, at the single family level it can be very straightforward. I mean there are a lot of LPC projects in suburban or rural areas where it looks a lot like a conventional drilled well in a conventional septic system and that meets the intent of the living building challenge, presuming that there’s enough rainfall on site to demonstrate aquifer recharge. The materials petal on the other hand sounds simple in principle- avoid carcinogens and endocrine disruptors and biocumulative toxins when possible. That unpacks to be a task that touches 100% of products or very nearly a hundred percent of products that go into a project.

Robb:                                06:22                   Is that it? Is that like the whole requirement of the pedal that you in that one phrase?

Charley :                           06:28                   That’s the, that’s the red list portion of the pedal. So the pedal in living building challenge is the sum of one or more imperatives. So the energy pedal is the single imperative- provide 105% of annual energy needs from onsite renewables without combustion. That’s not verbatim, but, but it boils down to that. The materials pedal has a couple of different facets. One of them is the requirement I just mentioned. To avoid so called Red List Chemicals. These are chemicals of concern, about 800 specific chemical abstract service numbers, on the order of 25 chemical families of concern. So that’s one piece. Another piece is net positive waste. I don’t, I’m not, I’m not reciting these in order. That imperative looks at really four phases of the project. It looks at the design phase. Is it designed to minimize waste? It looks at the construction phase. Are our resources brought to the site, repurposed, and salvaged and diverted from either landfill or incineration to the highest extent possible? The third is the operations phase. Asking the question of sort of responsible resource stewardship. You know, that’s onsite recycling, that’s composting, that’s sort of making sure that as the building is used, it’s not contributing to a waste stream. And then finally end of surface, you know, 50,100, 200 years down the road. What care has been given in the design and construction phase to ensure that the, the materials aren’t destined for landfill or incineration down the road. So some of that’s designed for disassembly, some of that is flexible structures so that if a building is set up to be adapted for future use rather than demolished and replaced. So that’s that’s another piece of the materials kettle.

Robb:                                09:09                   So I guess the healthy materials piece is the red list, as you mentioned, but then there are the three others.

Charley :                           09:18                   And then there’s him embodied carbon.

Robb:                                09:21                   Oh, there’s one more. Ah, I was wondering, I was going to ask you about that. I thought you said that was the last one.

Charley :                           09:27                   I’ve learned not to, I’ve learned not to number my lists before I start talking cause I’m always wrong when I do that. You know, embodied carbon at this at this point requires project teams to, using tally within revit or using the Athena tools to calculate embodied carbon for the project and its renewable energy system and then purchase a one time carbon offset at the start of the project effectively to pay back the carbon debt so that embodied carbon is covered. And then the operational carbon is covered by the onsite renewable systems so that the project truly is a carbon neutral in construction and operation.

Robb:                                10:23                   And that includes extraction and processing and shipping. That piece of the pedal?

Charley :                           10:28                   It does Using libraries. So we’re not studying, you know, how many trucks come to a project on a given day or how many hours are put on an excavator that’s all covered in tons of concrete and square feet of drywall and basically don’t get, you know, in the, in the simplest terms, looking at the assemblies and then using industry standards to assign embodied carbon impacts to the, the volumes of each assembly type.

Robb:                                11:03                   That makes sense. That makes sense. And I mean, there’s a lot to it. And this is, correct me if I’m wrong, but this is the most rigorous formal program looking at sustainable materials, Yes?

Charley :                           11:21                   It’s the most rigorous one I know of. I’m imagining there’s something out there. I mean, the way I see living building challenge, having evolved, it certainly wouldn’t be possible without USGBC and LEED, if we accept that lead is an evolutionary process and it certainly has evolved, you know, continues to evolve. And in each iteration LEED gets more stringent with the idea that it’s moving toward sustainability. Over time, years, decades, it moves to a place of positive impact that no harm is allowed to be caused by a LEED project. So certainly there are LEED projects that are net zero energy for instance, but if there’s no requirement, so then the notion in LBC is to say what’s the logical extension? What would true sustainability or regenerative design look like? It wouldn’t necessarily be that we stopped at a project that’s 30% better than code energy use or 50% better than grid energy use. Let’s take that to the place that looks truly sustainable or it looks future-proof and that would be net zero energy. So effectively in each sector of green building consideration, we follow that evolutionary curve to the point where it looks neutral or positive and that’s the starting place for the living building challenge.

Robb:                                13:01                   Makes Sense. Kind of going all the way. And I personally have been involved very only tangentially in a few living building challenge projects. I know others in our office have been much more deeply involved, but it’s ambitious. It really is. And it’s off putting, I think many of the petals can be off putting, the materials one maybe more than the others.

Charley :                           13:33                   Yeah, someone described it as a Trojan horse. It seems really straightforward and then you welcome it in and it starts to unpack inside the gates of a project. And you’ve committed to a lot and you might not even, particularly in the early days, you might not have realized quite how much you committed to.

Robb:                                13:58                   But and this is what we discussed talking about perhaps, the red list and LBC. I think you used the phrase waiting into LBC, not diving into LBC. There are some less heavy lists lifts that can make a big impact to indoor health, to overall carbon and bodied carbon of projects. And I think that some more accessible pieces might be well more accessible.

Charley :                           14:30                   Right? So I think that’s, that’s one thing I’m really looking forward to talking about. Another piece is that the market has evolved a tremendous amount since the advent of LBC. So you know, the way projects work most have an LBC projects in particular, they may have a three year five life cycle. So the stories that current projects are telling are quite different than the stories told by projects Five and 10 years ago. Back in 2011 and 2012 we were a smaller operation and there were two of us and we could hear one another in an open office and it generally took five or 10 minutes on the phone to describe to a manufacturer or you know, an engineer, product engineer at a manufacturing firm. Just what the living building challenge was. So if we were on a research task, we had to plan on stopping and giving background. It is no longer the case, or It’s very seldom I should say the case that we call a manufacturer and have to explain LBC. So just that fact alone means that the, you know, the effort required by a particular project team is, is vastly reduced because there’s familiarity. So that’s one thing I would want to make very clear is that while it remains a challenge, a lot of the war stories from early projects are now somewhat outdated in the sense that it has gotten significantly easier. And another piece of that, is that unlike say the water pedal, where it’s a new regulatory lift for each new project, materials can be fairly consistent from project to project. So once a single project team has determined a good drywall or you know, an appropriate non flat interior latex wall paint, that is a really good starting place, if not a good solution for subsequent project teams. So because information can be shared and because there’s the possibility of reuse of compliance information from project to project, the community of practitioners can facilitate future materials, project compliance paths for all subsequent projects. So there’s that, that idea of data reuse and information sharing is I would say much more significant in the materials petal than it is in others.

Robb:                                17:36                   And you manage a database. The red to green database I believe, is your product that you have kind of compiled over the years? Is that true?

Charley :                           17:47                   Yes. So I think almost all LBC project teams begin with a spreadsheet. So the international living future institute has a template spreadsheet that’s effectively the reporting form that that needs to be submitted for audit at the end of the project. So everyone begins there, there’s certain information that gets tracked and it’s a subset of all of the information that’s collected over the course of researching a product for LBC compliance. So the quick story of red to green is that we had our first living building challenge project at Williams college and then about two years later signed on to do one at Hampshire college just about 40 miles away. And we thought it would be really easy because we had all these answers from the first project. And Lo and behold, we’d fought, forgotten a lot of what we’d learned because we didn’t write it all down. And then we started our third project, the Hitchcock Center also on the Hampshire College campus. And those two projects had the same construction team and were overlapping in design and construction. There again, we ran into the limitations of a spreadsheet. First of all, it didn’t contain all the information that we’d learned. And then on top of that, there weren’t enough dimensions in the spreadsheet to keep track of what was consistent from project to project and what had changed from project to project. So we started a database development process to take advantage of the many dimensions that a database allows. And over time that’s evolved to be a software platform that’s focused on LBC materials compliance that we call red degree.

Robb:                                19:37                   I hear quite a few people mention the red list, but the red list is not a list of products. It’s a list of chemicals that are not allowed in any products that you use in an LBC building, is that accurate?

Charley :                           19:50                   That’s correct. So the red list is you could say worst in class chemicals. So you’re familiar with some of them asbestos, led, you know, others by name, BPA or p Foss, even something like BPA isn’t a single chemical that’s a chemical family. So I won’t really know the numbers off the top of my head, but there are dozens of BPAs, there are polycarbonate VPAs and so forth and so on. So we sort of start with the idea that we’re going to avoid BPA and then need to delve much deeper to find specifical chemical compounds revealed by manufacturers, which may or may not be BPA. So there’s a lookup process that we do when, when screening a product.

Robb:                                20:48                   Gotcha. Basically all the products in that database do not contain any red list chemicals. It’s that accurate?

Charley :                           21:11                   It’s not quite so simple. So we’ve looked at something over 9,000 products and we sort them into categories. There are a couple of different ways of sorting. Sometimes we know all that we need to know about a product to make a determination and other times we don’t. It’s still the case that not all manufacturers will reveal 100% or anything approaching 100% of the chemicals in their products. And there are a couple of reasons for that. Some valid, some arguably less valid. Sometimes they just don’t know. So I’m sitting in a chair which has, you know, I’d guess 150 parts, you know, they’re the arms and they’re the screws that hold on the arms and they’re the little plastic levers that let me adjust the arms. It’s quite possible that each one of those comes from one different sub supplier. And it’s also possible that like a screw that has a black coating might involve two or three suppliers. So just the act of figuring out what’s in a chair sounds straightforward. It’s nontrivial. Yup. And then sometimes it’s just a data acquisition problem and we’re totally sympathetic when manufacturers face that. Other times we’re also sympathetic, but we when there’s a concern about proprietary information. That’s to say a company has invested significant resources in figuring out how best to make whatever, a flexible coating that could go on a, you know, the arm of a chair in this example. And they, they don’t want to reveal how they made that because understandably if they, if they gave the chemical recipe, someone else would have a shortcut to replicate their high-performing chair arm coating. The trick in all of this is that, you know, as a, as a consumer or as a designer, that’s, that’s recommending products to consumers, we want to begin from a place of information that allows us to make informed decisions. So it’s very different to say, you want me to indicate that you, if we switched to food as an example you know, the difference between, trust me, it’s organic and I have a third party seal from the Oregon tilth saying that this fruit bar was produced organically and it contains only fruit as opposed to, you know, preservatives or other synthetic chemicals. So, you know, I think I take materials health to be a two step process initially. First obtaining disclosure, so that information sharing and then second, a screening process to understand it, judge for myself, using sort of established rules of health and potential health impact to understand if a product screens positively or negatively against those lists of chemicals of concern.

Robb:                                24:47                   Yeah. Okay. And so where’s the best place for looking for HPDs, which stands for?

Charley :                           24:58                   Health product declarations. It is still early days for getting this information and there isn’t a standard standards. So there are multiple standards for ingredient disclosures, all of which are good and maybe none of which are perfect.

Robb:                                25:22                   Yeah, no, it’s, it’s very confusing. There’s all kinds of different sustainable product certifications. It’s a little alphabet soup that I, for one don’t know exactly what to make of them.

Charley :                           25:35                   Right. and I wouldn’t claim that I know what to do with them either. I think the, you know, the way we approach it and we talk about waiting into this, potentially overwhelming pool just pick a couple of criteria that seem to make sense. So, you know, on the simplest level, is it good to know what’s in a product? Better, that is, than not knowing. So yes. And then it doesn’t need to be a hundred percent disclosure, is it good to know something rather than nothing? Sure. So if you look at a safety data sheet, for instance that does not reveal 100% of material ingredients now, but it will flag certain chemicals that are known bad actors. So that’s to say there are, there are regulatory requirements to reveal certain things. Now, there are other bad actors that aren’t subject to requirements. So if a product contains Formaldehyde, for instance, it will show on the SDS. Gotcha. If it contains BPA, it may or may not show on the SDS. Someone could choose to put it on the SDS, but they’re not required to put it on the SDS. So that’s a good first screen because a product, or many products are required to have them. So anything that’s any chemical constituent, that’s a proven carcinogen, will be revealed through the safety data sheet. If we move on to something like a health product declaration, that’s a voluntary standard, it’s fantastic because it is a standard. So there is an increasing level of consistency from manufacturer to manufacturer. It’s good that it’s an evolving standard. So, you know, the health product declaration collaborative does tremendous work in industry helping manufacturers understand the benefits that accrue from disclosure.

Charley :                           28:00                   And then over time, that standard evolves, you know, moving toward higher levels of disclosure, which is to say you know, moving from say a thousand parts per million as the threshold for disclosure to a hundred parts per million as the threshold for disclosure. So there’s fewer places for chemicals of concern to hide as you move toward a more stringent screen for ingredient disclosure. So all of these resources are tremendous. What they do is they bring information out into the light for review and reflection by project teams. So as we reach higher and higher levels of ingredient disclosure, we now that get to the next question, great, I know what’s in this product, should I use it? And that’s an entirely different question because that we presume some knowledge about chemicals of concern in order to move from the factual question to the, the guiding question. Andagain, there are lots of tools. Something like the red list gives us a way to ask the binary question, does this product have a chemical that someone else has said I should avoid? So in the case of Formaldehyde, it’s a carcinogen I understand intuitively that given a choice, I wouldn’t use that in a building.

Robb:                                29:59                   Yeah. I ran across something in an article that was a pretty general article or paper that advised avoiding mastic for duct sealing, use tape instead of mastic for duct sealing because mastics contain many chemicals of concern and they were talking about just generally. And so this kind of floored me because mastics are so much better at duck ceiling then tapes usually, that I was a little concerned. So I went through, I looked up a few SDSs from some mastics that I had used that I knew about. And you know the compounds list on the SDSs accounted for something like 17% of the volume or the weight of the product. And then, so I dug a little more, tried to find some duct mastic with product declarations. HBDs and did not find any. So it’s frustrating.

Charley :                           31:00                   Right. Well, I mean, you can’t unthink these thoughts. You know, we might change our diet if someone said to us, what do you have for breakfast every day? I can only tell you 17% of what’s in it. And that leads to that question well what’s the other 83%? And if someone were unwilling to tell you, you might go looking for a different breakfast. And it’s possible that the other 83% is a nerd, but wouldn’t you feel more comfortable if you knew that? Absolutely. And it gets to a really good point, robb. That A consideration in design is to avoid single variable optimization. So it is absolutely true that mastic produces, you know, duct leakage with a higher effectiveness rate. Lower duct leakage at a known installed cost. Right. if you asked the question, what’s the most cost effective way to reduce duct leakage? The answer is mastic. If you’ve asked the question, what’s the most effective way to deliver uncontaminated air to building occupants? You’re introducing a new variable in the discussion and that’s uncontaminated. Leakage reduction is great, but If it comes at the expense of a contaminant load it may be less great. And noq you know what the optimal solution focused on leakage alone might be mastic. We may be willing to accept a higher leakage rate in exchange for our production and in chemical load. And now we’re really asking a different question.

Robb:                                33:37                   Or somebody can step up and make a mastic without any red list chemicals.

Charley :                           33:41                   Exactly. And that’s really, you know, the entire premise of the living building challenge is precisely that- no one stepped up and delivered a red list free. If someone hasn’t delivered a mastic mastic that’s free of red list chemicals, it’s probably because no one has asked them to yet. So what we end up doing as practitioners in this realm is just asking the question, Hey, what’s in your product? I’d really prefer a mastic that contains no red list chemicals and that does a couple of things. First of all, it alerts the manufacturers that there’s an interest, you know, that there’s a market here for a red list free product. It alerts them to something that they can act upon. So it’s not just that I want a healthy product, it’s that I want a product that doesn’t contain anything in these 25 chemical families. Some of them are going to be easy. Yeah, we don’t put asbestos in our mastic. though it might be legal, we don’t put led. But there may be some plasticizers that we’d have to look at and come to a better understanding internally speaking as the mastic manufacturer, to know, do we have it now and can we reformulate without. And to a topic you touched on a little bit ago, there may not be a perfect mastic and then a design team is left with the question, are they better off with a leaky duct or a duct that uses mastic to achieve a certain level of sealing and that decision left to the design team. So I don’t think in terms of absolutes, but rather think in terms of the best that we can do for a particular design problem. So when we’ve finished an LBC project, as much as we’d love to say it’s red list free, really what we’re saying is that use of red list compounds has been minimized. So we’re using them in known places for known purposes. So an example of that is a fire alarm. We have not found a red list free fire alarm annunciator, but we believe there’s very good reason to have fire alarms in buildings, and code officials agree. So what we’ll do in that case is we’ll advocate to the manufacturer and say, you know, we have this red box. You didn’t tell us what the, what the coding was on that box. And we can deduce that it contains led. That’s fine. We accept that this is the state of the market for now. And to have a safe building, we want a fire alarm system, and to have a fire alarm system, we accept these shortcomings and current disclosure and compliance. Please know that when you or one of your peers has a product that does better than this from a chemical perspective, we’ll shift our purchasing there. So we’re engaged with the market as it exists, but we’re telegraphing what we want the market to be in the future, in an effort to tip the market toward optimization. And the idea there really is the living, building challenge teams individually may or may not have a lot of power, but collectively they define the terms red list, red list free. And they commit in the abstract toward buying better products in the future. So whoever’s making the case for better paints or better coatings or better what have you, can be accumulating this information to say, boy we’d own market share, if only we had a red list free solution in this particular building product sector.

Robb:                                38:03                   It makes sense. And we’ve seen the market change in this way and in other and other aspects. Our accessibility group I know has had issues with high tech windows and doors, not having the proper clearance to get into in and out of buildings and working with manufacturers to get products that satisfy everybody. And if there’s big enough demand, it’s worth their while.

Charley :                           38:36                   Right. Absolutely. We internally track what we call success stories, which are these breakthroughs with manufacturers. And you know, many go to great lengths and we appreciate, you know, their their knowledge of their products, their knowledge of the manufacturing process, and they alone can pinpoint the shortcomings and then work within their supply chain and work to innovate in ways that addresses these concerns. And it moves either in large steps or incrementally toward better products. Where in this case better is holding the line on all of the other performance criteria, durability, what have you, and increasing awareness of health impacts and really making efforts to reduce those.

Robb:                                39:34                   Yeah. If anybody knows of a good mastic with HPD, let me know. I’d be very keen to find one.

Charley :                           39:42                   So that’s effectively what we do, is we’re just cataloging what we find. So when I go back to those 9,000 products, you know, some, we have full disclosure, some we don’t, you know, in every case if we’re trying to ratchet toward fuller disclosure and then certain products are red list free, certain products or Red List compliant, certain products or red list unknown and certain products are red list noncompliant. So that gradation, red list free I think is obvious. Red List compliant, you know, there are what ILFI calls temporary exceptions. So exterior sheathing, so plywood sheathing, It needs to be weatherproof for a few months and no one has yet come up with a resin that let’s you know, cdx plywood, weather for a few months without delaminating, without using fetal formaldehyde. So if we want buildings to be durable, they have to stand up through the construction process and they need to tolerate a certain amount of moisture.

Charley :                           41:03                   So the chemistry, the green chemistry isn’t there to give us exterior grade plywoods without fenal formaldehyde. So we’d love one, but for right now, ILFI has given us permission to use that chemical of concern in this limited application until the market has transformed.

Robb:                                41:24                   All right. So that’s an explicit quote exception for now. That’s something that design teams have to judge, right? But ILFI themselves have given stated permission.

Charley :                           41:37                   So there’s dozens of exceptions that reflect temporary market limitations. So part of what we’re doing is we’re attaching that exception to a particular product so that the next project team that comes along can see it’s okay to use this. There’s nothing better than this product in this particular market segment for the time being. And then, you know, further down the list of the products about which we’ve not gotten enough information to make a judgment, there’s something that’s called the due diligence case. So if we reach out within the bounds of a particular project to three manufacturers, none of whom will answer our questions, and we know of nothing else that can be used to meet the project’s requirements, we can go ahead and use one of those products of uncertain compliance, because the work can’t stop either in design or construction to wait for the market to transform. And that’s equally true for noncompliant products. So, you know, back to the fire alarm, they contain lead. We wish they didn’t contain lead. But we, we need them. So, you know, as we look at the library, it’s about a third products that are compliant. A third products that are unknown, and a third products that are noncompliant. And where it gets interesting is when you have a particular design need or performance need that can be met either by a compliant product or a noncompliant product. Now you really feel yourself pushing the market or moving the market to say, no, we’re not going to buy this thing that is noncompliant. We’re going to favor this thing that’s compliant. And I think back to your mastic example, you know, this is where, you know, it, it’s an interesting process for designers to ask what products are necessary in a building. Is that the case that mastics are necessary? Maybe, or there may be a creative solution that says we can achieve an adequate level of duct sealing without mastic. And now we’re asking the question, well, what would replace mastic to achieve the desired performance level? So a lot of what we end up doing is, we feel most impactful at the beginning of design where we’re able to broaden the question, you know, to steer away from say, spray foam solutions into bat or loosefill solutions. Because you know, these are places where you can make a huge step away from chemicals of concern. You can also make a huge step away from embodied carbon. And now, we’re focusing on the performance and the abstract rather than the particular performance characteristics of a material. So it may be those are different air barrier solution. It may be that there’s a whole different wall assembly. But with openness in the early days you can often move toward products that meet multiple at the optimized and multiple criteria.

Robb:                                45:21                   That’ll do it for part one of my interview with Charley. Next time we’ll talk about where to start with healthy products or sustainable products. If you’re not going to go whole hog with living building challenge, where does it make sense to start spending effort to look at healthy materials and buildings? I also wanted to mention Charley’s website materiallybetter.com there’s links to that on our show notes, but I wanted to give you a shout out for that website too. Thanks and I hope you tune in next week.

Speaker 4:                        45:54                   Thank you for listening to buildings and beyond. For more information about the topics discussed today, visit www.swinter.com/podcast and check out the episode show notes buildings and beyond is brought to you by Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment. Our professionals have led the way since 1972 and the development of best practices to achieve high performance buildings. Our production team for today’s episode includes Dylan Martello, Alex [inaudible], and myself. Heather Breslin, thank you for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Laurie Kerr

As Deputy Director for Green Building Policy at the NYC Mayor’s Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability under Michael Bloomberg, Kerr helped develop PlaNYC, New York’s influential sustainability plan, and spearheaded the development of New York’s innovative green building and energy efficiency policies. These included the first comprehensive policies by any jurisdiction to address energy efficiency in existing buildings, the greening of New York’s codes and regulations, a clause that solves the splint incentive problem in commercial leases, and programs by city government and leading sectors to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30% in ten years — which currently impact over half a billion square feet of space. Subsequently, Kerr conceived and launched the City Energy Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is assisting ten major American cities – from Los Angeles to Chicago, Houston and Atlanta – in developing large-scale efficiency policies similar to New York. She is now the President of LK POLICY LAB and the Director of Policy at Urban Green Council.

As we enter a new era of climate policy, we wanted to evaluate some of the efforts major cities have made along the way. How do cities compare? What improvements have they made? And where should cities start with regards to climate action?

To help us answer these questions, we called upon Laurie Kerr, a climate policy veteran who helped shape the sustainability plan of one of the most notable cities in the world with regards to climate change and climate action – New York City. Laurie discusses which programs were successful (and which were not) during her time with the Bloomberg administration, and compares these initiatives to those of different cities around the US.

Other Relevant Resources:

Send your feedback and questions to [email protected]

Buildings and Beyond is the podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment by focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Buildings and Beyond is a production of Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building, and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment. For more information, visit swinter.com.

Hosts: Robb Aldrich | Kelly Westby

Production Team: Heather Breslin | Alex Mirabile | Dylan Martello

Kelly: (00:06)
Welcome to buildings and beyond

Robb: (00:09)
The podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment.

Kelly: (00:13)
By focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Robb: (00:18)
I’m Robb Aldrich.

Kelly: (00:19)
And I’m Kelly Westby. Sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards. Several weeks ago we ran an episode on New York City’s new existing building carbon bill. This bill did not come from nothing and in order to translate this legislation to other cities around the country and the world, we need to look at the series of policies that brought us here. Today, we are going to take a step back to dive into the initial steps towards sustainability policy and then look to the future to see how other cities are or can be getting on the road to carbon neutrality. And I don’t think there’s a better person to take us on this journey than Laurie Kerr. Laurie is a national leader in urban sustainability policy as deputy director for green building policy at the New York City Mayor’s Office of Longterm Planning and sustainability under Michael Bloomberg. Laurie helped develop plan y c New York’s influential sustainability plan and spearheaded the development of New York’s innovative green building and energy efficiency policies. Subsequently, Laurie conceived and launched the city energy project at the National Resources Defense Council, which is assisting 10 major American cities from Los Angeles to Chicago, Houston and Atlanta and developing large scale efficiency projects similar to New York. She is now the president of LK policy lab. Speaking of carbon policy, remember to join us on June 27th 28th at the 2019 North American Passive House Network Conference, which will be at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City featuring presentations from industry experts on cutting edge strategies for achieving low carbon, high performance buildings. This year’s conference is gearing up to be the best to date and even includes sessions from my cohost, Robb Aldrich, among other SWA folks. And of course don’t forget to sign up for some of the incredible pre conference workshops. These will take place on June 25th and 26th. I’ll be talking about commissioning, how to make sure your high performance building actually performs. You can also hear the buildings and beyond acoustical director, Dylan Martello and plenty of others. Use the code n a p h n 19 star s w a to receive a 10% discount on the standard two day conference and expo pass for more Info on the 2019 n a p h n conference visit. The show notes page for this episode.

Kelly: (02:47)
Thank you Laurie from for being on this podcast with me today. We actually just had an episode on the basically groundbreaking carbon caps for buildings. But obviously it didn’t come out of nothing. You’ve done a lot of work over the past 13 years, over a decade, looking at what we should do to kind of get on the path to low carbon. So that’s what we want to talk about today. We obviously focus on buildings, our podcast is called buildings and beyond, but can you give us a little background on why New York City has decided to have a pretty big focus on buildings or at least looking at buildings and energy use and what the impact is on the environment?

Laurie: (03:38)
Well, before I went to the mayor’s office, I got a sneak peek of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions inventory and what I saw was really surprising. 75% of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions came from energy used in buildings. We didn’t know that before that and that really focused our mind. I also did the math on our growth rates and figured out that about 85% of our buildings in 2030 were buildings that we already had in 2005. So that meant clearly that if New York wanted to address climate change, it would have to focus on its existing buildings. But there were no models. What do you do? The energy codes are all designed around new buildings, existing buildings, unless they’re making some improvement are allowed to run inefficiently forever. That’s just the way it works. So I remember pouring over the data and trying to figure out what we should do. And Maryland Davenport, who was the doyenne of the real estate industry walked by my desk and started asking me a few questions and I guess my answers were pretty poor because she said, you poor dear, you really don’t know very much do you? But we learned a lot and we did a lot. We eventually came up with the world’s first comprehensive plan to address energy use in existing buildings. It was called the greener greater buildings plan, but we did other things too. We launched a green codes task force to green the city’s laws and regulations related to buildings and we developed a series of policies including the Mayor’s carbon challenge to many different sectors eventually. And then we launched the New York City Energy Efficiency Corporation to help with financing. We launched BEEx to help with training and information. So it was a very broad brush set of programs and policies

Kelly: (05:58)
And BEEx is building energy exchange.?

Laurie: (06:00)
Yes.

Kelly: (06:00)
Okay. I just like to define all the acronyms here. And so kind of diving in a little bit to that greener, greater buildings plan, you outlined these couple of things, some of them I guess at this stage it sounds like most of those things are still promoting good habits but not necessarily requiring specific things. Like you were talking about building energy exchange that’s educating the market. You talked a little bit about the greenhouse gas inventory that’s just measuring what are we doing here? How did we transition into some laws around what buildings would start to have to do?

Laurie: (06:47)
So the greener, greater buildings plan which was our biggest effort focused exactly on energy in existing buildings, has a couple of features. About half of it is about information. So the benchmarking and the audit piece, which I’ll explain are really about information. And then there are some requirements to reduce lighting energy and to submeter, and to Retro Commission, which are about making improvements. But I want to go back a little bit. Cause it’s partly what we did and partly how we eventually grappled with this very complex industry. New York City actually has a million buildings. There are big ones, little ones, old ones, new ones. It’s just a very complex disorder. And that’s what Maryland Davenport was kind of getting at. Right. And our big kind of key to solving that, at least in the first phases was when I was looking over the, the data and I realized, Hey, wait a minute. Half the square footage is contained in 2% of the buildings, the buildings larger than 50,000 square feet. So that’s how we should start. And those buildings aren’t only a little easier to get to cause there are relatively few of them, 20,000, approximately, but they also are a little more sophisticated. They usually have a professional management companies in charge. So that seemed like the place to start. So the greener, greater buildings plan is focused on those larger buildings.

Kelly: (08:38)
And I want to dive in on that a little bit because I think, and potentially based on recent New York Times headlines, but I think there’s sort of this misconception that, that some, that our industry is focused on these big, big buildings, even though, you know,, there is some efficiency benefit to having a larger building with less envelope per interior area for example. But I think getting to that point of, well, it’s actually just easier to address climate change when you’re talking about 20,000 buildings covering most of the square footage versus the whole million square build a square feet. Well, million buildings that you mentioned that, that have all these individual owners and individual points of points of entry and might have be less cost effective to do anything about.

Laurie: (09:32)
Exactly. I think some of the press coverage on this that seems to imply that big is bad was not our thinking at all. A big as good in many, in many, many respects, density is very good in terms of reduced carbon footprints per capita. So it really was about being effective. Yeah, from a policy point of view. So, you know, one of the things we realized is that you know, you go to buy a refrigerator or a car and you get some information about how efficient that is, but these really huge objects that we have that use so much energy, buildings, people don’t know. There’s no tag on those buildings that tell you whether the building’s efficient, even the building operators and building owners don’t know. So we felt that we needed to start measuring the how much energy buildings used and we needed to make that public.

Laurie: (10:41)
And the idea was that if that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. And so benchmarking, which is the process of doing that measurement was kind of the foundational policy. We didn’t exactly think it would do anything, but we thought we needed it to build on it. It turns out that it actually might do some things. And, and you know, in the reports on energy consumption that are come out every year in New York City from the benchmarking and now the audit ordinances. We see about a 2% energy reduction year on year for buildings that consistently benchmark. So it’s a correlation. It’s not necessarily causal, but it’s very promising. And it, it accords with data from EPA and from other cities that have passed benchmarking ordinances. So that policy may have done somewhat more than we actually anticipated.

Laurie: (11:45)
That’s great. But we also wanted to require cost-effective retrofits even in this first past, so we drafted this ordinance that required that buildings do audits and then they had to do the package of measures that paid for itself in five years. We decided on a payback horizon at that point that seemed fair. But as we delve deeper, we realized it wasn’t fair because building owners would have to pay for retrofits to central systems, but because of a split incentive problem in leases, the tenants would accrue the benefits of the five year horizon wasn’t realistic, wasn’t paying people back. So we had to go back and correct. We came up with the energy aligned lease clause which fix that. And so so we replaced the mandatory upgrades with a requirement that lighting systems be updated to meet code and that commercial tenants be sub-metered for their electrical use.

Kelly: (12:50)
Great. And did we have any results? Was there any other successes besides you mentioned that you saw that even just benchmarking could kind of move the ball forward. Did you see any other successes through the work that you did?

Laurie: (13:09)
I think that one of the biggest successes was the data that we captured. At the time that we, after we passed the audit ordinance, I started thinking, you know, we shouldn’t really let these audits just pile up at the department of buildings. Why don’t we collect the information systematically and then we can have an electronic database that we can actually study and learn from. And then we brought together all the great brains in New York and created a good matrix of information that we wanted to collect. And that’s turned out to be a gold mine. We now know not only how well our buildings are performing from benchmarking, but we can look under the hood and see why and we can see what systems are more or less efficient. We can see where we have opportunities citywide to make improvements. So that I think was has been a really exciting success. Another one was the Mayors carbon challenge program, which we originally launched for just universities and hospitals. But over the years it’s expanded and it’s now covering 10% of the square footage of the city. I mean, it’s just taken off.

Kelly: (14:31)
So 10% of the square footage is participating in the carbon challenge?

Laurie: (14:35)
Exactly. And those participants are required to reduce their carbon emissions by 30%. So that’s been just a runaway and surprising success.

Kelly: (14:49)
Great. And those those participants are achieving those savings?

Laurie: (14:54)
Some have some achieved them in like five years. Some are on the road. Some of the great success stories have been FIT, NYU, you know, so those are some of the early players who achieved their carbon emissions very quickly and then signed onto a 50% carbon reduction. So some have gone to the next level. So I don’t, we didn’t expect that at all.

Kelly: (15:21)
Yeah, that’s, that’s amazing. And I know those guys have been doing a lot of work, especially the universities we’ve seen making a lot of movement towards this, these goals. So that’s great. And were there any disappointments?

Laurie: (15:32)
Yes, I would say the audit and retrocommissioning ordinance has been a real disappointment. Building owners in general. Sod is a box they had to check and they wanted just to pay less money. So we got to kind of race to the bottom in terms of the quality of the audits and maybe even the retrocommissioning. So, you know, right now there’s a effort underway to improve the retrocommissioning requirements. I think that can be fixed and I think there have been benefits for that piece. But the audit piece, if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t put that requirement in. And also in the meantime, people have developed strategies to tease out more actionable information from audit, from benchmarking. So we don’t need to make the building owners go through that trouble and expense anymore, I think.

Kelly: (16:29)
And so I guess there is always this concern with, I’m a little bit going off on a tangent here I think, but with data integrity from the benchmarking data. So how do you see kind of pulling out information on building systems from the pure kind of energy data versus getting it from an energy audit or some other kind of system of someone actually going into the building and looking at the different systems? Potentially both could have data integrity issues, but kind of where are your concerns around that?

Laurie: (17:12)
We studied the data quality issues extensively after the first year of benchmarking. And what we found was that there were a lot of mistakes because people were new at the process. We didn’t see any evidence of large scale manipulation or cheating. It really seemed to be mistakes and people needed to be better trained. That said, my biggest concern on data quality is not inaccurate submissions or fraud, although I’m sure there’s some of that, I don’t think it’s large scale. My biggest concern is the accuracy of building square footage. And I think that data is not good and it’s really important. And I would love to see in new laws going forward, particularly if we’re looking at a per square foot carbon cap that people actually have accurate square footage that really is foundational. Right. And it only needs to be done once, but it needs to be done once.

Kelly: (18:19)
Yeah. That’s interesting cause I was saying to a colleague, even in new construction, it’s hard to tell what the square footage is, that there’s six numbers probably on the first sheet, depending on whether you’re talking about the zoning’s square footage or the residential square footage. And so even internally people might say square footage of a new building and there’s six different answers. So kind of nailing that down.

Laurie: (18:41)
The EPA has a very specific definition. And the reason the EPA matters is that they’re the people that created and run the benchmarking tool that the city uses. So that definition is the definition we need to be using.

Kelly: (18:59)
Great point. So there were some good things, some, some maybe things we would do a little bit differently next time. What are the next steps from, from this?

Laurie: (19:09)
Well five or six years ago when the Bloomberg administration was coming to an end I thought, you know, the next big thing would be to, if we want to have a national impact with what we’ve done here, is to create replicable policies that other cities can use. So, you know, cities are wonderful in that they’re politically proactive. They’re engines of creativity. But the downside is they’re so damn many of them. So if they all try to reinvent the wheel, we’re not gonna get anywhere. So I thought, let’s create basic policies that cities can adapt, but they have kind of a lead like handbook of you can do this policy or that policy, you’re a range of proven policies that you could utilize. So I proposed that we got 10 million in funding through NRDC and cities from Los Angeles to Chicago to Atlanta signed on. And that program was called City Energy Project. And five years later, it’s been re-upped several times. And now 35 cities across America now, including San Jose and Saint Louis, New Orleans, they’re all pursuing some of these foundational policies.

Kelly: (20:36)
Great. And which of the policies are really taking off among the 35, do you have a sense of that?

Laurie: (20:44)
The biggest uptake is certainly benchmarking. It was required really to be part of the program and to get funding. So you basically had to do benchmarking and a lot of cities that aren’t in this program are also doing benchmarking.

Kelly: (21:00)
And I think I even saw L.A. Is, is kind of going down the path of the carbon emissions caps that we kind of looked at in New York too. So it seems like there are kind of other cities following the footsteps or kind of moving forward in a big way. What, what have you Learned? Your work was really very much focused in New York City and you were working with all of these different cities to develop policies that were replicable. What did you learn and kind of moving beyond New York borders and how other cities might be different or it might be similar?

Laurie: (21:39)
Interestingly, city profiles are surprisingly similar. So in most cities, buildings are the dominant source of greenhouse gas emissions between about 50% and 70%. Even in a sprawling city like L.A. where you might not expect that. The only city I think that falls out of that is Seattle because they have so much carbon neutral electricity. And that varies quite a lot from the national average, which is 38 or 40% coming from buildings. So there really is a city strategy that focuses on buildings or it makes sense. The other thing that was surprisingly similar is that concentration of square footage and energy usage in the largest buildings. So it might not be 2% of the buildings and all the cities, but it’s not more than three or 4% to capture pretty much half the square footage and energy use. So those basic strategies of focusing on buildings and focusing on larger buildings turned out to be, you know, very applicable across most of America’s cities.

Kelly: (22:55)
But with like a different square footage threshold by city?

Laurie: (22:59)
Yes. So we went to 50,000, L.A. Had to go to about 35,000. L.A. Was not able to get to 50% even with that because they really do have smaller buildings. But of the 10 cities in the initial cohort, they were the only one that didn’t really fit that profile that you could fairly easily capture half of the square footage. So I think in terms of differences between cities, of course every city wants to have its own flavor of what it does, but that hasn’t been that dramatic. I think the biggest difference right now is going to be timeline. You know, what has a city already done and where is it now on the path. And that really matters because time’s getting short. So in New York, we started early, we had the luxury to think and study our building stock. And I think other cities don’t have that luxury anymore. The ones that are coming down the pike right now, they probably have to start with the foundational policies, but they’re going to quickly have to pivot to deeper requirements.

Kelly: (24:15)
Okay. And so if I’m a mayor then in one of these cities that maybe hasn’t gotten started, maybe isn’t even on your list yet, what would you recommend for me?

Laurie: (24:28)
Well, I would still start with the foundational policies, such as benchmarking, leading by example programs, so that the city government is, is reducing its energy first carbon challenges. Those are great in terms of engaging the community. And in the course of designing and implementing those policies the real estate community becomes involved, becomes educated, you know, and I just can’t emphasize that enough. I think one of the biggest things that we did in New York and other cities are doing to make this work is really creating a community of educated professionals by and large who understand the issues and are becoming kind of thought leaders in terms of how to solve them. Would you say

Kelly: (25:25)
That is sort of spurred on by the building energy exchange or is there, are there other sort of policies or things you put in that were put in place that kind of moved the industry towards an educational?

Laurie: (25:36)
I would say it’s been a whole range of things, but primarily it’s been the dialogues that have been created. So in developing the greener, greater buildings plan, we brought in industry to advise in creating the, the, in every single thing that we’ve done, we’ve brought in the industry to advise because we didn’t know enough that, I mean quite honestly, we didn’t do it to be a, to create a community. But I realize in retrospect, that’s been a great thing. So, when the Department of buildings wants to change the energy code, it brings in the experts. There’s a dialogue, there’s a conversation. And with every single thing that we’ve done, it’s been that way. And you know, all the nonprofits from urban green to ASHRAE, to the American Institute of Architects to building energy exchange, they all have programs. They all have a conversation. So that conversation building that conversation is critical. And so I think any city has to start with the foundational policies, build the conversation, and then they will be in a position to start to require some of these more ambitious requirements like you know, energy reductions, however they’re shaped. I think you’re not going to do that without building building support and knowledge about what the capabilities are. Otherwise it’s just frightening.

Kelly: (27:16)
Right. Sort of retrofit all of this in the dark with no understanding of how buildings work. That could lead us to down the very wrong path for sure. Okay. So now, if I’m an energy efficiency proponent in a city that hasn’t gotten started yet or maybe hasn’t made a lot of moves yet, I know my friend from Australia complaints that they’re behind us in the U.S. Even, what, what should I do as a proponent to get started? Is there anything I can do to move the industry forward?

Laurie: (27:52)
I think it’d be pretty hard at the individual level. So, you know, I would get involved with a local institution that has some clout, like the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects or US Green Building Council or Boma, any, any one of those groups that convenes. And then I would try to use that that venue really to create a citywide discussion. And, you know, maybe that institution could start inviting people from other cities to come talk about what they’re doing. They could maybe do programs on success stories in the cities. They could invite people from the administration, people from city council to come to those meetings. So you have to kind of create a, you have to create interest. You have to start educating people. You really have to prime the pump.

Kelly: (28:55)
Yeah, that’s a great point. And it’s actually interesting. I think we get stuck in our own bubble in all of the different bubbles that we might be in, whether you’re in la or, or another city or, or New York. I’ve definitely been stuck in my own bubble before. But one thing that was really interesting for me when we were on the advisory committee for the energy code here, we brought in someone from the city of Seattle to explain, because, you know, we, we’ve developed some existing building laws, but actually Seattle’s new construction laws are somewhat ahead of ours. So we brought them into to educate us a little bit about about building blower door testing and a couple of different elements that we were looking at. So I think that’s a really important point to say that the, there’s a global network of people about these things and of cities doing these types of things and, and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Laurie: (29:46)
Absolutely. And there are a number of programs. The city energy project was one, but there’s the C40, which is a large cities around the world sharing best practices. There’s the urban sustainability directors network that is a platform for a lot of exchange of best practices across sustainable urban sustainability policies. But buildings is certainly a big piece of that. And I think there’s all, there are others.

Kelly: (30:26)
Yeah. Great. We’ll throw a couple of links in the show notes. So we talked a little bit about energy efficiency, but after kind of a carbon neutral future, what do you think are a few key elements to getting us towards this carbon neutral future?

Laurie: (30:44)
Well, I’m going to stick with the building sector because it’s what I know. And assume that people working on transportation and wastewill figure their, their pieces out. But within the building sector, you know, I think everybody’s come to a consensus that there are three big things that have to happen. One is pushing efficiency as far as, as reasonably possible. The second is we’ve got to decarbonize the grid. The third is we have to electrify as much as we can. The fuel use. In other words, we have to get off fuel for heating and hot water as much as we it fossil fuel for heating and hot water as much as we can. But that’s very rational. But it’s actually a really tall order and I’m afraid that is not practical to get us all the way there. I think practically we could use those strategies and we could get to maybe 70, 75, 80% reductions particularly in the colder and older regions of the country. So California or Hawaii, which is already highly electrified, they can probably get to carbon neutrality with those methods and they’re probably on the path to do it. But in places of a country that are heavily dependent on fossil fuels electrifying the tens of millions I’m talking tens of millions of buildings would have to be electrified in that swath of the country that goes from North Dakota to Maine and from, and all the way down to, you know, Virginia or even a little further south. That’s gonna cost a fortune and it’s a Herculean job. You know, the other problem with it, the other problem will be in this broad swath of the country, is that even if we achieved full electrification, can the electrical grid support it without massive infusions of cash in order to grow the electrical grid to, to handle the increased load.

Kelly: (33:05)
And adding all the renewables and all these things to get the grid off of fossil fuels as well.

Laurie: (33:11)
I think, I think that maybe is a little bit easier, although maybe not, I’m not a grid person, but absolutely there has to be a lot of storage. I think that goes without saying that we have to decarbonize the grid or mostly decarbonize the grid. But it’s really the growth of the grid that worries me the most with these new strategies, particularly if we’re looking at electrifying vehicles, which I think we are. So so I’m going to go out on a limb here. I’m going to say that we need a fourth strategy and that, or we might need a fourth strategy in our back pocket and we should be looking at carbon neutral fuel. And I don’t mean by this, you know, waste to energy, although that needs to be a piece of it. And that could be a starting piece. Like the Newtown Creek wastewater treatment plant that takes New York’s waste and turns it into methane and now is, is selling that methane or using it. That’s a start, but it’s not going to be enough for what we need. There are scientists working at the national labs and in universities and some entrepreneurial situations that are looking at creating methane from water and carbon dioxide using sunlight or carbon neutral electricity. And right now, of course it’s very expensive, but solar energy and wind energy were very expensive. So before we really started to make the policies that supported investment in, in those areas. So I think we should start going down the road with carbon neutral fuels on that, you know, promoting the science, promoting the early technology, and maybe even starting to layer in a carbon a renewable energy standard for fuel.

Laurie: (35:19)
So we did that with electricity, so a renewable portfolio standard for fuel means that the grid has to have a certain percentage of carbon neutral energy. And we did it for electricity, I think it helped fund, you know, a lot more solar and wind in that brought the price down. So if we started to do that with fossil fuel, we could start, of course, with waste to energy and then expand as these other strategies hopefully are developed. The reason I think this makes sense is that, look, we already have billions invested in our gas grid. Our buildings have billions invested in terms of their fossil fuel burning equipment. So, you know, reutilizing that for low carbon or, or no carbon fuel is, you know, in terms of the infrastructure a very cheap way to do this. So as I say, I’m going out on a limb. I don’t know that this is the answer, but I’m very worried that the other solutions won’t get us there. So all of that’s to say we, we should be exploring this, but it shouldn’t be something that deters us from aggressive action on the big three that we know we have to do.

Kelly: (36:48)
Right. And you know, that’s an interesting point. It reminds me, I actually, fun fact, when I was at Columbia, did research in waste to energy and one thing that people thought about is, well, if we have a lot of waste to energy plants, will it deter people from recycling? Now I think there’s some new information from different places. I haven’t been in the industry for a decade, but but at the time when we looked at waste to energy versus recycling cities across the world, that there was actually a positive correlation. If you recycled more, you also did more waste to energy. So there wasn’t this negative. Yeah, that’s a little fun fact. I’ll have to see if there’s any new information on that and link to the show notes. So that was a a great and funny twist at the end there. But in, in terms of kind of everything we talked about from everything that you, you know, from your deep bench of experience and buildings, what do you think we’re going to be talking about in five years when we have you back on the podcast?

Laurie: (37:53)
That’s a good question, which I’m going to dodge. I am gonna say that I’m more optimistic about us getting to these goals than I used to be. And I think that’s for at least two reasons. One is how how quickly the a net zero electricity revolution has moved forward. I just, I didn’t see it coming. And suddenly New York state is in a position to commit to 100% carbon neutral electricity by 2040. That’s just fantastic. And Yeah, none of us saw it coming. So that’s, that’s a great thing. The other great thing is I think the political winds have changed on this subject over the last and over the last year or two. I think, you know, the IPCC report really got people frightened in a good way. And I think AOC throwing out the idea of the green new deal, there might be pros and cons, but I think the energy that she spurred by doing that has been a really positive thing. So, you know, I’m, I’m seeing a lot of positive movement. A lot of players getting into this who weren’t there before, who are, you know, coming up with great ideas and moving this along at a nice fast clip. So that’s exciting.

Kelly: (39:31)
That is a wonderful note to end on. And I just want to thank you for being on our podcast today.

Laurie: (39:38)
You’re welcome. It’s been a pleasure.

Speaker 4: (39:43)
Thank you for listening to buildings and beyond. For more information about the topics discussed today, visit www.swinter.com/podcast and check out the episode show notes buildings and beyond is brought to you by Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment our professionals have led the way since 1972 and the development of best practices to achieve high performance buildings. I’ve production team for today’s episode includes Dylan Martello, Alex Martello, and myself. Heather Breslin, thank you for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Brad Mahoney

Brad Mahoney is responsible for all aspects of MP Boston’s commercial development, including design, construction, leasing and tenant coordination. In addition, he is also the sustainability and technology lead on MP Boston’s next Boston project, an iconic 1.5 million square foot project in Winthrop Square.

Brad joined MP Boston in 2012 and oversaw the restoration of the historic Burnham Building, the former Filene’s Building, in Downtown Crossing. He was also on the development team for Millennium Tower, which is Boston’s tallest residential building. Prior to joining MP Boston’s team, Brad worked at Lend Lease as a construction manager where he oversaw a wide variety of projects ranging from large scale residential to historic restorations. He also managed an expansion for a life science client by using an integrated and virtual MEP design assist platform.

As we continue our discussions around high-performance buildings, we would be remiss if we did not discuss the laudable endeavor that is MP Boston’s Winthrop Square. Projected to be the fourth tallest building in Boston and the largest Passive House office space in the world, Winthrop Square is a pinnacle of high-performance design.

Although construction for this project has just begun, we were eager to hear about the plans for this immense undertaking. So, we sat down with MP Boston’s Director of Sustainable Development, Brad Mahoney. Brad shares some of the extraordinary energy conservation measures that will be included in the tower and highlights the many benefits that the project is anticipated to achieve, including advanced productivity, wellness, and social engagement.

About Winthrop Square:

About Passive House:

Send your feedback and questions to [email protected]

Buildings and Beyond is the podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment by focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Buildings and Beyond is a production of Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building, and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment. For more information, visit swinter.com.

Hosts: Robb Aldrich | Kelly Westby

Production Team: Heather Breslin | Alex Mirabile | Dylan Martello

Kelly: (00:06)
welcome to buildings and beyond

Robb: (00:09)
the podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment

Kelly: (00:13)
by focusing on efficiency, accessibility and health.

Robb: (00:18)
I’m Rob Aldrich

Kelly: (00:19)
and I’m Kelly Westby.

Robb: (00:21)
This week I talked with Brad Mahoney who is the director of sustainable development at MP Boston and we talked about Winthrop center, which is a very large building under construction right in downtown Boston, 691 foot tower. The top 30 stories are residential, 420 apartments, and then below that are 20 stories of office space, 750,000 square feet of office space. And if everything goes as planned, this’ll be the largest passive house certified office building in the world, as far as we know, we talk mostly big picture: why they’re doing what they’re doing, a little bit of how they’re doing what they’re doing. If you want to learn more details and if you can make it to New York City at the end of June, consider coming to the n a p h n conference.

Robb: (01:15)
That’s the North American passive house network conference. Dylan Martello from SWA will be presenting on some of the details of the curtain wall system and there’s a lot that goes into it, especially for such a big building. I’m looking forward to the conference. I’ll be talking in a session about heat pumps- getting more from air source heat pumps. Lois and Kelly will be talking about the importance of commissioning in high performance buildings. Lots of industry experts really focused on high performance buildings and especially low carbon buildings. So if you can make it June 27th to 28th at Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City. And if you want a discount code, we have one of those for you. If you want 10% off for the regular conference admission rate, use the code naphn19*SWA for 10% off. All this is on our show notes. So you can go there and you can click on it and you can copy the discount code. The conference website is naphnconference.com. Hope to see you there, and here’s my talk with Brad Mahoney.

Robb: (02:30)
So the whole building will be certified to LEED?

Brad: (02:34)
Correct.

Robb: (02:35)
But the office and the residential sections are kind of being tackled in a different way?

Brad: (02:41)
They are.

Robb: (02:42)
And it’s the office section that will be passive house and LEED platinum?

Brad: (02:51)
Yeah, that’s correct, Robb. It’s exciting. This will be the largest passive house office project in the world. Certainly the largest here in the northeast. And the other thing is we’ve gone through our passive house journey, and we found that there are these inherent synergies that passive house has with other components of the ecosystem that we’re creating here at Winthrop. So we’re certifying the office space to WELL gold. We’re really trying to help create and define the workplace of the future.

Robb: (03:30)
To a lot of people it may seem curious as why you split it up. I mean, why go for passive house only on the office section? Is this your first foray into passive house?

Brad: (03:50)
Yes. This, this is our first passive house venture. And to answer that, I think you really have to look at the market, right? Companies are looking to attract and retain top talent, right? You read about it everywhere and that’s kind of where this conversation starts. So we’re creating a healthy, high performance environment, that’s founded in passive house, right? And we think this project will be where companies want to be. You will have to be at Winthrop Center. There’ll be over 4,000 women and men working in this building every day, and it’s that appeal. The other piece is, you know, if you look at the office component per person, it’s where you can most directly impact carbon reduction, the amount of energy per person, right? So first off, the residential- 400 units, 4,000 employees in and out of this building every day.

Robb: (05:13)
So there’s many more people using the office sections and there’s a bigger opportunity for energy savings, for comfort, for health. Now and when you’re thinking about the passive house concept, is this something that kind of you championed or did you see a need in the marketplace for efficient, healthy office space? How did you get to be looking at passive house here?

Brad: (05:48)
So it really did start at the onset of the project when we started this. How do we make this project truly next generation, right? So when you look at passive house, which is ultimately performance based standard, right? And right now when you hear about performance, you think about energy performance, carbon reduction, long term carbon reduction goals, things that we all, both in our community and at large care very much about, and the desire to express what we’re doing, and make the office user understand that, but feel that they have a play in that- feel that they are able to participate in that solution, participate in this idea of going beyond the things that may be traditional. People understand what sustainability means, when you look at some of the top measures, how do people feel that they’re able to contribute, you know, conserving water and recycling? Well, this goes far beyond that because you’re talking about energy reduction and there are many, many other benefits that have tremendous appeal to the office user. You know, better indoor air quality, right? Thermal Comfort. Noise reduction because the triple glazed windows, long term the quality of construction.

Robb: (07:38)
So it was really the tenants, when you were toying with this idea, it was really that this is going to be better for the tenants

Brad: (07:46)
it’s going to be better for the tenants on many, many levels, on many levels.

Robb: (07:52)
And obviously the idea is, hey, we’ll be able to lease this quicker. or it might be for a little bit of premium. Was that a tough sell or did that just seem like a next logical step when you’re thinking about going passive house?

Brad: (08:15)
So it became clear. I think when any organization is contemplating something new, and this is new, not just to us, but it’s new really to the industry, you take a long hard look at it. And we took a long, long hard look. And the more we studied this, the more it really became clear that this is where we want to go to really set the bar and create a new paradigm because we believe this is where development ultimately will go. And we’re trying to do that in a way that really allows for the best experience for our customer, for our tenants.

Robb: (09:04)
You don’t want to be obsolete in 10 or 20 years

Brad: (09:07)
right, I mean the benefits, the resiliency benefits, right? I mean that alone, you know, you can find that there are pieces and elements of passive house that can appeal to different subsets within each organization. And it really has a broad overall appeal.

Robb: (09:35)
Are you getting feedback yet from brokers or possible tenants or is there interest yet? Is that resonating with folks yet? First of all, actually, let’s back up. What’s the whole schedule for this?

Brad: (09:53)
So we open in three years, 2022. So we are starting those conversations with tenants, with brokers. People want great space, right? That’s number one, right? Views are huge, location, and we have all of that, right? And what we’re doing is we are tremendously enhancing that. Right? So when you think about what are the elements of passive house? You know, triple glazed windows, energy recovery, heat recovery- really understanding the vision spandrel framework, what that vision of wall ratio is and kind of optimizing that. The other thing that obviously appeals are the energy savings, the utility savings. Not only today, but long term. Right.

Robb: (10:47)
And that does appeal to the tenants?

Brad: (10:51)
That does appeal, that does appeal. I mean, you know, the traditional, “let’s sell on utility savings,” that’s maybe what people traditionally start with as the key marker for passive house. And I think in some respects, that’s where it starts. But when you look at everything else, and you look at what I was saying earlier- how to optimize the vision to spandrel framework. You know, we have 10 foot high windows, right? And we’ve optimized those for views, right? Because we know the benefits of daylight. And when you look at the overall floor plan, you know, 95% of the overall floor plan is within 35 feet of one of those windows. It’s so everyone has that opportunity and everyone really plays in that.

Robb: (11:54)
Cool. Yeah that totally makes sense. Can we talk about those windows in more detail? What are they, how are they constructed? What are the big differences between this construction and past big projects that you’ve worked on?

Brad: (12:13)
So I think taking a step back, right? So this idea of integrated design, right? And I think with integrated passive house design, you start the project and you kind of set certain parameters- this is what we’re doing on the project, we are moving forward with a passive house design. So that’s really kind of the baseline, right? And you always need someone that raises their hand and says, this is what we’re doing, this is what we’re driving to. And it’s our job to make sure that everyone’s committed to achieving that mutual goal. Everyone on the team is fully committed to it. And it kind of permeates everything. It permeates the modeling on the MEP side and the integration with the PHPP. It permeates the design and the facade when you get into the procurement of the facade in 80 to a hundred million dollars on a project of this scale and size. And I mean there are very real, commercial, financial aspects to this, you know? Like what premium are you spending on that facade? 10 to 15%? Right? And what does that relate to on the overall? And so, you talk about modeling, talk about the facade, talk about the MEP systems and the commitment in driving through that and flowing it through from initial design into design development, into procurement, then into construction. So integrated- everyone is working towards the same goal. And you look at the differences between another high rise project and this, when you look at the facade, it’s curtain wall, unitized system, third layer of glass, right? And with input from our passive house consultants, Steven Winter Associates, we’ve come up with the optimal solar heat gain, the U value, the R18 spandrel insulation. The R18 is a big driver. That’s a big difference, over a traditional curtain wall. So it’s all of those things. It’s the triple glaze. The R18, the ceiling, the perimeter ceiling. That’s inherent, that’s where a lot of old leaky buildings lose their energy. Right? Well, on this one, that’s where our primary focus is and making sure that within that passive house envelope, the collective envelope, we are sealed.

Robb: (15:22)
So I mean, yeah those are a few big ticket items. You know, the triple pane glass, the higher R values, the air sealing. And there are some pretty large numbers associated with those features. But would you say the first thing you came to when I asked you about it, what was the coordination, was the integration. In your mind, is that a bigger change or a bigger challenge than any of these line items? Does that make sense?

Brad: (15:58)
Well, yeah, in some respects it is, because, you know, we’re talking about something that hasn’t been done before. And so you really need to shepherd that. You know, the supply chains are not there. And supply chain starting from, look, this is in its infancy, right? So Handel has done this before, but when we talk about supply chains, it’s not just the architecture, the engineering, the construction managers, the facade manufacturers, the equipment manufacturers. So you really need to watch through that and make sure that everyone has their eye on the collective goal because, you know, you don’t want to bring it to a point and then have it fall down because someone wasn’t paying attention. Right. It’s more a matter of making sure that everyone’s working together. And so in some respects that is bigger than the upfront capital cost. The ability to say, “we’re committed to this and we’re doing it,” that really got us out of the gate, and now we’re off and running. We’re committed to it. We’ve looked past that and now we’re focused on delivering

Robb: (17:20)
Right on. Yeah. And obviously in a project that is this big, you need really good coordination and communication. But passive house adds another layer. I guess it’s even more important with passive house.

Brad: (17:41)
It definitely is. And that’s why really having the right team members, people that are committed to this and we absolutely have that from top to bottom.

Robb: (17:54)
I mean you’re asking for some wacky curtain wall, something new, have they have their suppliers ever done that before? Anything like that?

Brad: (18:05)
So at this scale, no. And you know, I mean adding a third layer of glass is nothing really that novel, right? I mean you’re just adding, however, when you’re talking about producing this many square feet of current wall, it is a challenge. So Cariss + Cariss and Soda Wall, have been working with us and they understood from the onset that this kind of was the Bible. And they have been excellent. I mean we’ve been working through Design Assist now for a couple months and they’ve been pressing hard on the facade and the facade opportunities and the early signs are very good. I mean, they’re very committed to it and it seems like we’re going to be in production soon.

Robb: (19:02)
Excellent. So what’s been the biggest challenge? What’s been the biggest nut to crack so far?

Brad: (19:12)
I think the biggest nut to crack its really- what is passive house. And when I say that, I mean kind of from top to bottom. You know, you’re starting something new, hasn’t been done before, hasn’t been done before at this scale. Its new to the industry. But you can see beyond all of that, and you can see the outcome, and it’s a matter of getting everyone to feel that. And I think once you do that and you realize that we’re committed to this because sure, maybe the first couple projects in a region that go passive house, maybe they have some cost premiums. Over time, as those supply chains open up, as more construction managers are exposed to it, as more designers in teams realize how to build passive house, those premiums go down, and we’ve seen that in other states, Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh area, other communities that have been committed to passive house, and we’re starting that here in Boston and we hope and think that others will follow. And we’re fully committed to it.

Robb: (20:46)
So are you looking ahead to future projects yet?

Brad: (20:49)
Not yet. This is a big one. It’s super fun because there’s a lot at stake, right? There’s a real lot at stake when you think about where we are today and where we have to go tomorrow. And that’s a huge part of it. And that’s a huge appeal to tenants, to people that want to be in a space that cares about the tomorrow. Right. All the while bringing them just a greater experience within their work environment.

Robb: (21:31)
Is there going to be any premium, do you think, compared to other comparable office space in Boston, in downtown? I mean there’s certainly a lot of demand for office space in Boston.

Brad: (21:49)
The honest answer is I think it probably remains to be seen. I fully believe in it. When you believe in something, you’re creative with it and you say, look, this is how we’re going to put our money where our mouth is, so to speak. We’re fully invested in this and we believe in the outcome and it’s going to be to your benefit.

Robb: (22:13)
Who’s going to manage the building? Who’s going to run the building?

Brad: (22:16)
So we will manage and run the building. We will hire a team, when we get to that point, which we still have a couple of years, but we’ve already started those conversations, because it doesn’t just start from scratch, that understands what we’re trying to do collectively on this project.

Robb: (22:45)
Gotcha. Yeah. So you’ll be reaping the benefits down the road of the lower the lower energy bills, the durability, the demand for healthy, a comfortable space.

Brad: (23:01)
Absolutely. And this only becomes more and more in demand as every year it goes by. That’s my firm belief. That this is not a blip on the radar. This is something that is going to be the new standard and we’re just, we are helping to define that and helping to usher that in.

Robb: (23:30)
So, if we were to talk again in five or 10 years, what do you think we’d be talking about? Would this be standard? Would there be something bigger and better?

Brad: (23:43)
So I think if we’re talking five to 10 years, let’s see, where does that put us at? Close to 2030. Right. Or 2025. So we know that the direct path to carbon neutrality in the urban core for large downtown projects, it requires passive house, it requires high performance. You can’t get there without this. So I think in five to 10 years we’re really talking about some something else, I think passive house is the talk of the town. It’s something that people are familiar with and integrating into their projects. But I think in five to 10 years, hopefully we’re talking about the next innovation. And that’s what this is. It’s an innovation that is so very simple at its fundamental level, at the scientific level, and it just needs to be brought out and explained in a way that people grasp and understand it.

Robb: (25:20)
Brad, thanks for coming on.

Heather: (25:27)
Thank you for listening to buildings and beyond. For more information about the topics discussed today, visit www.swinter.com/podcast And check out the episode show notes, buildings and beyond is brought to you by Steven Winter Associates. We provide energy, green building and accessibility consulting services to improve the built environment our professionals have led the way since 1972 and the development of best practices to achieve high performance buildings. Our production team for today’s episode includes Dylan Martello, Alex Mirabile, and myself. Heather Breslin, thank you for listening and we’ll see you next week.