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Does your business qualify as “Zero Waste Certified”?

Author: Celeste McMickle, Senior Sustainability Consultant

Waste reduction is an important topic these days in New York, as the city is currently targeting sending “zero waste to landfills” by the year 2030 as part of the One NYC program. What zero waste means from a practical standpoint is a reduction of more than 90% of waste to landfills, as this ZeroWaste_onenyc-logo_credit_1.nyc.govaccounts for non-recyclable toxins, and so forth.

Much like the US Green Building Council (USGBC), the US Zero Waste Business Council (USZWBC) has developed a rating system that allows business to track and achieve different performance tiers of waste reduction in their operational practices. (more…)

Passive House: At the Crossroads of Sustainability and Affordability

GreenEnergyTimes_Banner Green Energy Times is a bi-monthly publication chronicling the latest sustainability news in New England and New York (and beyond!). In 2016, SWA will be contributing a column for each issue. To start the year, SWA’s Heather Breslin discusses how and why the affordable housing market is beginning to embrace the Passive House Standard. The full article is featured below, or on page 27 of the February edition of Green Energy Times.  (more…)

Happy April Fools’ Day!

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It Can Take Years – A Market Adoption Story

Earlier this year, at the AHR Expo in Orlando, the biggest trade show for HVAC professionals, Aeroseal’s duct sealing technology was declared the Product of the Year, the top honor of the Innovation Awards. Aeroseal was recognized as “a groundbreaking solution to an industry-wide problem.”

The unique appeal of the Aeroseal technology is that it seals ducts from the inside. Walls and ceilings do not need to be removed or damaged to gain access for traditional mastic sealing. Aerosolized vinyl polymer particles from 2 to 20 micrometers are injected into a pressurized duct system. The particles stay suspended in the air stream until they reach the leaks, where they are deposited and built up at the leak edges until the leaks are sealed.

The Aeroseal technology has been around for more than two decades. It was developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the early nineties and patented in 1997. It has received many awards over the years including the Best of What’s New award from Popular Science magazine in 1996 and the Energy 100 award from the U.S. Department of Energy.

So what’s the big deal?

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HUD Innovation in Affordable Housing (IAH) Update – Santa Barbara Site Visit

On March 9, the four finalist teams from this year’s HUD Innovation in Affordable Housing Student Design and Planning Competition (IAH) visited the Housing Authority of the City of Santa Barbara, California (HACSB) project site. Multi-disciplinary teams of graduate students are competing to develop a holistic solution that would allow the HACSB to meet its goal of offering safe and sustainable affordable housing to area residents. Teams are given the option of rehabilitating the current structure, or demolishing and rebuilding. The winning project proposal will thoroughly address design, community development, and finance in their solution.

(more…)

Popular Multifamily Retrofits, Part II

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In our first entry of this three-part series, we described advanced controls for electrically heated buildings, combined heat and power systems, and upgraded atmospheric boilers. This time around, we’ll examine the ins-and-outs of exhaust ventilation in multifamily buildings. (more…)

Unique Certification Options with National Green Building Standard™ (NGBS)

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If you’re unfamiliar with Home Innovation Research Labs’ National Green Building Standard™ (NGBS), the program is designed primarily to rate the performance of single-family homes or multifamily properties in six important categories: Site Design, Resource Efficiency, Water Efficiency, Energy Efficiency, Indoor Environmental Quality, and Building Operation & Maintenance. So how does NGBS differentiate itself from other green building rating systems? NGBS goes beyond the norm by offering certification paths for new land development and remodeling projects. Let’s take a closer look at these unique verification options. (more…)

Hotels, Motels, Reining Emissions In

I’ll save the long-winded introduction and get straight to the facts. Based on New York City’s publicly available Local Law 84 (LL84) benchmarking data for 2015, hotels emit 32% more greenhouse gas (GHG) per square foot than the average for all buildings. I also want to qualify this by making a few statements about the data:

  1. There are 13,973 buildings on the Department of Finance list; of which 2,353 did not comply with LL84 or are not required to comply.
  2. We removed the outliers. Weather-normalized source energy use intensity (EUI) over 550 and under 100 (kBtu/ft2) typically indicates erroneous data. Most likely either the building’s benchmarking activities or report filed with NYC were completed incorrectly.
  3. A significant portion of the list comprises the buildings with erroneous data: 4950. Seems a little crazy, no? Leaving us with a good topic for another day….
  4. For clarity, that means we analyzed the remaining 6,654 buildings.
2016 Emissions Map

Click to View Interactive NYC GHG Emissions Map – via CityLab. Map credit: Jill Hubley

The good news – for the sake of this post – is that the hotel market had one of the higher rates of correctly reported compliance data. Out of 187 buildings, 143 reported with numbers that were in a normal range. The average for the sector however, reflects EUI and GHG emissions per square foot that are much higher than other similar building types. Multifamily buildings, for example, have an average of 42% lower GHG emissions/ft2 than hotels (see table below). (more…)

Gamifying Sustainability: Play to Save, Save to Win

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Using gamification to incentivize consumer-level sustainable behavior is a relatively new strategy. It applies classic principals of game playing to encourage green living, offering a challenge, a platform for social competition, and a reporting system that quantifies performance. In an increasingly networked society fascinated with social media and gaming, tracking lifestyle behavior in a way that’s sharable and interactive transforms the mundane into the meaningful. (more…)

Popular Multifamily Retrofits, Part I

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There is no single retrofit that is a panacea for all multifamily buildings. There are myriad options and permutations for upgrades, the efficacy of which is defined by the operational needs, budget, and goals set by the owner. With that in mind, we will examine six retrofits popular with SWA clients in this three-part blog series. (more…)